Issues with freezing in Mass Effect 2 and 3 have been resolved.
Issues with freezing in Mass Effect 2 and 3 have been resolved.
When I play Mass Effect 2 or 3, my game occasionally freezes for a brief moment every minute. It doesn’t crash, but it’s quite bothersome. Timing a perfect shot and then the game halts is frustrating. This issue began about a week ago and has been persistent. My system handles the tasks well—CPU: Intel Xeon E3 1230 v3, GPU: 7870XT, 8GB RAM, drivers at 14.4. I’m planning to switch to the beta driver to test, though I doubt it will help since I’ve been using it since early May. After reaching 160 hours with no bugs so far, it’s becoming increasingly annoying. It makes me think about abandoning this playthrough if a fix isn’t found, which would be disappointing. This clearly highlights the problem. I also noticed the issue only appeared when using a USB3 as a "Ready Boost" device. Turning that off resolved the problem. Further testing shows that any caching on drives not used by the game (except the dedicated pagefile) can cause stuttering. Likely this is linked to Windows resource management, which didn’t repeat on my Windows 8 PC.
If you're using Windows 7, give this a shot. Download the link shown in the video information (a much simpler approach). Unpark the cores, then restart. I recall multicore issues caused problems with games at first. I've played the series on my 4770k (same chip as yours, just clocked higher) and it worked fine. If you're on Windows 8, this step is already complete. You might want to run the game in compatibility mode using an older version of Windows or execute it as an administrator. Apart from that, the GPU driver could be the issue. This game should run perfectly even on an old GTX 260 216c at 1080p with AA/AF set higher than the menu options inside the catalyst software. One more suggestion: try running it in fullscreen or windowed fullscreen (whatever you're not using). Hopefully, one of these methods will help. On Windows 7 with an 8-core processor, unparking cores should improve performance in games like Planetside 2/BF4. With Windows 8, the problem is resolved.
I used a GTS 250 with maximum graphics settings. The unparking cores didn't resolve the issue. I'm testing the drivers next, then doing a clean install. A fresh setup didn't help either. Running in Window or Fixed window mode didn't work. Using Admin with Compatibility for XP(SP3) made it start quicker and connected to EA servers faster, but the problem persists.
I resolved the issue by disabling the USB3 "Ready Boost" function. Further testing revealed that caching on drives not hosting the game (except the dedicated Pagefile) caused stuttering. This is likely related to Windows resource management differences between Windows 7 and Windows 8.