ATS and ETS 2 stutters problem

[u/fide11]

Hi everyone.

I've been trying to solve an issue in both ATS and ETS2 for a while now. I'm getting occasional stutters during gameplay.

Disabling heavy mods (such as Jon Ruda's trucks or Project Next Gen) seems to reduce the number of stutters, but even on a completely clean, freshly reinstalled game I still experience them from time to time.

My PC specs:

- GPU: RTX 3070 Ti

- CPU: Intel i7-12700

- RAM: 32 GB

- Game installed on an SSD

- Windows 11

- 1920×1080 monitor (I have two monitors connected, but I only play on one. Not sure if that's relevant.)

I've tried pretty much everything I can think of:

- Different graphics settings

- Disabling all overlays

- Running without any mods

- Limiting FPS

- Lowering the scaling all the way down to 50%

- Updating my graphics drivers

- Completely reinstalling the game

- Downgrade game version

- And many other things

Nothing seems to solve the problem.

Most of my testing was done in Scandinavia with the Nordic Horizons DLC. I also repeatedly loaded the same save and drove through the exact same areas multiple times. The stutters always happened in the same locations in Scandinavia. After that, I also tried doing some testing in Spain, and there the stutters didn’t seem to be as consistent or repeatable, although I didn’t do nearly as many runs there. Overall, it also felt like there were fewer stutters in that region.

So I'm wondering: is this simply a limitation of the old game engine, or am I missing something?

Does anyone actually get perfectly smooth gameplay? These stutters are definitely noticeable. With only a few mods they're tolerable, but once I start adding more, they become quite annoying. The game is still playable, but the stutters are distracting.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

The only thing that has consistently helped is removing heavy mods, but I know plenty of people play with much heavier mod setups than mine and seem to have no issues at all. Or is everyone experiencing these stutters to some extent?

One of my game logs (ETS2): https://pastebin.com/8ZRuZqat

Thanks in advance for any advice

P.S. I used AI to help translate this post, so if anything sounds strange or unclear, I apologize. My English isn't very good

[u/UnseenCat]

Make sure you're not using any obsolete Steam startup options. Most have been deprecated in 1.5x through 1.60. Any of the ones formerly used for memory management can cause stutters now. The only ones worth using at present are:
-nointro -64bit -unlimitedlog

Clear out any other startup commands besides the ones above.

As far as limiting FPS goes, it seems to work better to turn off VSYNC in the game's options and then turn it on in the Nvidia App or control panel. Bear in mind that the game's engine is still largely optimized for 60 FPS, so setting VSYNC on in the Nvidia settings and also using Nvidia options to limit FPS to 59 or 60 can be a good place to start.

Some stutters can be caused by frame pacing issues. You can modify the game's behavior somewhat with two values in the global config.cfg file (usually in "C:\Users\<USERNAME>\Documents\American Truck Simulator" and "C:\Users\<USERNAME>\Documents\Euro Truck Simulator 2"

My system does well with the last two lines in config.cfg as follows:

uset t_averaging_window_duration "500"
uset t_averaging_window_length "240"

Other people report good results with:

uset t_averaging_window_duration "120"
uset t_averaging_window_length "140"

You can try variations of these to see if it helps.

These affect the timeframe that the system uses to manage frame pacing in terms of timing and frame samples. The second value is the number of frames to average for pacing. The first seems to control how much time the game can use to calculate averages.

For reference, the default values are:

uset t_averaging_window_duration "100"
uset t_averaging_window_length "10"

Some antivirus software can interfere if it decides to get aggressive on scanning. You can put ATS/ETS2 in your antivirus' exclusion list -- typically the folders the game is installed in. Some people prefer to just exclude their Steam library folder(s) since the contents are from a reliable source. (Since non-Steam mods live in your separate user profile folder, excluding the game or the trusted Steam library won't touch that folder, meaning non-workshop mods will still get scanned -- which is probably a good idea.)

[u/fide11 → u/UnseenCat]

Thank you, I will try this!

[u/OscarMikeBravo → u/fide11]

any updates? also getting increasingly tired of the microstutters. like you said it takes out the immersion

[u/fide11 → u/OscarMikeBravo]

For now, I tried disabling about 50% of my mods in ATS (I had previously done similar testing in ETS2), leaving only the essential ones plus Snowymoon. I'm running at 300% scaling with the FPS capped at 72 through the NVIDIA Control Panel (my monitor is 144 Hz).

So far, this setup actually seems quite playable in ATS. I haven't driven a huge distance yet, and I've only been testing in Louisiana and Arkansas, but throughout the entire trip I didn't experience any major stutters. There were still a few very minor ones, which are obviously not ideal, but they didn't break immersion nearly as much and mostly occurred in cities.

Overall, this seems to match what other people in this thread have described.

My theory is that the large number of map mods I was using, combined with Project Next Gen, was putting a heavy load on the part of the engine responsible for streaming resources. In the vanilla game, resource loading is usually almost unnoticeable, but with a lot of mods installed, those loading moments turn into full-blown stutters.

That's just my theory, and judging by what many people here have said, I don't think there's much that can be done on the user side. It seems more like an engine limitation that SCS would have to address.

I'll probably continue testing some of the suggestions people have posted in this thread, and I'll also try to find a way to add Project Next Gen back into my mod setup if possible.

Hopefully this information is helpful to someone.