[Bug] Reproducible frame-pacing spikes at high FPS with ~81 ms slow-frame cadence

[hypervising]

Summary

FiveM reports and displays a high average frame rate, but I noticed motion does not feel consistently smooth.

PresentMon captures show frequent long displayed-frame intervals, even though the average is around 247 FPS uncapped and 198 FPS with a driver-level 200 FPS cap.

The 200 FPS cap noticeably improves frame pacing, but it does not fully resolve the issue. In repeated capped captures, slow frames still occur at a regular interval, with a median spacing of about 81 ms.

These slower frames appear to be caused on the application/CPU side rather than by the GPU. CPU busy time rises to around 10 ms, while active GPU work stays below roughly 2 ms.

Note: The first five seconds of each capture were excluded from the analysis to avoid including the focus transition after starting PresentMon.

Results

Uncapped

Metric	Result
Average displayed FPS	247.44 FPS
Median displayed interval	3.35 ms
95th percentile	10.72 ms (~93 FPS)
99th percentile	15.33 ms (~65 FPS)
Maximum	20.46 ms (~49 FPS)
Displayed intervals above 8.33 ms (120 FPS)	8.21%

Despite averaging approximately 247 FPS, more than 8% of displayed intervals exceeded 8.33 ms, which is the duration of a frame at 120 FPS.

NVIDIA driver cap at 200 FPS

Metric	Result
Average displayed FPS	198.09 FPS
Median displayed interval	4.97 ms
95th percentile	7.61 ms (~131 FPS)
99th percentile	11.41 ms (~88 FPS)
Maximum	18.23 ms (~55 FPS)
Displayed intervals above 8.33 ms (120 FPS)	3.20%

The cap improves frame pacing substantially, but periodic slow frames still remain.

In the capped capture, frames exceeding 8.33 ms had a median spacing of approximately 81 ms. This suggests recurring periodic work rather than isolated random spikes.

CPU and GPU timing

For frames with displayed intervals above 8.33 ms (120 FPS):

Metric	Uncapped	Capped at 200 FPS
Average CPU busy time	10.92 ms	9.90 ms
Average active GPU time	1.52 ms	1.78 ms
Average GPU wait time	9.13 ms	8.33 ms

Issue type

Client

Repro rate

Always

Server build version

FXServer-early-access b90 win32

OS

Windows 11 25H2

CPU

AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D

GPU

NVIDIA RTX 4090

RAM

32GB DDR5

Storage type

SSD NVMe

Connection type

Ethernet

ISP and bandwidth

No response

DxDiag

No response

Network graph

No response

Platform

Windows

OS version / distribution

No response

CPU

No response

RAM

No response

Using txAdmin?

Yes

Hosting provider

None

Machine type

None

/perf endpoint output

No response

DDoS protection

No response

ulimit -n value (Linux only)

No response

Docker Compose file (Docker only)

No response

Steps to Reproduce

1. Launch FiveM for GTA V Enhanced.
2. Join a test server.
3. Remain in a consistent scene and continuously rotate or move the camera.
4. Record GTA5_Enhanced.exe using PresentMon for 60 seconds.
5. Repeat with a 200 FPS per-application limit configured through the NVIDIA app.

.\PresentMon.exe --process_name GTA5_Enhanced.exe --timed 60 --terminate_after_timed --output_file enhanced.csv

Expected Behavior

At 247 fps, camera movement and world motion should appear consistently smooth.

Actual Behavior

FiveM Enhanced reports and displays approximately 247 FPS, but motion feels noticeably less smooth than regular FiveM at a similar frame rate on the same system.

Evidence

enhanced_uncapped.csv
enhanced_cap_200_retest.csv

Additional Context

Server had no extra scripts running besides txadmin.

[hypervising]

Quick follow-up with a CapFrameX comparison between regular FiveM and FiveM Enhanced on the same PC.

This is pretty much exactly what I’ve been feeling in-game:

• Enhanced: 251.9 FPS average, 58.1 FPS 1% low
• Regular FiveM: 331.8 FPS average, 155.6 FPS 1% low

Interestingly, the P95 is actually slightly better on Enhanced:

• Enhanced P95: 489.6 FPS
• Regular FiveM P95: 478.8 FPS

So Enhanced does seem a little more optimized at the very top but it's clearly being dragged down by something. Enhanced is constantly spiking into the 8–20 ms range, while regular FiveM stays much more stable.

So even though Enhanced says 250+ FPS, it really doesn’t feel like 250 FPS at all.

This is especially noticeable at high frame rates and on high-refresh-rate monitors, which matters a lot for the competitive FiveM PvP scene.

I’ve attached both graphs. Would be good if someone from the Cfx team could take a look and let me know what other data would help.

Regular FiveM

Enhanced FiveM

[hypervising]

Update

I spent the afternoon tracing this and the bottleneck appears to be inside GTA Enhanced's audio command queue rather than FiveM itself.

Build 1.0.1158.13 contains two audio producer paths using Sleep(1) when a queue slot is busy, plus another bounded Sleep(1) consumer poll. At high frame rates, those waits consume a surprisingly large part of the frame budget.

I made a build-specific POC that removes those delays:

• Before: ~260 FPS
• After: ~499 FPS
• Frame pacing improved
• Audio still works

Code, notes and A/B video:

https://github.com/hypervising/gta-enhanced-audio-queue-poc