Questionable framerates and stuttering

Battlefield 4 General Discussion
1

Hi guys,

I bought BF4 yesterday because it was $15, and for that price, why not take an upgrade from BF3?

I’m very satisfied with the game so far, however, performance is bad. I was able to play Battlefield 3 at ultra settings with no lag or stuttering whatsoever. My internet connection is fine, 15 down and 2 up, and I don’t have any whacky settings enabled.

My specs are: i7 4510U Dual Core, NVIDIA GTX 850M w/ 4 GB VRAM, Windows 8.1 x64, 12 GB RAM.

This laptop was bought in July. Again, I have no stuttering or anything with any other game, and framerates are always great. My temperatures range from about 60-70C while playing, and this is common for all games, so it shouldn’t be due to heat at all.

My laptop is set into high performance mode, my battery is out and I’m running on outlet power. When playing at ultra settings in the test range, I’m getting an average of 70-90 FPS, however, when I play multiplayer with any amount of players at any graphical setting, I lag and stutter. My average frames in multiplayer at low settings is 35-40 FPS, which isn’t terrible, but there is very noticable stuttering. Here’s the kicker: at ultra settings, I get 35-40 FPS too, and the stuttering is just as consistent as at low settings. 35-40 FPS is unimpressive by itself, but even at that framerate, there is no reason it should be stuttering as much as it is. So the problem here is, it’s stuttering for no reason, and there are crazy frame drops for no apparent reason.

In BF3 multiplayer, I got 70-90 FPS at all times, never any lower. I realize this is a different game, but the graphics haven’t changed that much and there really isn’t anything in this game that should be causing my CPU/GPU to struggle. I’ve read about many of the performance issues with this game, and have tried disabling paging, prefetching, etc. to no avail.

Can anyone help me out here?

2

Sound like CPU. Yes game engine changed a lot.

3

CPU yes - you really need a quad core to enjoy game

4

I realize this CPU is not as powerful as something like the quad core 4710HQ, but again, I’m not experiencing any lag at all on singleplayer or in the test range, so why it would be so bad in multiplayer is just beyond me. Of course MP will be more resource intensive, but even with 8 players? I just think there’s another issue.

5

Make sure your resolution scale is at 100% not higher or lower
(resolution scale at 100% is basically 1080p)
I know you said you had no wacky settings on but it’s worth checking.
My rig gets about the same as you at max settings but every now and then i do get a frame rate drop.
Hope this helps =)

6

Just checked, it’s at 100%. Thanks for the suggestion, though!

7

Do you have shadowplay? You can try and optimise the game, but a dual core on a current gen game might be a bit of a push unfortunately!

8

I’m still working on this issue a bit, but setting max pre-rendered frames to 1 rather than application-determined has helped considerably.

I don’t think the issue at hand is really caused by aging hardware, rather the fact that the game is crappily coded. Google “Battlefield 4 stuttering” and you’ll see the alarming amount of people who have this issue, regardless of hardware. This game seems to really be littered with many more bugs and performance problems compared to previous versions of Battlefield, and hopefully it’s something that Hardline will solve.

I do believe that dual core CPUs definitely won’t be usable in games like Battlefield in the future, but right now, there is seriously no reason that they shouldn’t. There were considerable changes to the game and engine that might make performance a bit worse on some systems, but the sharp drop that some people are reporting with this game is just not right. It should be able to perform somewhat similarly to Battlefield 3.

9

A lot of the BF4 performance issues were fixed a few months after release (I was one of the ones who suffered miserably!).

64 man servers will be the most intensive for your machine… mine dips to 40fps sometimes on siege of shanghai when a lot is going on (overclocked fx8320/760GTX setup), but then can be 140fps on Final Stand. Hell, 16 man servers which I’ve been on (dogtag hunting) can be as high as 194fps.

Does your card support shadowplay? Worth a try if so with the optimisation setting.

But you can’t compare this game to BF3 in terms of performance. The game has completely changed. BF3 is 3 yrs old running on the older Frostbyte engine - BF4 is a completely different kettle of fish on a more advanced engine. I had to upgrade my PC just to play the game at a respectable framerate for BF4.

I hope you can get it into a playable state though - it really is a great game now and you’ve got it at the peak time (after patches, on offer, DLC out etc). If you fail to get an answer here head over to /r/battlefield_4 subreddit which is the main one.

Good luck!

10

Did you try disabling origin in game?

11

Sry for late resp. Sure there is something that can help but I know from exp that MP required much more CPU power. Correct me if I’m wrong