Yeah that happens sometimes. Part of the problem is when we left Steam for here after EA, the older convos on that forum were deprecated out. If you had the benefit or reading them you would see there’s a lot of Denuvo territory covered over some time. So some of us smirk a little when we see it because we’ve chased that a bunch of times during exploit season.
It’s always important to test, and it’s valuable feedback. I’ve been there. Welcome, barbarian!
Alright, where to start. First, I suspect Funcom is at least aware of this, but I’ll do my due diligence in reporting.
Per the Steam user, Fampat, who made a post here, there is a possible connection with UE4 Garbage Collection settings causing some of the stuttering that people experience.
What is Garbage Collection? Well if you are interested, you can read about it here., and if you scroll down on this link you can read about the various settings that we see in the DefaultEngine.ini. Essentially though, Garbage Collection helps keep your memory clear as the game runs (from what little I understand anyhow).
Now the interesting tidbit is that, via some light Google research, Garbage Collection and hitching with UE4 in general has been an on going issue in several versions of UE4 now. What that means for Conan Exiles, I have no idea, I’m not a coder, I just know that this is a general problem in UE4 across the board (not sure if it’s been solved in the latest versions of UE4 either.). And no, before you ask, Funcom can’t just update the game engine even if that was a reasonable fix. That would take MONTHS of transition work from the UE4 version that Conan Exiles uses to the latest version. Maybe even a year, not to mention the millions of dollars in costs.
Now for the test, per Fampat on Steam. Before you do this test though, please be aware that I don’t honestly know what disabling this does long term. This should only be done on a test save to be safe, but it’s your call. I only tested this on single player, I don’t know if severs have a similiar option or if it’s client side only.
Navigate to → Steam\steamapps\common\Conan Exiles Client\ConanSandbox\Config\DefaultEngine.ini
Find the section, [/Script/Engine.GarbageCollectionSettings]
Change gc.BlueprintClusteringEnabled=True to gc.BlueprintClusteringEnabled=False
I tested on single player, in a save that has no buildings at all. What I noticed is that in the usual spots I always get the stutter/hitches, I still got them (though they may have been lessoned some). But what I didn’t get was after I ran over the spots again, instead of the consistant hitches in those spots I’ve always gotten (like in Fampart’s sample video of the problem), they didn’t come back.
Edit:
Ignasis response below with additional information:
BY CROM! This is working… like working perfectly! Only tested for a tiny bit on single play and my dedicated server, but I can’t believe how smooth everything is running! I don’t even get an initial glitch at the reliable lag spike places. Smooth as glass.
I am anxious to see what the other side of the coin looks like, with this feature turned off. Will it just blow up on me after a day? Few hours? Base explode? I don’t care. I like the smooth game play right now.
Thank you!!!
Edit: Also, ever try running in admin mode at 1000x speeds with lag spikes? Good luck! But now… I ran the whole map end to end and just flew like a god. Did it to get to my favorite lag zone for testing.
Edit 2: Tested death and opening the wheel of pain. Both of those can cause huge lag spikes normally. Death to death menu is less than a second now. Opening wheel of pain (first time after logging in) was near instant. This is just fantastic.
You know you can just admin teleport yourself right? Turn on admin, and open the map. Ctrl + Right Click where you want to go.
yeah… but that isn’t any fun. I specifically wanted to compare my runs to before the tweak. However, I should add that in dedicated server mode, it still jumps a lot in high speed running mode. The communication between server and client isn’t fast enough to provide a smooth run at that speed.
What I am really hoping to see tomorrow, over a very long day of play, is a lack of strange micro teleportation, when the server and client snap back together on exact location. I don’t think this is a fix for that, but it is entirely possible. My hope is the problem comes from all the accumulated lag spikes and eventually the server has to correct the client on location, thus the micro teleport. If my theory is right, then this would fix it, but most of my guesses on how things work are off the mark by a bit.
I hope that user on steam gets a free DLC or something. That is a huge find. Makes me wonder what Funcom’s coming fix will be and if they are related.
Thanks for the info, good articles and interesting solution. I am going to change that setting and try, hopefully it should work. I sincerely hope this can help me too, that would be the start of a trend, and might be a big light into what causes the issue and if it’s possible to get rid of the annoying stutter.
More testing today. I throttled my power down to simulate a mid range gaming machine and the lag spikes do manifest slightly. They are so small that it is barely noticeable and so far, not repetitive like before this garbage collection tweak. Just seeing them on long runs, so it seems like the loading of new object groups in a region, like an NPC camp
With the garbage fix it works much better most lag spikes are reduced to rubberbanding and very short stutters but its far from smoth and on death i get a fatal error and the game crashes.
But i think its going the right way.
Did get a new error just now. Lost connection to server and this error also popped up:
“Outgoing reliable buffer overflow”
Never had it happen before, so it could be related to the Garbage fix. This is after about 8 hours of online time.
