arizonachris wrote:I'm very familiar with rubber banding related to playing an online game with a high ping server. it's like walking forward, then all of a sudden you are 5 steps back, walking forward again. Like a rubber band knocked you back as you walked/ drove/ flew into it. But that's a high ping server issue. I have not seen any rubber banding with my PC and RW. Just that darn stutter when the game reads from the hard drive. Not much to do about that, even the high speed (EXPENSIVE!!!!!!!) SSD drives don't help a lot.
I recall SMMDigital was similarly lukewarm about the impact of SSDs on this game, but after recently swapping my WD Green for an SSD, test results showed very significant reductions in stuttering, and this was consistent with my subjective experience. The tests were done a month ago but so far I haven't been motivated to post the results charts. There'd probably be less benefit swapping a 7200 RPM drive for an SSD, but nevertheless, the tests supported the theory that much of RW3's stuttering is related to its demands on the hard disk during play.
Re rubber-banding, I concur that's a distinct phenomenon from basic stuttering. A stutter would be when the simulation appears to pause for a moment before continuing where it left off. Rubber-banding would be when it pauses, then seems to go back in time slightly before continuing - I'm not up to speed on the mechanism is for this in modern games but I'm familiar with it from my dial-up days when prediction algorithms were first introduced in online first person shooters like QuakeWorld. To make play smoother, the client would (accurately, for the most part) predict your character's position without waiting for feedback from the server, but if the server was too lagged and the prediction was off, you'd "rubber band" back to an earlier position. I haven't observed any rubber banding in RW3 on my system.
Come to think of it, I may have experienced "forward" rubber-banding (momentary pause then lurch forward) in RW3 though.