Annoying stuttering

[nowheredan27]

Lately I've been getting some annoying stuttering whenever a sound that hasn't been played before in this session is played. It happens both in combat and in exploration when I go near an NPC and he snorts or whatever. Any tips?

EDIT - By the way, I'm not using any mods except for weapon sheathing and animated containers. I'm also using both MOP and Project Atlas for extra performance. No shadows, no water shaders, no distant terrain, no vsync. Pretty vanilla.

[akortunov]

The game loads requested sound file from disk, and it takes too much time for you for some reason. Usually it happens when user has a disk with very slow random access (when he launches a game from an external USB HDD, for example, or uses a slow SD card on Android). A workaround for such case is to do not launch the game from such slow storages.

[nowheredan27]

Well that's really weird since I'm running OpenMW on an SSD.
I've tried everything that the documentation said might help, from lowering the target framerate to increasing the sound cache size, but to no avail.
Guess I'll have to live with it, but boy for a 20 year old game this thing sure is taxing.

[psi29a]

Is this the infamous microstutter that some people have (and not just with OpenMW)?

[nowheredan27]

I believe so, yeah.
It's very weird, because I can get 120+ fps pretty much anywhere in the game, but it still chugs like a b*tch whenever someone casts magic, barks at me when I pass by or during combat.
A weird thing is that it doesn't seem to happen at all right after I've installed the game, which makes me think that since I've just got these files in my drive, they must be "indexed" or something.
I'm using OpenMW 0.46 by the way. I've read that 0.45 is more stable, but I really don't wanna love my save file now.

[psi29a]

In what way do you mean stable? 0.46 should be _more_ stable than 0.45, with more features and better performance.

[nowheredan27]

I mean that, from what I've read from people that were also experiencing this kind of heavy stuttering, downgrading back to 0.45 was a solution.
I haven't tried it, mind you. I have no idea how having 2 versions of OpenMW would work since they'd both use the same user files.

[psi29a]

Hmm... another question, are you using our fps limiter? We recently (as in yesterday) just changed how we deal with that.

Are you using anything else? vsync or gsync?

It's fine, you can have as many 'versions' as you want, as they are just different binaries all using the same data files and config files. OpenMW will ignore settings that don't exist.

[nowheredan27]

I'm not using any kind of frame limiter right now, since activating that seemed to make the stuttering even worse. I'm not using any kind of vsync either.
How do I get this latest build? Is there something like a beta branch of OpenMW that I need to sign up for? I'm definetely interested in giving it a try.

[psi29a]

We talk about that here down below in: https://openmw.org/downloads/