Menu slowdown/stuttering in version 3.1

[deathwingduck]

Decided to finally try out version 3.1 after using 2.2 and 2.4 for so long but there's some weird issue with the menu. This was tested with both the standard Doom 1 and Doom 2 Wads with no mods loaded, opened simply by clicking on the application. It's weird but this slowdown issue only seems to be affecting the menu. moving to my menu selections make the audio progressively stutter as well as moving to each selection be very laggy. The actual gameplay and background music as well as gameplay audio, however, are unaffected. I never had this issue with previous versions of GZDoom. Even testing older versions now, they run just fine with no problems in menu selection.

Other games I play are showing no unusual behavior.

GPU is an NVidia GTX 970 manufactured by MSI, not overclocked (I'm only behind on 1 driver update due to the most recent one causing me some grief).
CPU is an AMD FX 8150
I have 16 GB of RAM
OS is Windows 10 64 bit (With Creators Update, and yes game mode is off).
My drivers are updated besides the GPU.

[deathwingduck]

Sorry this was my post. Didn't realize I wasn't logged in, surprised I could even post it in the 1st place.

[wildweasel]

Sorry this was my post. Didn't realize I wasn't logged in, surprised I could even post it in the 1st place.

No problem, I've reset the OP's owner so there's no ambiguity. The Bugs forums don't require registration, but do require approval (for guests and new accounts), so more people have made this mistake than I'm sure they'd like to admit. =P

[deathwingduck]

Ok so I think I figured out what the problem was. went to sound options and went to the menu under "OpenAL" and set "EFX" to off. I also found out it was a framerate issue whenever sounds activated, which caused the audio to stutter. The reason why it only seemed to be effecting the menu only is because framerate in the menu is always around 36 FPS. I did notice a dip in gameplay FPS, which is normally 200 FPS, to around 16 FPS for about a second when I discovered a secret. However turning off EFX seemed to fix this whole issue I was having.

Hopefully this helps anyone who encountered a similar issue to me.

[Graf Zahl]

This is something Chris will have to comment on. Can EFX really have such a performance impact?

[Korell]

Ok so I think I figured out what the problem was. went to sound options and went to the menu under "OpenAL" and set "EFX" to off. I also found out it was a framerate issue whenever sounds activated, which caused the audio to stutter. The reason why it only seemed to be effecting the menu only is because framerate in the menu is always around 36 FPS. I did notice a dip in gameplay FPS, which is normally 200 FPS, to around 16 FPS for about a second when I discovered a secret. However turning off EFX seemed to fix this whole issue I was having.

Oh, I've also noticed (in some mods more than others) that on finding a secret there is sometimes a bit of a momentary delay (but I've not experienced any other slowdown). I'll take a look at turning off the EFX option and see if that stops it.

[Chris]

This is something Chris will have to comment on. Can EFX really have such a performance impact?

It shouldn't, no. Menu sounds don't use EFX, and even if they did, you'd have more sounds playing in normal gameplay than menus. And even then, the cost of EFX is mostly fixed (ZDoom just uses one global reverb effect, which only needs to be processed once per audio update regardless of the number of sound sources).

I did notice a dip in gameplay FPS, which is normally 200 FPS, to around 16 FPS for about a second when I discovered a secret. However turning off EFX seemed to fix this whole issue I was having.

Did you make sure to restart sound after toggling it? Toggling EFX won't have any effect until the sound subsystem is restarted.

Such a delay when discovering a secret would be caused by having to load the sound from slow media (uncached disk read, for example, or an anti-virus checking all disk accesses), but once it's loaded it stays loaded and shouldn't incur such a delay again. So if you have EFX on, got a stutter with the first secret sound, switched EFX off without restarting the sound subsystem, then got no stutter with another secret, that would be because it didn't have to load the sound that second time. Though even if you do restart the sound subsystem or GZDoom as a whole, the OS may have cached the on-disk data into RAM, so when it does load again it will be faster. To better test for that, you'd need to quit GZDoom, run some other memory intensive programs for a while to flush those disk buffers from RAM, then run GZDoom again.

I wonder how easy it would be to log how long it takes to decode sounds from disk.

[Enjay]

I did notice a dip in gameplay FPS, which is normally 200 FPS, to around 16 FPS for about a second when I discovered a secret.

I don't know if it is connected but a number of times I have noticed a significant dip in performance on hearing the secret sound for the first time. It doesn't happen every time I play (so it's hard to reproduce reliably) but when it happens it's very noticeable. It feels like it's a much bigger sound file that is having to be loaded and cached, then it plays. After that it seems fine. I have never noticed it happening with an add-on DSSECRET but the unreliable nature of reproducing the problem means I can't be certain that it would never happen.

Of course, I'm blaming the sound. It could be something else happening on finding the secret that is causing the dip in performance.

[_mental_]

I don't know if it is connected but a number of times I have noticed a significant dip in performance on hearing the secret sound for the first time.

The thing is that only GZDoom 3.1.0 has proper version of libsndfile-1.dll. Previous stable versions had several performance issues. Also devbuilds contain old version of this DLL.
So please make sure that you are using 3.1.0 and all DLLs are the same as in release .zip file.
If many users experience this issue with 3.1.0 then we can precache secret sound or store it in uncompressed format.

[Enjay]

Also devbuilds contain old version of this DLL.

I thought that had been addressed (when the fmod file disappeared, I assumed the others had been updated). Seems it hasn't. My guess is that my problem could be related to that. I'll change the DLL in my folder for the git build versions of GZDoom for the newer one and if I get the problem, again I'll report back.

[Korell]

Such a delay when discovering a secret would be caused by having to load the sound from slow media (uncached disk read, for example, or an anti-virus checking all disk accesses), but once it's loaded it stays loaded and shouldn't incur such a delay again.

Yeah, that's the kind of behaviour I'm seeing. The first time a secret is found there's a slight delay, then after that it's fine. Not sure how to define slow media though. I use my SSD pretty much just for my OS, my games and documents being stored on a HDD.

EDIT 27/08/2017: Just thought I'd update this post. I tried playing the Wolfenstein Infinity gameplay mod and I noticed a lot of momentary pauses (less than a second) when a new sound was played. In this instance it seemed to be when a new monster showed up. Is there any way to load all of the sounds of the loaded IWAD and PWADs into a cache so that they are always ready for use?