Today I logged in after the patch to see if the stuttering problem was at least getting better.

Well, it was! Even in a scenario it was more playable. The stutter was still there, but much reduced to where it used to be, and definitely not a matter of perception. It really seemed better.

In fact Mythic confirmed this:

We have been listening to the Warhammer Community about performance issues players are having while they were in scenarios. While we had the servers down today, we applied a number of fixes designed to improve play in scenarios and make the experience better overall. Our goal is to make scenarios the best possible experience for our players.

Great.

But I had a few suspects. I noticed that the texture usage was noticeably lower, so I was wondering if those fixes were about reduced detail or something like that. Or maybe a better caching. It was odd because the stutter seems reduced even outside the scenarios.

Then a few minutes ago I noticed something: specular lights aren’t being shown anymore.

Specular lights are those shiny effects/glow on the terrain, or the red glimmer on metal items. Well, gone for me.

You know, that explains both the reduced texture usage and stuttering. I just wish Mythic was more honest about this and explained that the increased performance wasn’t due to “fixes”, but removed client features. And at least give us updates about their progress on what is really being done…

Mythic’s engineers should be able to do something more than go in the settings and turn off an option (while also causing the side effect of hardlocking all the graphic settings, which is kind of hilarious).

UPDATE: It seems hardware-based. On my other PC everything is turned on and working properly, while on the first PC I have BOTH lightmaps and specular lights disabled even if they are active in the options.

UPDATE 2: The patch fixed the previous problem, but the stuttering is back as it was.