I love my PC but troubleshooting problems on it drives me mad and makes me sympathize with console folk that can't be bothered with it. It's even worse because I've had some nasty problems that needed very specific solutions, even down to downloading shady executables or modifying files I didn't even know existed. In this case, it wasn't even that, it just came down to terrible assumptions on my part and bad troubleshooting. So here's what happened:
I randomly decided to launch Kingdoms of Amalur, (something I haven't played in forever) just because. After a few minutes of playing, it would stutter, audio began to cut and shriek and performance dropped to unplayable levels. I spent 2 hours on this shit: I google the issues, but I get the standard 2 year old responses of trying different drivers, set core affinity, turn off antivirues, etc. but nothing that would seem like a solution, or that even describes my problem accurately. Of course this never happened before, and it's an old game a toaster can run maxed, so I began to freak out: "oh god, did my HDD decided to die today?" Nope. Other games work fine. Well it still could be bad sectors or something, so I move it to my SSD (thankfully, Origin is actually easy and good about this sort of thing) but the problem remains.
Maybe it's the audio drivers considering the audio freaks out, but other games sound and perform fine. Yea, fuck that. I'm not downloading 20 driver versions and trying them one by one. Maybe the install became corrupt... but why, I haven't launched or changed anything in the game for a year. Fresh reinstall is 10GB, so I'll leave that for last. Maybe it's the NVIDIA drivers instead? Ugh, I don't want to roll back a million of those either. Google some more, but there's nothing specific to new drivers or programs as a problem. I guess I could try fiddling with at least my default settings: turn off forced Triple Buffering, nope. Turn off forced AF, nope. Vsync, nope. OK, what other things have changed in my PC since I last played? A shit load of installed programs, but what could specifically fuck KoA over? Agggggggghhhhhhhhhhhh...
OK, what about new hardware? I don't even remember if I had this video card back then. I have a couple of new HDDs but I don't see how that could be the problem and I already moved the game, and I'm not taking my other HDD out just for this fucking game I didn't even want to play... I guess I also got a new mouse? But how the fuck would the mouse cause issues? I don't have my old one to try anyway...
...so finally...
..,OK, I guess this is new hardware too, maybe if I unplug it and launch the game... fuck me! It was that? How the fuck?
So what was it? The XBONE Controller, that so far has worked flawlessly in every single game I've tried causes this issue in this game alone. Worst part is that there is actually a thread on this on the Steam forums, but I didn't even think of checking there because I never bought that version. (I agree that was dumb of me). Ugh.
Maybe I'm shit at googling for known issues, but fuck me. I was going insane. Well, I guess it's "fixed" now. Pffff. That was a good time, wasn't it? Now to shut down Origin, cause I didn't even want to play the game in the first place.
...
Sorry for venting here
