Awkward caching

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Xentinel

n00b
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Nov 17, 2009
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I've recently noticed a lot of strange lag in a lot of games right as the game finishes its load screen. When I move the camera around, it'll stop and skip around a bit, till it seems to have everything loaded, after which it's smooth, untill I move to another area where it needs to load more stuff from disk. I didn't use to have this problem and I was wondering if any of you had any tips to improve the caching in Windows, seeing as it's happening in most games.

I'm using Windows 8 Pro x64

My system specs are as follows:

Q6600 @ 3.2GHz
Asus Maximus II Formula
6GB DDR2 Memory
GF 670 2GB

Lastly, I'm not running out of memory, as that would explain noticeable swapping.
 
What game/program? Have you got a lot of background programs running? You should check with system internal's 'autoruns' - then try disabling them all (be careful not to disable drivers and system processes in autoruns), and if that fixes it, enable them one by one to determine which one might be a problem, then find alternatives if possible. And also, are you using the newest NVidia drivers?
 
Most modern games I'd say, Arkham City has a lot of it in DX11 mode giving me a horrible minimum fps since it constantly streams in new stuff, it's not as bad in DX9 mode.

StarCraft 2 does it too, a place where I can reproduce it every time, is the bar fight cinematic (it uses the game engine for it) It starts with the loading of a record in a jukebox, and just when the camera is about to switch away from the jukebox, it hangs for about 2 seconds (audio keeps playing). If I run the cinematic again during the same session, it runs flawlessly, but every new session yields the same lag.

It seems to me like it doesn't bother to load what it's supposed to, but I have no idea what could be causing this.

I do have a few background programs running, but I've been monitoring them and they're not taking up a lot of disk or CPU time.

I am using the latest WHQL drivers from nVidia
 
I don't think this is related, but I can't think of anything else, so you may want to try DPC Latency Checker, and see if your latency is ok. A bad driver, or background program, may be lagging the system all the time, or at intervals. Another thing you can do, is run Process Monitor, to determine if something is making a lot of disk/registry accesses. There is a guide in my sig about reducing latency, but it's kinda for people who are hardcore into that stuff, you may want to try some of the things in there though. But again, I don't even know if latency is the issue.
 
What sort of drive are these things loaded on? Could be symptoms of a dying storage device.
 
Windows is installed on a Corsair F120 SSD, and my games are installed on a Samsung F3 1TB HDD.

I'm going to check out that DPC Latency checker and your guide and then check back.
 
Are you running any hardware monitoring programs like HWMonitor? I have noticed during heavy I/O load scenarios when I am doing a video encode project or simply recording with FRAPS at max quality that HWmonitor (specifically this program) poll of the HD status causes a disruption in the data stream enough to jar the render. Just a shot in the dark. :0)
 
Ok, I have a lot of new info on this. I tried the DPC stuff, and it was around 1000µs latency, I did most of the tweaks except turning off power saving stuff in bios, I did however see it drop really low when running wprime in the background, but all in all I don't think the DPC latency is the real problem.

I just upgraded my motherboard, CPU and RAM from the specs in the original post to:

3770K @ 4.6GHz
Asus P8Z77-V Deluxe
16 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1866MHz

The GTX 670 in my system is also quite new, before, I had a GTX 275, but the problem was there, even then.

I've also tested the issue with all background programs closed, and I even did a quick reinstall of Windows 8 on a completely different harddrive, to make sure my installation wasn't at fault.

From the time at which this problem started occuring and till today, I've pretty much upgraded my entire system, the only things that have remained are my storage drives, but I've tested running from my SSD, my usual game harddrive, a completely different harddrive, and even a USB stick, and none of it has made a lick of difference.

I'm starting to think this is just the way it's meant to be, but that seem to me like a very unsatisfactory answer, so to test this I was wondering if anyone who has StarCraft 2 could test out the bar fight scene (details in post #3)
 
I have the system in my sig, which is significantly slower and don't have this issue.. maybe your issue has something to do with Windows 8?
 
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DX11 in Arkham city had significant issues like that, often dropping to 0fps for a few seconds.
 
Tawnos said:
DX11 in Arkham city had significant issues like that, often dropping to 0fps for a few seconds.
Click to expand...

Yes I noticed yesterday that there's a thread on this forum about Arkham City, wherein numerous people are experiencing the same as I using DX11, I even found a youtube video illustrating exactly the kind of stuttering I'm seeing. So I guess the game itself is simply to blame.

But that still doesn't explain why that SC2 cutscene has a hiccup, but I guess it could also be jotted down to poor programming.
 
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