Game runs in "Slow motion" or low fps?

[Jumpperi]

I was having the same issue as some in the thread (even though a decent PC) and am here to post how I got the game fixed and playable for me. This may or may not work for you, but it's surely worth a try.

I combined a few tips from here and found almost perfectly smooth solution for me.

The "sweet spot" settings:
- terraria.exe priority HIGH or ABOVE NORMAL (windows task manager) <- THIS was the most affecting setting for me, somehow. I needed to turn this to have smooth frametime/framerate
- Frameskip off
- maximum prerendered frames: 1 (nvidia control panel)
- force no vsync (nvidia control panel)
- 1920x1080 resolution (instead of 2560×1440 I usually use, this fixed vibrating graphics)

Things I tried:
- tweaking with nvidiainspector
- adjusting vsync, gsync
- adjusting nvidia control panel settings
- adjusting screen refresh rate
- maxcapping game fps

I tested this with Rivatuner Statistics Server (RTSS) on screen info and frametime graph. Without these tweaks, the frametime was bouncing all around in the graph, while the fps was looking quite smooth around 130-144fps and the game and the mouse felt laggy. With these settings, I got almost perfectly smooth frametime, fps and mouse movement.

I took a few screenshots with the RTSS frametime graph for illustration.

Picture 1: Here's what it looks after the changes. The framerate is almost perfect 144fps, and the graph showing frametime is almost perfectly smooth line.

Picture 2: Here's what it looked like before the settings/changes. Frametime was skipping a lot between 6.9ms-45ms (that's a lot of lag) even though fps was showing to be only between 130-144fps. The game felt horrible, small microstutters everywhere, and a lot of mouse lag. Sometimes the game felt it was slow-mo when moving around, then when stopping it felt smooth again.

Picture 3: With the tweaks, but with Frame Skip. This is how frametime behaves when frameskip is turned to SUBTLE or ON. The experience is not as bad, but there is constantly small stutter and lag. Also, it automatically caps the fps to 60.

My Rig:
Windows 10 PC
i5-4690k @ 4 Ghz (OC)
GTX 1080 Ti
16 gigs ram

Hope this helps someone! I will update if there's something more I will find out

 

[Marcus101RR]

You need to use NVidia/AMD Graphics Panel to adjust how the program runs, don't let the app decide. In addition, always setting to "HIgh" priority does the trick along with those settings. I hope this will be addressed in 1.3.6

 

[AJman14]

Found the most (not) obvious fix. Go to full screen, assuming you're on borderless windowed. I know, I hate it... but it fixed the issue completely for me. Maybe seeing this will help the developers in diagnosing the issue?

EDIT:
When a message from Discord or Steam pops up, the game slows nearly to a halt for 30 seconds. In multiplayer, this makes me jump/glitch around for other players. Again though, making Terraria full screen, instead of borderless windowed fixed that issue.


System Specs:
Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
i5-3570k
GeForce GTX 970
16GB DDR3 RAM
OS boots from 256GB SSD*
Tarraria runs from 1TB HDD*

*I know those two probably don't matter, but if it's trying to load something from a HDD, instead of RAM it could cause it to go slow.

 

[Big Gay Dinosaur]

Any good video cards for terraria around 200-300 dollars

 

[Soronity]

You won't be needing any 200-300 Dollar card for terraria, but the best price to performance cards in that range are the Vega 56 and the RX 590

 

[ifoundit]

I found the cure with amd. you need to go to the radeon settings and turn off anti lag

 

[Vanegaming]

Hello guys I found a fix for my issue. I went to video on the main menu and disabled borderless. So far this has made my game buttery smooth with no lag.

 

[kode54]

The horrid performance is likely because the game on Windows is still using the horribly ancient XNA framework. Then again, I can't say for sure whether building against FNA on Windows would be any improvement, considering that at least on AMD GPUs, the OpenGL performance would be atrocious on Windows, thanks to AMD's "lovely" drivers.

Yes, I find my Linux performance to be way better than the Windows performance. I have yet to try running the game under Gamescope, however, so I can see whether I can force 1080p in a "fullscreen" view to scale to my 3840x2160 monitor, since the game itself refuses to do this for me properly.

E: I have found a solution to my Windows performance issues: I disabled the "borderless window" mode, and now it performs much better, even in a 1920x1080 window, which due to my system DPI, is doubled to fill the screen.

 

[REDnotfred]

I know that this has already been said but TURN FRAME SKIP ON. The most likely reason why the game is running in slow motion is because when frame skip is off I makes sure that you get every single frame, so if the game caps the max frames per second at (eg.) 120 and you are running at 60 frames per second then it's going to takes 2 seconds to get all of the frames. Skipping frames honestly isn't that noticeable unless you have really low fps. I hope this helps anyone who still has a problem.

we HAVE IT ON, its in the post!

 

[Unit One]

we HAVE IT ON, its in the post!

Hi there @REDnotfred, the post that you're replying to is almost five years old. TheFancyWisp gave this advice to someone else five years ago. So I'm confused about your post, why it's somewhat yelling back with caps and an exclamation point.