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Hello, dear HotA developers!
I would like to ask if the problem I am experiencing is a bug or not, in the latest version of HotA. This problem has not been observed before and only occurs in this game, while in other applications, such as Dota 2 or CPU-Z stress tests, the system runs absolutely stably.
My PC:
CPU: Intel Core i5-4670K @ 4.6GHz, 1.35V, completely stable (temperatures up to 70°C)
Motherboard: ASRock Z97M Pro4
RAM: 4×4 GB DDR3 2133 MHz, timings 10-10-10-30, stability tested (AIDA64: 31.8GB/s read, 46 ns latency)
Graphics card: GTX 1060 3GB (latest driver) (chip and memory temperatures below 50 degrees, chip load always below 80 percent when FPS is locked at 60 frames, memory usage always below 2 GB, the card is not limited by Afterburner in any way)
Monitor: 4K
OS: Win 11 x64, recently installed, no antivirus
Storage: SSD 256GB (no RAM cache, 205 GB free, 1.5 TB read, 1.5 TB write, thousands of hours of operation, 350 power-on cycles)
Game settings:
- 1280x720
- xBRZ x4 Linear sharper
- 32bit OpenGL by Verok
- Fullscreen + System cursor
- Everything else is default
Problem:
During gameplay (HD mod), there are stutters and two-second freezes. The bug can be reproduced as follows:
1. Start a game as Devil in a detailed map.
2. Use cheats to get a decent army for easier testing.
3. Attack any enemy.
4. The autobattle wins.
5. Then, several options:
5.1 Immediately move the mouse cursor to another enemy.
5.2 Scroll the screen slightly and move the mouse to the enemy.
6. You will see that the entire game freezes for 2 seconds.
7. If you repeat the actions and move the mouse to the same enemy, micro-freezes still occur.
Nothing else is running in the background, absolutely nothing.
I tried changing the video card to a 750 with 1 GB of memory, changing the RAM to 2x8 with timings of 13 13 13 33, setting the BIOS settings to stock with all hardware configurations, and tried playing on two other PCs (one of them with an RTX 2060) - nothing helps, the problem still occurs.
This problem is clearly not related to hardware instability, overheating, or lack of resources. In other games and applications, the system behaves perfectly.
Using the LatencyMon utility, the following was found:
High DPC latencies from the video card driver (nvlddmkm.sys) - up to 449 microseconds
Severe pagefault events (up to 40) from the process h3hota hd.exe, which indicates that the game is loading data from the disk during execution, even though the game size is only about 600 MB and it is installed on an SSD
Humbly suggest:
Given that modern systems have a large amount of RAM (I have 16 GB, for example), I suggest implementing an option to load all game resources into RAM at startup. This would allow:
To make the game completely independent of the I/O disk during execution.
Additional info - I once played on an old Athlon 5 years ago with a dead hard drive, the game worked normally, but there were micro-freezes when I first entered the castle, and I could hear the hard drive clicking - reading data to load the images, when I entered the castle for the second time, there were no micro-freezes because everything was already cached.
I apologize in advance if I have violated any forum rules.