Poor BF4 beta performance on decent system? **Possible fix**

[PCM2]

I'm not sure whether this has been posted before, if so feel free to delete this thread.

The problem

I took some time off work to enjoy the BF4 beta, but like many other people I have been experiencing horrific performance issues. The latest Nvidia beta drivers installed but no relief. Essentially the frame rate will continuously fluctuate between >60fps and into the single digits, even though my character is stationary and the action stays pretty much the same around me. This is with a GTX 780 and pretty decent gaming rig aside from that. I've seen others report similar issues on the Graphics Card section of OcUK and the Battlelog forums.

The solution

Time to cut to the chase. I have a number of Intel SSDs on my system and run the 'Intel Rapid Storage Technology' driver and tools. I found instant relief on BF4 by going to 'Processes' in Task Manager and closing 'IAStorDataSvc'. If you're tearing your hair out wondering why your BF4 performance is so poor, this could be the culprit. Apologies to anybody with issues who isn't helped by this.

 

[PCM2]

This shouldn't really make any difference tbh. Placebo comes to mind.

FPS counters don't lie, nor does the blatantly obvious difference between being able to actually play the game or not. I'm not talking about slightly slower performance than I would expect from my system here, I am talking about a very obvious bug/issue. My FPS would literally bounce around to 60fps+ and 5-20fps continuously. Changing graphics settings would not alleviate this issue - others have shared these specific symptoms as well, this could help in some cases.

For me it is possible that my Intel drivers need updating as on my system at least there was a massive conflict here that was preventing BF4 from using my system resources properly. Other users have done testing which suggests their GPU is massively underused by the game. There are probably many other possible conflicts on different systems but this worked for me and may do for others with higher end GPUs and clear performance issues.

 

[PCM2]

I uninstalled the Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver and installed the latest version (dated 08/08/2013). Much, much better now. Must've been some strange conflict with the old driver. The gameplay is actually a lot smoother than it was on the Alpha and it obviously looks a lot better (with actual textures!)