#Strange Freezing/Frame Drops

109 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

violet sandal
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Ok, I haven't been able to screen record and replicate this when using OBS, so it's some sort of weird frame issue I think.

Anyways, while playing songs, randomly I'll encounter a complete freeze for a second or two. Frames essentially drop to zero. I am still able to pause, as the pause menu pops up when frames return, from my futile attempts to salvage a run. And it may or may not be purely random, but it feels that way. It's happened at the end of songs, towards the beginning, slow parts, intense parts, fret variety, chord marathons, etc.

Specs:
Computer: Dell G15 5511 (gaming laptop)
GPU: NVIDIA RTX 3060 Laptop GPU
Monitor: MSI MPG321CX OLED (UHD monitor)
Controller: Xbox Riffmaster
EDIT:
Game's songs are in an external SSD.

Resolution settings:
OS side: 3840 x 2160, 120 Hz
Game side: 3840 x 2160 @ 120Hz

Tested with VSync Enabled and Disabled
Tested with Low Quality Mode On and Off

Tested with other 16:9 resolutions and lower refresh rates.

To reiterate, while OBS is recording the monitor, it does not freeze at all.

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Uploading video of the issue momentarily...

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-# Please ignore the in-between, I had my phone on a stand blocking the highway so my performance is poor lol

violet sandal
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Some slight narrowing down, this issue seems to only occur with YARG-original tracks.

brisk shuttle
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wow that's so weird

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does it actually happen only with official YARG songs?

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maybe it has to do with reading of audio data or something?

cunning hare
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2:24 just to be clear

violet sandal
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I ended up playing a song (can't remember which atm) where it froze 3 times on me! New record, that one.
That may be related to just playtime or something.

cloud lark
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oh that's interesting, it's dropping the audio too. haven't seen that one before...

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audio runs in a separate thread, so typically even if it freezes the audio continues to play and visual time jumps forward to match once it gets unstuck

violet sandal
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Very good point yeah.
It's 100% freezing both visuals and audio. If I don't pause it fast enough, the audio will be out of sync for the rest of the song. At least I think I'm preventing desync by pausing, I'm not fully certain on that.

cloud lark
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what kind of audio output are you using?

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also, nightly or stable?

cloud lark
night skiffBOT
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Log files contain debug information that can be helpful for developers when diagnosing problems or bugs.
Each log in the folder is listed with a date. Please send the relevant log, which in many cases will be the most recent one.

Accessing Logs From In-Game

  • Go to YARG's settings menu
  • Click on "All Settings" on the top
  • Scroll down to "File Management" and click it
  • Click on "Open Persistent Data Path"
  • Navigate into the logs folder

Accessing Logs Without the Game

If for whatever reason you cannot open the game, here's how you can access the log folder:

  • Windows: C:\Users\<you>\AppData\LocalLow\YARC\YARG\release\logs
    • You can get here quickly by pressing Windows Key + R then typing in exactly: %userprofile%\AppData\LocalLow\YARC\YARG\release\logs
  • Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/YARC/YARG/release/logs
  • Linux: ~/.config/unity3d/YARC/YARG/release/logs
    (if you're playing on a dev build, it may be in the dev folder instead of the release one)
violet sandal
violet sandal
violet sandal
cloud lark
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just as a test, you might try playing on the laptop's internal screen

violet sandal
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Repro'd the freeze, then finished up the song. Where would the log file be?

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oops forgot to actually enable device logging, sorry

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One more time!

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Or wait, is "Input Device Logging" specifically required?

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That seems just like one facet.

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I'll just give it a try anyways

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Freeze happened a few minutes ago very recently, around 9:48 pm CT (21:48 in the logs I think).

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Now trying the integrated monitor for the laptop.

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Just happened on the laptop's actual monitor too.

cloud lark
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hm, let it get through the hiccup and run a couple seconds longer before hitting the pause button, pls. It seems like whatever is happening it isn't getting detected by the point that you stopped the play (maybe not at all, but I'd expect it to notice the audio time and visual/input time are desynced at some point)

violet sandal
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Got it 🫡
More data is always a good thing

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Also, any preference for "Input Device Logging" enabled/disabled?

cloud lark
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off is fine

violet sandal
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Ok an extra detail I've noticed:
The visuals and audio freezes but the game seems to be still running in the background. The notes will be noticeably further progressed by the time it unfreezes.

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I also just noticed that it happened in the Music Library menu.

