I love FF and I’ve been playing it for years, but I’ve had a stuttering/microstuttering issue for a few years now playing the game, I’m wondering if anyone has an idea on how to resolve it. Turning GPU settings down doesn’t make a difference.
I’ve experienced this across multiple computers, here is the current rig:
Rosen 7950x
64GB RAM (6400 cl32)
Radeon RX 7900 GRE
All nvme ssd
Stuttering occurs at all gameplay speeds, it’s much more noticeable at 2x-5x, getting more noticeable the fast you have the game speed set.
I see the issue as early as late T1 into T2 tech. It doesn’t come and go across different towns, it’s ever single save game I start.
If you stop scrolling and watch the snow, or the villagers running around, you can still see the stutter.
I’m kind of at my wits end, it’s super annoying. I can replicate this on windows and Linux. I’ve used programs to force processes onto CCD1 and keep FF on CCD0, as well as setting process affinity higher, it didn’t really have and impact.
Any suggestions? Should I file some kind of bug report? I don’t see much talk about performance issues on the forum but since I’ve been able to replicate it on different hardware, I don’t think this is strictly a me problem lol.
I will just mention my experience, maybe it is same problem in your system. I use ubuntu, I have am5 9900x and rx 9070 xt. I may not help for windows but maybe you can find your solution with similar approach.
I had same issues like you had, micro stutters, continuously. I could replicate it in a way though. I was testing furmark with opengl and there I could see those micro stutters as well. but with vulkan it never had an issue. this could be one fix for you, in steam you can set some env vars to use vulkan instead. for me this did not fix. I also disabled c-states in bios for my cpu. it helped on gpu use (my gpu use would drop to 0 and cause long stutters, c-state disable reduced frequency and stutters to be very short but still I had them)
another thing I realized is power use. I installed a tool called Corectrl in ubuntu. it shows how much power gpu uses. in my case it would go down to a few watts on some occasions. and in those times I would have problems with sound as well, yes, I had sound stutters too (gpu cable carried sound to monitor speakers).
I had to do an update on power use on gpu, use “min X watts” or something like that. only that solved my problem, both sound issues and micro stutters went away.
in no game I had this issue, but my explanation is both gpu and cpu is almost in heavy use so no power saving would interfere. in a simpler game with low settings or early game FF, it could mean cpu/gpu are almost idle.
in summary, my issue was about power use. so maybe your system has same issue. I hope it helps
I thought corectl was deprecated so I didn’t reinstall it.
I’m actually on Fedora 44, I’ve had this issue on windows, pop os, and now fedora for a few months.
I’ll see if I can statically set a high performance power plan. I try to disable any low power states (pcie-aspm, etc) where I can, but I don’t recall if I did anything on Fedora.
I had installed the cachyos kernel, which actually made the stuttering worse.