What are the problems people are having with dual core and games?

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rbarr110

Limp Gawd
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Jan 8, 2003
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I recently upgraded to an 4200+ X2 and a 7800 GT card with a clean install of WinXp SP2. I play BF2 and a little WOW, I really haven't had any [roblems with WOW and occaisionally get some audio and video stuttering when the BF2 maps finish loading and launch into a game. But the stuttering dissapears after 30-40 seconds of playing.

Are any of these "problems" what the stickied post helps fix? I have not applied any hotfixes or patches that I am aware of, I have my automatic updates turned off so I don't think any thing by MS has been installed automatically.

Thanks
 
no problems at all just make sure and download the amd x2 cpu driver and the windows dual core patch. btw if you look at the top thread there is a full article about how to and what to do written by hardocp :) its a 5 min operation and simple
 
I did look at the top thread and that is prompting my questions, I haven't really had any significant problems, but was wondering if I really want to apply patches and "fixes" if I haven't had much problem.

That top stickied post "Dual Core Gaming Fix Guide" implies there are problems and I wanted to know what the "problems" people are having, so I can compare them to my little annoyances to see if it will fix my small gaming issues.

RIght now my system isn't "broken", like I said small annoyances that I can live with, but if it will fix it I will try it, otherwise, if it aint broke - dont fix it.
 
I did the hotfix and patch before gaming just to be safe, so I can't really tell you if they helped or not. But I don't have any problems and never have had any. I'd install the hotfix and patch just to cover the bases. :)
 
I have a gig (2x512) of corsair pc3200 (not the stuff with the lights, just a silver heat spreader).
 
Vengance_01 said:
The stuttering in BF2 is caused by you not gaving 2GB of ram
Click to expand...

I would have to disagree, in my previous system with the same exact ram, the stuttering I have now did not happen. I ran the game with a slower processor and slower graphics card and the current stuttering of audio and the first 30-40 seconds of game play did not happen ever.

I did have in game lag when there was alot going on, half the reason for the upgrade, which I dont have anymore with the new setup.

I am pretty sure the "more ram" solution everyone seems to think is needed, isn't. Especially since it didnt happen before.
 
I had problems with stuttering after like 10 min of play in NFSMW and i simply set the affinity to one processor. Same with Warcraft 3.
 
rbarr110 said:
I did look at the top thread and that is prompting my questions, I haven't really had any significant problems, but was wondering if I really want to apply patches and "fixes" if I haven't had much problem.

That top stickied post "Dual Core Gaming Fix Guide" implies there are problems and I wanted to know what the "problems" people are having, so I can compare them to my little annoyances to see if it will fix my small gaming issues.

RIght now my system isn't "broken", like I said small annoyances that I can live with, but if it will fix it I will try it, otherwise, if it aint broke - dont fix it.
Click to expand...

The "problems" I've seen are that games run either very fast (unplayable) or very slow (also unplayable). These are caused by power management issues with WinXP and the AMD dual core CPU's. The hotfix and the /usepmtimer switch added in the AMD X2 driver address power management issues and thus fix the stuttering problems. These problems are not ones that will go away after 30-40 seconds. They persist throughout the whole gaming experience.
 
Only problem I personally had was AFTER I loaded the dual core driver and turned on CnQ the system ran a little buggy and stutterred. When I unloaded the hotfix and turned CnQ back off the system ran great again.
 
With very minor setup (MS patch and SP2) there are NO issues...other than having a great, smooth gameplay experience.....plus the added benefit of killer video/audio encoding speed and being able to do other things at the same time....plus NV having multithreaded drivers that DO indeed give a small but FREE speed boost to ALL games...


Except for $$$ concerns, there is absolutely no reason to go with a single core instead of a dual core....
 
TheRapture said:
Except for $$$ concerns, there is absolutely no reason to go with a single core instead of a dual core....
Click to expand...

I agree here ;).
 
Well I'll have to eat my words.....

I put in an extra gig of ram for a total of 2 gigs and that audio and video stutter for the first 30-40 seconds is gone.

Thanks for the input even though I didn't believe it.
 
rbarr110 said:
Well I'll have to eat my words.....

I put in an extra gig of ram for a total of 2 gigs and that audio and video stutter for the first 30-40 seconds is gone.

Thanks for the input even though I didn't believe it.
Click to expand...

I'll have to add that to the Dual Core Gaming Fix Guide :D.
 
PerfectCr said:
I guess the sticky was too hard to spot?
Click to expand...

