Major FPS drops after playing online for a bit(?)

Bug Reports
1

Title: Major FPS drops after playing online for a bit(?)

Summary: After playing for a while (generally online) my frame rates will drop from 60ish FPS to 10ish FPS (with serious input lag and dropped inputs), and apparently it affects opponents online too. Once in a while it resolves itself, but when this happens it tends to persist to the main menu screen too.

Steps to reproduce:
Unsure, honestly. It seems to happen semi-randomly when playing online, sometimes during a match and sometimes right at the matchup screen (especially when playing against The Rook Hugger).

Expected Results: No FPS drops, or FPS drops with consistent rendering speeds

Actual Results: weird jerky slowdowns that drop inputs, that apparently affect both players in online matches

Notes: the slowdown is not like a normal smooth 10 FPS would be — instead of, like, every sixth frame, the game is much jerkier. It renders a few frames in a row, then freezes briefly and renders another few frames in a row a quarter second later or so.

This also “eats” inputs sometimes, or, in one case, interpreted B then C as a super macro.

Game Version: October 2018

System Information: latest macOS on 2013 15” MacBook Pro (top-end with discrete graphics)

1 Like
2

Here’s a log from just now — the slowdown started around the win animation after the first match, then persisted for a while until it stopped right around when the opponent’s Midori did some sort of cinematic (when it fixes itself, it always seems to coincide with a cinematic), but then it started again and lasted until the end of the match.

The game did seem to fix itself when going back to the main menu, though.

3

This kind of thing is hard to evaluate because it’s often legitimately the fault of something else running on the computer. But ok, noted.

4

Yeah, it’s hard to pin down. It seems to affect both players online, though, and it’s new to this update for me.

5

This morning I played three matches, the first of which was fine but the second and third of which were bad.

I kept Activity Monitor open the whole time, and nothing seemed to be spiking the CPU (which was generally pretty steady, and fairly low on the CPU load gauge overall). It’s worth noting that I run the game on a user profile with more or less nothing but Steam installed on it, in order to minimize any potential lost performance from other software running concurrently.

Interestingly, though, after these matches, I went to the character select on the main menu (daily challenge, in this case) and found that the significant slowdown actually stopped (60 FPS) when Grave, Arg, or DeGrey was being displayed. When any of the other characters were onscreen for that character select, my frame rate dropped to about 10–15 FPS. This was a consistent behavior that could be repeated by moving the cursor around. :thinking: