Performance Issues

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ritch1

Weaksauce
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Sep 1, 2005
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112
I posted on here a couple of days ago asking if I had enough juice in my pc to maximise the use of a new card, as my system is an ancient 18 months old lol. I have a quad Q9550 clocked at 3.80Ghz with 3GB of ram running at 800Mgz and run my games at 1680 x 1050, i’d like to use 1900 x 1200 ideally as that is my lcds native res. A few helpful replies convinced me i was ok.

Anyway i went ahead and got a 6870. I have noticed a boost in performance but its not as silky smooth as i hoped to be honest. Im not sure if its me expecting too much from a mid range card or a have a bottle neck slowing things down. The strange thing is that fraps reports decent frame rate figures, up in the hundreds in most cases but gameplay still seems a bit sluggish with some noticeable slowdown.

I been trying out games like COD 4 and Battlefield Bad Company 2. Even Left 4 Dead seemed a bit sluggish. They are playable but the sluggishness and lag does notice. I tried V sync with double and triple buffering as well to see if that smoothes things out a bit. In left 4 Dead V sync kills the gameplay.

So basically i’m not getting the performance i hoped for. I guess my question is am i asking too much for a card in this price range so give me silky game play, or is there something else causing it, like i said, fraps is reporting decent frame rates, are those high figures misleading? Should i have aimed at a higher performance card? I have obviously played with all the setting, AA anf AF ect, but even low set ups seem laggy. I was surprise by COD 4 MF 1 performance as its pretty old.
 
To narrow down the problems a bit, could you turn off AA and AF, all filtering. Keep all the texture settings at the highest. Let us know if there is still a laggy feeling, there may be something else wrong.

If everything is with FRAPS reporting fps in the 100s, could you post your mouse and keyboard, monitor brand and model, internet ISP if applicable?

Thanks
 
thanks for the reply. yep is still feels a bit laggy with AF and AA off. the best way i can explain it is if i'm going round a corner of a building it stutters like its catching up with itsself rather than looking smooth. i get this in most areas, its playable but it annoys me as im becoming sensitive to it. at times its fine but if an area has a bit of stuff going on or effects it lags, but fraps doesnt report it, even in benchmark tests. My mouse is a logitech G5, keyboard is also a logitech, but like i say, sometimes its is nice and smooth so not sure its that.

edit: - oh and all texture settings were high, COD4 was pretty bad with texures maxed out. my monitor is a Hanns-G 28 inch. i dont play online, only L4D

thanks
 
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Try turning double, triple buffering off, vsync off, and frames buffer to 1 or 0 if you can find that option - I can't find it in my control panel now for some reason.

Storing frames before displaying them will definitely feel like lag, I've tried it before.
 
I turned off v sync in games that survive without but it looks so bad if i dont use it in battlefield. it helped a bit when i cut down on some system stuff. I think a lot of it is me being fussy, my eyes are so sensitive to laggyness but the games are playable, COD is still bad though. The card doesnt seem as powerful as i expected either, if i enable AA or AF on low settings performance takes a pretty big dip

do you think the driver is an issue as well? they obviously not sorted out the 6870 properly software wise which is pretty bad. I does make me wonder about gettign a higher end nvidia, i have had better experiences with those cards. the last couple have been ati and the driver thing is irritating.

anyway, ill carry on doing a bit of tweaking as i few things i have tried have helped, L4D is performing very well now bit disappointed i hant put the shader quality about medium without laggyness occuring.

edit: i couldnt find a frame buffer setting either, does anyone know much about this and how to change the setting?

thanks
 
Honestly, that video card should be able to bend L4D over and do naughty, naughty things to it, so it's extremely weird that it's laggy.

What driver do you have installed? What hard drive and power supply do you have?
 
Yeah, something's definitely up. I have a slower card and CPU than you, and I have no issues in any of those games. Have you run any benchmarking apps to see if your system measures up to where it should? Smells like a driver issue and/or something else in your system is hosing the works.
 
I bought a 460 gtx for my rig (in sig) to keep it going for a while longer, but after a couple of days of trouble I had to return it. Besides a constant problematic DPC latency of 4k+, I also had the same problem with "stutter" that you are having. It was strange, because the new card clearly had no problem running at max video settings, but no matter which setting and constant high fps it would always feel choppy.
In some games, like L4D2, it would run almost perfectly but others, like TF2, were totally unplayable (a ping of 30 would feel like 1000).
Im getting a 6850 when I can afford it (sent the 460gtx back mainly because it has driver related DPC issues with older intel chipsets). Also, Im currently using an old (5 years+) Apevia Aspire 520w psu - Im considering getting a TX650 to replace it, to see if it might be related to the stutters. Its a long shot, and if it fixes it thats cool, if it doesnt I'll need it anyway for when I upgrade my rig to sandy bridge
 
Try an extra gig of ram, or an ssd, that cpu and video card should be plenty. Also while troubleshooting, disable EIST/Speedstep, sometimes they can take a few milliseconds to catch up to the application load and cause similar issues.

Edit: And if you have a readyboost usb drive installed, remove it. Readyboost caused pretty much exactly the described stuttering/slowdown but with high reported framerates issue on my system.
 
thanks for the tips guys. after a bit of tweaking, turning down windows stuff performace has improved a little. L4D is seamless but on medium shader setting, anything above that and its laggy. Bioshck 2 performs great, all settings at 1900 x 1200 is smooth, no slow down at all, even in busy areas.

COD and bad company 2 are still pretty bad though, to the point i cant play them. they are playable but the little slowdowns irritate the hell out of me

im not sure its a system problem as other games perform great. it might be those games reaction to my set up or the lacking 6870 drivers. the card might not be able to give me the settings i'm asking for either, any attempt to use high texture setting and AF AA kills it.

im tempted to go balls out and get a GTX 580.

thanks
 
If you are very sensitive to stutter no current high end ATI card is your friend.
 
your cpu might be throttling, bring it down to 3.4ghz(1.25v), which is 1600fsb in your bios.
 
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Here are some results from 3D Mark 06. I’m no expert so don’t know how these results relate newer games. I’m assuming this is an ok score, im not sure why it just did 2 cpu tests on a quad, is that me being dum? things seemed to be running nicely though. Just dont get why it struggles to get smooth performance in COD 4 and Bad Company 2. one other question, would i be better off installing games on a different drive, or even a different partition to the system drive?

1920 x 1200 scores

3dmark score = 19829

sm2.0 score = 7970

HDR sm3.0 score = 8893

Cpu score = 5938

GT1 - Return To Proxycon 64.811 FPS
GT2 - Firefly Forest 68.015 FPS
CPU1 - Red Valley 2.022 FPS
CPU2 - Red Valley 2.790 FPS
HDR1 - Canyon Flight 92.995 FPS
HDR2 - Deep Freeze 84.870 FPS

Edit: - the cpu overclock on my Q9550 to 3.80 seems to have a pretty big effect, i brought it down to 3.60 and the overall score went down to 19198 from 19829 and the frames were down by an average of 5 or 6 FPS. so might try and see how high I can get the CPU to go, never tried abouve 3.80 so need to research some cooling + voltage tips!
 
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