I guess reading the thread's contents, not just it's title, was a little too goddamn difficult?

I've not had any problems with my dual-core rig. Source-based games, World of Warcraft, Warcraft 3, Farcry, and even StarCraft have all run without issue for me, with no tweaking or installation of x2 drivers. Just installed XP, my drivers, and rolled with it like I would on a single core.

And the 2GB upgrade made the difference for a pal of mine with an x2 as well, although I'd imagine it's the same on a single core.
 
Well to be honest I was and still am very suprised with power of a X2.

Also for in game preformance.

It gives me more preformance overall. I doo not need to stop playing if I need to doo something else to.


On other hand I'm bit getting pissed off that I need to stop some game just to sett it's process to work just with one core.
Also some drivers are acting crazy and I'm bit tiered of waiting that hardware vendor writes ne driver that suports X2. Well I have USB 2.0 wireless G adapter with 6 db panel antenna. It's crusial part for my I-net connection. Better wireless less lag better gameplay.
From moment I've got X2 it started behave as pain in the ass. It crashess whole PC sometimes. BSOD.

Then new version came and driver is pretty cool but it's utility crashes PC :(
Now I use driver of 2,1 version and utility of a 2,0 version and still sometimes (once in few days) it makes BSOD.

Simply XP decides that something should run in both cores and it makes it runing in both cores. PRogramm not writen for it is going to crash.

Like friend of mine uses Norman anti virus and it crashes His X2 rig :(


Affter all patchess and all stuff some things are still pain in the ass.


I'm seriously getting anoied to a point to gett or some other single core 1MB L2 A64 SPU or even upgrade my Intel PC to a gaming rig.


I mean You pay premium money and then You need to doo work and wait longer to be able to play a game? Work that somone with much cheeper CPU don't need to doo!!??


MD
 
ElektronikSeraph said:
I guess reading the thread's contents, not just it's title, was a little too goddamn difficult?
Click to expand...


Is that directed at me?

I didn't see my specific problem in the stickied post. I read about 10-11 pages into the thread and my questions regarding the problems with the games still wasn't made clear in those pages (at least to my SPECIFIC problem). I applied some of the fixes and it didn't help my particular problem.

Pretty rude comment when all I am asking is for a little input.
 
Half-Life 2 took some time to get used to the idea of an X2 with minor stuttering. Now it's fine.

All I did was install Windows, get all the updates, and then install the latest nvidia drivers. I really haven't had any issues at all. Perhaps things are getting better?
 
SKy042 said:
Only problem I personally had was AFTER I loaded the dual core driver and turned on CnQ the system ran a little buggy and stutterred. When I unloaded the hotfix and turned CnQ back off the system ran great again.
Click to expand...
Yep, I haven't had any problems so far with the dual core. If it isn't broke, don't fix it.

And as for the BF2 stuttering - I've never had any and I only have 512mb.
 
rbarr110 said:
Well I'll have to eat my words.....

I put in an extra gig of ram for a total of 2 gigs and that audio and video stutter for the first 30-40 seconds is gone.

Thanks for the input even though I didn't believe it.
Click to expand...

The high quality graphics require alot of system ram.

Had the same problem with i got my 7800GT before i dropped in 512mb i had kicking around.
 
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And as for the BF2 stuttering - I've never had any and I only have 512mb.
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Looks like you have 1gig to me??? :rolleyes:
 
I had lots of stuttering with my X2, and I had 2GB of RAM as well.
I tried the sticky thread/patch, but that didn't help. Eventually I just set the processor affinity for all the games that were having problems.
 
TheRapture said:
Except for $$$ concerns, there is absolutely no reason to go with a single core instead of a dual core....
Click to expand...
I have to disagree. Dual core give so little benifit right now there is nothing wrong with going single core. There's only a few types of users I encourage to go dual core: Video editing folks and HEAVY Photoshop users.

And to answer the OP - well it all depends on your hardware and the games you play. I had the "Benny Hill" effect with the new Need For Speed game before applying the fixes. I still MUST set affinity to a single core when I play DOD:Source as otherwise the game will freeze with a repeating sound after 10-15 minutes. (never had any issues with Steam/Source before going dual core. I've tried everything under the sun to fix it including underclocking hardware, changing sound card, driver versions, reinstalls, etc.)
 
seanmcd said:
I have to disagree. Dual core give so little benifit right now there is nothing wrong with going single core. There's only a few types of users I encourage to go dual core: Video editing folks and HEAVY Photoshop users.

