Major hitching/micro-stuttering after March 8th update

[PeakKS]

Your system information

• System Information
• Have you checked for system updates?: Yes

Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:

Latest update (March 8th) seems to have introduced major hitching. Overall performance looks to be about as terrible as it was before but now there are constant micro stutters and hitching to the point that it is basically unplayable.

Steps for reproducing this issue:

1. Play the game

[PeakKS]

I decided to experiment a bit with changing the threads parameter. Basically the higher the threads parameter, the worse the stutter. To make matters worse more threads hardly improve performance (if not decrease it sometimes) and the game seems to use ~9 if the parameter is anything but 1 (Although using a higher thread parameter does show higher utilization of those 9 threads).

For comparisons: -threads 20

-threads 16

Default (no threads parameter specified, sys_info reports 11 engine threads equivalent to -threads 12) -threads 2

-threads 1

[MordragT]

Interesting for me there is few difference in the stuttering no matter what cpu affinity I set. Also for me I have a constant frametime of round about 15ms with spikes ranging from 30 - 40 ms. It seems like others already mentioned that the longer I run the game the worse these issues get and DeathMatch is especially bad. But I am also running it on an intel arc a750 so some of it might also be mesa anv quirks (had visual issues with cs until mesa 23.2 I believe). I tried gamescope (embedded via steam bigpicture and nested) as well as various configurations in cs2 but next to none difference. Now I am waiting for https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/20418 to be merged and I will then try the intel xe driver but I am not really holding my breath. I remember that it was not so bad on x11, so I will try that again as well. Also renicing (priority) seems to make no difference (eevdef seems to already give cs good resources). Just for tinkering I'll maybe also try linux zen/xanmod/liquorix.

My System: r5 2600x intel arc a750 (ReBar ofcourse activated) nixos unstable mesa 24.02 linux 6.8

[t0ssox]

It's really bad. I have like around 150 fps with i5-11400 and RX 6600 XT. My propositions.

• You can test with disabled hyperthreading in UEFI.
• You can test with disabled little cores.
• You can test on another distro. Maybe your configuration is your issue. I know that from your perspective it worked fine before 8 march but maybe you did and forgot or your system some update in the background that making this issue.
• You can clean current vulkan shader cache.

[kodatarule]

I can confirm that I experience the same problem on my laptop. It's a prime setup amd+nvidia.

Ryzen 7 6800H AMD 680M RTX 3060 6GB 16GB DDR5 RAM

Zorin OS and EndeavourOS both reproduce the issue(currently running zorin os).

[Mailaender]

I am on Arch Linux with KDE 6 which defaulted to Wayland. The game was unplayable as the stuttering caused visual glitches and input lag. Switching back to X11 improved the situation a bit, but the game was still so degraded that I couldn't aim properly. The frame rate was unstable. Lowering the graphics settings had no significant effect.

• Kernel 6.7.9
• 8 × Intel® Core™ i7-6700K CPU @ 4.00GHz
• 32 GB RAM
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070/PCIe/SSE2 (driver 550.54.14-5)

If I hadn't already reviewed the game positively as CS:GO, I would have gave you :-1: in the Steam reviews.

[oerkel47]

Everything feels so delayed as of late. Can't react, can't spray. My framerate and frametimes in general are okay but as soon as there is contact I get the "bad frametime" indication really often. I don't think I became a total noob in the span of 2 weeks.

[vladest]

The next "big update" (Copenhagen) brought another "big stuttering" feels like I'm rolling back in time for a moment

[idontbyte]

Intel + AMD here, game is ok for the first minute or so but then microstuttering gets really bad... and then it just becomes stuttering no micro about it.

[itouchdennis]

Also experienced the micro stutterings here on my 3070 ti + 12600k on EndeavourOS Game runs fine overall, but stutters random sometimes, making feel the game worse - for the update it was running smoothly

[asiantuntija]

Linux version runs terribly slow atm, I get only around 100 fps while on Windows it's over 300. GPU utilization is around 40% and it used to be maxed, this is in every map. I don't experience stuttering except in water where fps dips all the way down to 20 fps on 6800XT.

[oerkel47]

So I think I have managed to get the game run smoothly again by setting the CPU governor to performance via CoreCtrl which basically pins the CPU at max frequency (AMD 5800X3D). I wonder what Valve has changed with the threading in CS2.

[itouchdennis]

The last updates removed the stuttering for me - I do not know what changed but its running fine for me now back again.

[Mailaender]

I reinstalled and there are still frequent major frame drops, where also the top right indicator shows above 100 ms render times in red. It goes away after a few seconds, but it is impossible to aim in these situations. These problems don't occur on Windows dual boot.

[PeakKS]

I think this has improved with today's update. I tried doing -threads 100 and while it performed terribly it was smooth. The behavior of only those 9 threads actually showing activity is still the same however, I don't know what is up with that but I'd guess it is just some weird scheduling thing (sched-ext cs2 specific scheduler when? /s). Anyways the game seems much smoother for me now even if the framerate is still not on par with windows.

[darkylein]

I just tested some tweaks @t0ssox suggested in this comment. I can't thank you enough!

1. Dissabling E-Cores made a big difference here. I still experienced some micro stuttering, but the big FPS drops with enemy contact where gone. Overall the game runs pretty smooth this way.
2. Dissabling hyperthreading cost me some FPS, and the micro-stuttering described in 1. was still there, so I keep it enabled.

Another thing I noticed, when running CS2 wayland native (thanks to CNR_07's post on reddit) I get around +20-30% FPS out of it, but that causes some game crashes.

Specs:

Intel i5-13600KF (P-Cores running on 5GHz) NixOS 24.05 (Uakari) (64 bit), SwayWM Kernel Version: 6.8.9 AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT Mesa 24.0.6 RAM: 31953 Mb

[itouchdennis]

Its still stutters for me under wayland. Not as much as it was in between the last months, but it still has some micro stutter I only face on wayland. While its totally playable on X11, on Wayland, even on gamescope its stuttering.

Specs: Intel i5 12600k ( E Cores excluded via taskset launch option and threads set to 7, CPU @5GHz) EndeavourOS Kernel Version 6.9.9 3070 TI - 555 Beta Driver WM Hyprland / Wayland Ram: 32GB DDR4 3200 MHZ