How I reduced skipping / hitching on an older PC - easy fix

On my spare computer, an older Xeon 3550 CPU w/ an Nvidia GTX 670 card, 24 GB RAM, and fast SSDs - I was getting hitching worse than I've ever seen in SOTA - usually this would start to happen after 10 seconds or so of loading into a scene.. any scene.. simply turning the camera around would have an occasional 'skip' every 2-3 seconds.. It was especially noticeable during combat and casting, where I was often waiting what felt like 1-2 seconds at times for a response.

Reducing the graphics details bit by bit in SOTA itself, until running on 'fastest' didn't help - tweaking the Nvidia Control Panel settings (with game re-launches in between) didn't help - i.e.: single display performance mode, turning AA settings off, choosing performance vs. quality, power management set to performance, etc).. running w/o AV, ..nothing.. all on a W7 box fully patched w/ latest greatest drivers, minimal background processes, etc.

OK - so I thought, it's not the GPU - maybe it's a CPU issue.. but I was barely scratching 35% average CPU in Task Manager at peak .. weird.

I remembered an old trick with some applications for resolving CPU related issues - and thought..why not try..

..I turned off hyper-threading in the BIOS - which dropped me from "8" cores, to the actual 4 cores the CPU has (why would less cores be better, that makes no sense!? Read up on what hyper-threading does if you're interested - but they're not 'real' cores essentially)

.. the excessive skipping and hitching was now greatly reduced my CPU usage in task manager was now over 60% - probably because the total load was being divided over less cores for a net result of 60%

.. ok, so now I decided to get really crazy, and turn off multi-core support - i.e.: a single CPU... which took me to 100% CPU usage - but the frame rate dipped significantly, with about the same amount of skipping and hitching with multi-core enabled and with HT disabled.. so back to multi-core.

YMMV - especially if you're using a lot of background processes and multitasking with the game open (chat programs, browsers running, music streaming, etc).

(this probably won't help newer processors - I don't see this problem on my newer modern CPU - and especially once the game is optimized for performance and closer to release - but it's worth a try if you are seeing excessive skipping/hitching on every scene with an older CPU like I was)

---> update: I'm seeing improvements on my modern system as well - so give this a shot!

Spoiler: TL;DR

Try disabling hyper-threading (HT) in your BIOS/EFI

Spoiler: Specs

CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU W3550 @ 3.07GHz (8) System RAM: 24574
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 GPU RAM: 1990

 

Thanks for the tip. Might see if it helps on my laptop I use at work.

 

I've played with settings to no avail. Hitching is due to unoptimized code. Look in the tech section. People in there have some high end machines and they're still having the issue.
My specs - i7-3770k@4.6GHz, 32GB, GTX1080

 

causing a single processor to peak at 100% constantly is never a good idea.. sorry.

 

Oh well - it helped me, especially on my older W3550 CPU - which peaks around 60% with HT off and the skipping / hitching is much more manageable. My I7 6800k on my main PC hovers around 35-40%, and with HT off, seems a bit improved also.

 

Tried it, but it doesn't helped and after some minutes i got more stuttering as before

I only stutters in cities and it's manageable, beside Xenos, what was unplayable to me until r40, didn't try again.