And to answer the OP - well it all depends on your hardware and the games you play. I had the "Benny Hill" effect with the new Need For Speed game before applying the fixes. I still MUST set affinity to a single core when I play DOD:Source as otherwise the game will freeze with a repeating sound after 10-15 minutes. (never had any issues with Steam/Source before going dual core. I've tried everything under the sun to fix it including underclocking hardware, changing sound card, driver versions, reinstalls, etc.)
Click to expand...

DOD:S runs perfectly here. :confused:
 
/rant on

People get by with 512 or a GB of RAM with BF2 but they do it becuase they dont have the settings cranked. They buy a 7800 or a X1800 card so they can be U3bR |_33t and the FIRST thing they do is crank up all the video settings to high. Then the game wants about 1.7 GB of ram, they didnt go and change the swap file size either, so it stutters. They blame everything but themselves.

Seriously - do you people know how many "I got a xxxxx video card and now BF2 stutters" threads there are across the net? Tens of thousands. All you have to do is get on a 64 player server LIVE in game with your current video settings, alt-tab-del out of the game, and check your task mangler. It does not lie. Then restart the game, set your sliders on high, and check after your 15 minutes of map loading is over how much it takes then.

"mystery" solved. It really aint hard. Your computer is trying really hard to tell you what it is, but it dont mean nothing if you wont LOOK for it.

/rant off
 
And I still say it's up for grabs on whats going on. I'm very happy with the processor I've selected, and gaming runs great. While a single core may be a better option for some folks, I refuse to disuade people from following an dual-core route from my experience. Especially as time goes onward and the technology adapts.
 
zero problems on any games - only game I have to set affinity to one core is Chronicles of riddick (after that not even a hiccup). As for weather dual core is the best for gaming, the 4800 is cheaper than a FX-57 and will beat it in some games.
 
Vengance_01 said:
The stuttering in BF2 is caused by you not gaving 2GB of ram
Click to expand...


Agreed, all of the problems I experienced I falsely attributed to dual core. I added another gb of ram and problems mysteriously vanished... ;)
 
http://www.elitebastards.com/page.php?pageid=13241

From our testing here, the biggest cause of concern is the seeming incompatibility between the dual-core enhancements to NVIDIA's video card drivers and the improvements made to these game titles themselves - In Quake 4, with both NVIDIA's and the games dual-core enhancements turned on, there is a very large drop in performance, leaving you with an either/or situation as to which you have enabled. Obviously, this isn't a particularly satisfactory state of affairs, and is something that can hopefully be resolved as time goes on. Nobody is going to want to spend their time hacking through the registry depending on whether or not the game utilises multi-threading, so hopefully NVIDIA or the game developers will take some time to work out what's going wrong here and prevent it from happening in the future. At present I haven't repeated these tests using an ATI board and drivers, but will look into doing so to see if the recent CATALYST drivers with dual-core optimisations present the same kind of issues as we've seen here.
 
GREAT news... :mad: ;) So if I want to use the games built in ability to utilize more than one thread, I have to run old NV drivers that DON'T multithread.....and suffer less speed in the other 5 games I play....nah, I think I will leave it alone for now....sounds more like a developer/programming issue with the game more than anything else...they need to code it right.

NV's multithreaded drivers are working wonderfully...
 
seanmcd said:
I still MUST set affinity to a single core when I play DOD:Source as otherwise the game will freeze with a repeating sound after 10-15 minutes. (never had any issues with Steam/Source before going dual core. I've tried everything under the sun to fix it including underclocking hardware, changing sound card, driver versions, reinstalls, etc.)
Click to expand...

You sir just described my experiance with DOD:S in a nutshell, but setting affinity does not solve my problem... did you also apply the hotfix and amd driver??? I want to play dod:s too dammit.

-Shawn
 
seachus said:
You sir just described my experiance with DOD:S in a nutshell, but setting affinity does not solve my problem... did you also apply the hotfix and amd driver??? I want to play dod:s too dammit.

-Shawn
Click to expand...
I pm'd you - too long to put here and would hijack the thread
 
Well the only problems you can get with dual core, is that some older games, that dont take advantage of dual cores, will have the benny hill effect. pretty much the computer runs the game at a faster rate then the game cna respond and you get alot of stuttering, and really unplayable.

I just built the system in my sig, and had no problems with CS:S and NFS:MW.

Didn't install any of the hotfix or the amd driver. It really is a thing of the past, only effecting older games.

I did get teh Punisher game, so i will be checking things out.
 
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