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Hmm.

cloud lark
cloud lark
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Well that's interesting, there were none of the messages I would have expected from a major desync like that. I'll dig into it a bit more tomorrow and make sure those messages show up in release builds, as I thought they were only suppressed by having debug logging off.

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In the meantime, you might check your power settings in Windows and see if changing it to maximum performance changes anything (sometimes too aggressive downclocking can cause weird issues, though Windows 10 and 11 are normally better about it than older versions)

violet sandal
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I should have mentioned that I guess. I've had it on Best Performance for all of these tests.

image.png
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I super appreciate y'alls help!
Hopefully with a bit more prodding, I bet y'all can deduce this

cunning hare
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Excited to hear about this - I've been chasing what I think is the same demon on a friend's laptop, but it happens so rarely it's hard to catch. Hopefully the YARG official song trick helps.

violet sandal
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I have not encountered it yet on non-official songs but I’ll keep you posted 🫡

faint dirge
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Hi everyone, starting this week's update I started having frame drops even when using stable build, im easily able to do 144fps but now it goes even to the low 60's even with effects disabled

image.png
brisk shuttle
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you can enable "low quality mode" to get an fps boost

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also, what are you comparing to? nightly? previous stable?

violet sandal
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Ok returning to this after awhile.

Just did Choked Up by See You at Rogers and I froze multiple times throughout the song, instead of just one or two times.
Additionally, a few of the freezes were visuals only and the audio kept going until the visuals finally caught up. If I pause right when it freezes, the audio goes all dial-up modem on me until I reach the point in the track where the audio stopped off and then continues normally until the next freeze.

My friend def doesn't think it's YARG, and probably my system. He suggest I look at Event Viewer or Performance Monitor and see if I can't pin down the error region.

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I also wasn't able to repro on Igowallah which adds more ambiguity on to its source.

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And just finally broke my last "known" condition:
Just happened in a non-YARG song
-# (Day Late, Dollar Short, Harmonix chart)

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I guess the only "constant" is I know this doesn't happen with other games (Tried with Halo Wars and Baldur's Gate 3, but those are through Steam)

violet sandal
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Oop, got something new!

image.png
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And game crash! Interesting.

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Damn, the logs didn't capture that event it seems.

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Found the crash in Event Viewer!

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Faulting application name: YARG.exe, version: 2021.3.36.1605, time stamp: 0x65deecf2
Faulting module name: mono-2.0-bdwgc.dll, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x65cca6f8
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x00000000004fcdcb
Faulting process id: 0xC960
Faulting application start time: 0x1DC1F7A6B7CB151
Faulting application path: F:\YARG\Installs\YARG Installs\d82ca800-71a3-425d-a7d7-7639cf58433d\installation\YARG.exe
Faulting module path: F:\YARG\Installs\YARG Installs\d82ca800-71a3-425d-a7d7-7639cf58433d\installation\MonoBleedingEdge\EmbedRuntime\mono-2.0-bdwgc.dll
Report Id: 1f280e9f-87db-43b7-81ba-0a44a04e9fa6
Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID:

bleak yew
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This is a wild guess and probably unlikely, but it could just be that your SSD is dying and causing really slow reads on occasion.

Only saying this because I've had an SSD that did that before. I'm not sure how that would effect YARG though, maybe we could try simulating it and see

If it is a YARG problem then we need to see if visuals are synced to something. I was under the impression that audio was synced to visuals, and visuals don't sync to something else, but I'm new to this part of the code so idk

violet sandal
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Swapping all of anything YARG off the external SSD onto my laptop proper and testing now.
So far it's still happening.

bleak yew
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Thanks for reporting. I have still never been able to repro this even after several hours of continuous playing. I am thinking it might be best to test this on a rather slow machine to see if I can make it happen.

violet sandal
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Ok so I did a completely clean install of YARG but apparently it wasn't as clean as I could have made it. There are still some sort of paths pointing to my external SSD (drive F:). So everything is on my Laptop proper now but I'll fix that annoyance later. All it does is prevent me from launching YARC unless I attach and unlock that SSD.

Testing with renewed focus now. Everything is blank, time to start anew.

violet sandal
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Hmm yeah it seems inconsistent for me now.

sour oxide
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Having this issue as well, on both stable and nightly, but when it happens to me, the song speeds up to catch to where it should be, rather than desyncing.

bleak yew
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Were you playing a YARG official song or something else?

bleak yew
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I was able to repro this by simulating a disk read delay of 50ms on every read.

