Frame presentation is very erratic on Intel Xe-HP graphics under Windows

[djmrFunnyMan]

Bug Description

The following applies to default RAL of 3

On my Intel B580 the gameplay will look super jittery if the FPS is "low" and the framerate is uncapped. This pairs terribly with shaders which have a frame rate varying from 40 to 120 fps based on the scene (yes really) and if I wanted to avoid this issue I'd need to lock my FPS to 40.

You can see here the recording looks super jittery at 100fps, setting a 60 fps makes the game feel much smoother despite the framerate decrease.

sodium.mp4

The issue doesn't seem to be frametime spikes either. I mean the frametime graph isn't a clean line but it's not all over the place either.

Reproduction Steps

Have an Intel Arc GPU. The exact same model would be nice (B580 Battlemage)
By default the framerate in minecraft with sodium will be several hundred FPS even at 32 RD which will make the issue hardly visible.
To see the issue I recommend setting up a laggy superflat world to bring it down to the 100fps range (or just use shaders with Iris which is how I ran into the issue)

Severity level by RAL setting (my subjective experience)

• 0: 7 /10
• 1: 10/10
• 2: 10/10
• 3: 9 /10
• 4-9: 5 /10

Log File

latest.log

Crash Report

crash-2025-02-04_02.34.46-client.txt

[djmrFunnyMan]

Oh and yes this doesn't affect vanilla nor fabric without sodium

[vogon-poetry]

does increasing the Render Ahead Limit to 4+ change anything? I've seen on some Intel GPUs, the default value of 3 frames is not enough.

[djmrFunnyMan]

Changing RAL to 4 indeed resolved 99% of the stutter. I set it to 5 because it feels marginally better but that might just be placebo.

I still feel like this issue should remain open. Maybe Intel Arc GPU's could be detected and the RAL raised to 4 automatically

[jellysquid3]

This is likely a problem with the presentation layer in Xe-HP's driver. Can you see if the problem still occurs if you something like Special-K to replace the swapchain presentation method?

[djmrFunnyMan]

I'm sorry but I have no idea how to do that. I installed Special-K but the second it injects into minecraft it crashes the JVM

[djmrFunnyMan]

After playing for a bit I came to the conclusion that raising the RAL to 4+ doesn't solve the issue as well as I thought at first. It merely makes it go from abysmal to just bad.