Wouldn’t surprise me. It’s there for a reason, and has to do with cleaning up unused things from memory. I’m not savvy enough with UE4 to know exactly what it does by being disabled. It was more of a, garbage collection features could be a possible connection for some people’s stuttering. UE4 does have a patch note in version 4.21 regarding garbage collection (I was told this on mod discord by a fellow modder) , but I don’t know what the patch note is.
Depending on how much was changed between the versions of what version of UE4 Conan Exiles uses (4.15? Can’t remember), and the newer versions, Funcom might be able to transfer the changed code over, but it’s obviously not a copy and paste sort of situation.
Anyhoo though, I didn’t really intended for the ini tweak to be an actual fix (or expect it to be, bugs are rarely fixed with a simple ini tweak haha), but more of a potential puzzle piece.
Apologies if my last comments were harsh, they were not directed to a single person specifically, but at the whole conversation as a whole. It is a point that keeps getting brought up daily and it usually takes the attention off the initial intention of the topic.
Thank you for bringing up the tweak, @Multigun. I’ll inform our team and see if they can put that information into good use.
I am no tech either Multigun, but it seems to get better performance with those settings. I don’t care if it changes things we’re not supposed to change, it works at least, so it does seem a right direction to look to. I tried with a laptop and definetly things change, spikes still appear and stutter is there, but not as bad as before specially while running the map I’ve notice more “smoothness”.
Playing Singleplayer
I have also tested this fix and it works nicely for me, ive only played for short periods just to test the differences to the GC settings and so far my best performance has been to turn them all to false
Blockquote
[/Script/Engine.GarbageCollectionSettings]
gc.MaxObjectsNotConsideredByGC=42000
gc.SizeOfPermanentObjectPool=8388608
gc.CreateGCClusters=False
gc.MergeGCClusters=False
gc.ActorClusteringEnabled=False
gc.BlueprintClusteringEnabled=False
ive noticed that yes there is death lag but it lasts for about 1 second if that, compared to the usual 3-5 second lag that happens on death.
Im not a coder and i dont really understand the imkjpact of turning the GC off but for now its something for the devs to look into im sure
That would be cool! Took some hours of trial and error 
But as Multigun mentioned, this should not be a fix for all times, its more of a hint for the dev to check for a proper fix on this, maybe a workaround for the time beeing, because it looks to me it has something to do with the U4 engine as this and the rescent updates to it in conjunction with some system-setups. As a note, some of my friends dont experience this issue, others do, so no obvious cause of this issue can be named 
Thanks Multigun!
Gonna try that myself too. How do you even find these fixes? 
…
I will keep a suggestion to myself, as that would probably be improper.
(Having once read that they wanted to use another (their own?) engine at first and canceled that?)
It’s just that the unreal engine seems to not be working too nicely for survival sandboxes?
Or am I completely wrong? 
Fampat, the one who posted above you, is the one who found it. I merely shared what they found (and linked their original post which was on Steam).
Garbage Collection stuff as a whole is fairly complex, so if it is a source of at least some of the stuttering, it doesn’t surprise me. Hopefully a solution can be found either way.
…some are experiencing trees and rocks “spawning” in their base. Why am I not?
Because bugs almost never happen to everyone.
I dont know what exactly causes the issues, but differences in the system will have their part as well as differences in drivers and so on.
Grafics alone will produce a ton of different setups, even if the rest of the machines were the same.
Then CPU, mainboard, biosversion follow.
And then there is still the operating system and its software which gets forced upon the users machine.
This creates a ton of differents setups/builds/whatever the proper name is.
(I am so glad to still be using win 7, at least I can delete updates and hinder them from being installed again if they crash my system.)
By the way:
My first impression was that this fix helps a lot!
Prior I had 60 fps all the time and at some points in the map those dropped below 5 in a split second. This caused teleporting for me. Death took at least 3 seconds to be shown and really rarely it was as bad as me directly going into loading screen.
However.
The current situation looks like I’m up at my usual 60 fps and dropping down to steady 39+ fps.
Still need to die though.
Anyway, great changes!
to Multigun and Fampat! Thanks for sharing!
Some people run their rigs in potato mode and don’t know it, or some people have already acquiesced to the limitations and defeated various load-/draw-heavy video settings. Thanks to the excellent info in this thread, my team of Picts and I are closing in on some commonalities.
Thanks for sharing my post 
You test it ?
Yes I have, although I must admit it took a long time to get any results, because I was one of those who allowed GeForce Experience to take over many months ago. Additionally, on my laptop, it seems a lot of settings can persist in “low end” depending on how you have set your NVIDIA applet, which runs in the System Tray. In other words, I had to be unscientific in order to break it. 
I’ll be testing it on my i3 and i5 tester rigs today, once we’re wrapped up here with TestLive.