I got a visual freeze at about the middle of the song, however audio kept playing

Also, simulating a disk read delay of 100ms on every read caused yarg to crash.

Another possibility also, is that a big garbage collection call is happening in the middle of the song.

From the original video that was posted it seems like the main thread freezes up given the huge fps drop

bleak yew
violet sandal
violet sandal
bleak yew
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I think garbage collection is still the most likely culprit if both audio and video freezes, though unity is supposed to handle garbage collection more gracefully so idk

violet sandal
bleak yew
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but for the record, when I added the 100ms disk read delay that caused the crash, it is the same crash as you

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so that's something

violet sandal
bleak yew
violet sandal
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Man, if only I could record my pc and share these issues easier.

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But just to reiterate a couple of things that I think I've deduced in my troubleshooting.:
It's not the monitor causing issues, as I've played on it with other games on my PC, and through my Xbox, for hours without any freezes.
I have not encountered this sort of freezing issue on games like Baldur's Gate 3 or Halo Wars (through Steam). YARG is so far the only game that has done stuff like this.

bleak yew
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Yeah I don't think it's disk any more but idk

cloud lark
bleak yew
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3 second gc call during the song is kind of crazy though, idk why that would happen, if that's what it is

cloud lark
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yeah, it's generally not that bad. that long of a gc run would imply a lot of stuff hanging around for multiple gc cycles and only then getting released (despite being ancient, unity's GC still follows the basic principles of .net GC, it just lacks any vaguely modern enhancements)

bleak yew
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And idk if my slow disk theory holds up, depending on where I put the thread.sleep in the read call different things happen

But also I tested on a slow USB thumb drive and measured 150ms reads with no issues

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This was while copying several GB of stuff to the drive while playing lol

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I wonder if 4k 120hz plays into it

violet sandal
bleak yew
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You could try it and see if it still freezes

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Shot in the dark though it might not matter at all. Just thought that's a rather unique part of your set up. Most people aren't playing that hi res / frame rate

violet sandal
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It does look gorgeous at that res though ❤️

bleak yew
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well, 4k 120hz does cause memory usage to grow faster

violet sandal
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Ok I've played 17 different, unique songs in a row. No freeze issues or anything.
Going to play a bit longer before saying what I did. Don't want to speak too soon.

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Includes both YARG official and non-official songs.

bleak yew
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I have figured out nothing on this so hopefully you did 🙂

violet sandal
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Ok, for whatever reason this song was giving me so many issues with my situation but now it seems to be true that I "solved" it. Explanation coming.

image.png
violet sandal
# violet sandal Ok so I did a completely clean install of YARG but apparently it wasn't *as clea...

So apparently I was wrong here. I didn't actually fully uninstall YARG. I hunted down all the folders and files still laying around to make sure that it was gone and I was starting fresh. I noticed that, for whatever reason, some other files were reinstalled on my external SSD without me realizing (I was just using it as a .sng backup until that point). It had some Install files in it.
After removing all of that, and finally doing a real, legit clean install, I made sure it was purely on my actual laptop pc. Nothing external, all on the main drive.
So far it seems to be completely fine.

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So your drive/disk read theory was most probably correct.

bleak yew
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so you think it was song files on the external ssd that were slow?

violet sandal
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Maybe. I lost track of where the official YARG setlist songs were located. But if key install information was external as well as select songs, that could cause unsalvageable data propagation times.

bleak yew
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I think we should just put the whole song in memory before we start playback

violet sandal
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Hey, that's y'alls domain lol, do whatever works well.
But I'd say that makes sense. That also make it agnostic to any external memory source that may or may not cause issues.

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In the meantime, idk if this is an edge case, but there should (now) probably be a disclaimer somewhere that says "hey dumbass, don't put the game or custom songs on external memory storage" lol

bleak yew
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Well, I've been testing on an ancient and very slow 8gb thumb drive and I haven't been able to repro your issue 🤷

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I tested it while copying several GB of stuff to it at the same time and still no issues lol

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but I do think you are right about ssd. I had an ssd die on me before, and before it did it would freeze up my whole machine for seconds at a time when accessing files on occasion

violet sandal
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Interesting. Just checked the management software that SanDisk gives for this SSD and it seems to be reporting that it's "healthy" so far.

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Idk but the issue is no longer persisting.