Platform: PC (Epic) Digital
Level: All
Description: Mirrors are causing a micro-stutter each time during rendering since the last update on May 24th.
It’s subtle but when a mirror has to be rendered in the scene, frametime is increasing and a stutter appears. It’s not huge but it’s enough to notice it.
I took Dartmoor as an example because the mansion is filled with a lot of mirrors, so this micro-stuttering issue is more noticeable. In the image below, you can see the spikes in the frametime, I created them by turning the camera several times towards the mirror.
I installed the previous version of the game (with january 2022 patch), and no issue at all with the same setup and drivers.
Steps to reproduce:
- Start the game
- Set the “Mirrors Reflection Quality” setting on LOW or MEDIUM or HIGH
- Set Ray Tracing OFF
- Load the Dartmoor mission
- Go in front of a mirror
Freqency: Always
Nvidia Drivers tested : 516.59 (latest), 516.40, 512.96, 512.95, 512.77, 512.59.
Specs :
Windows 11 Professional (last update)
Intel Core i7 9700K
G.Skill 8 Go (x2) DDR4
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080
Settings :
With Ray Tracing OFF and Mirrors Reflection Quality set on LOW/MEDIUM/HIGH : Mirrors are causing micro-stutters everytime they are displayed.
With Ray Tracing ON and Mirrors Reflection Quality set on LOW/MEDIUM/HIGH : No micro-stutters when mirrors are displayed (just an overall drop in performance. This is expected, Ray Tracing is resource-intensive).
With Mirrors Reflection Quality set to OFF : No micro-stutters, and obviously mirrors are just using cubemaps fallback reflections.
This stuttering issue was introduced with the latest patch (3.110.1). Since mirrors use Planar Reflections not Ray Traced Reflections even when RT is ON, I suspect that this micro stutter behavior can be avoided with RT OFF. Planars Reflections used by mirrors were always stutter free since Hitman 2016 to my knowledge.