Stutter in games

C

Calamarth

n00b
Joined
Feb 22, 2007
Messages
26
Hey guys. Got an issue with my rig; in any game, like WoW or Far Cry 2, whenever I turn abruptly, I get a stutter. This is extremely annoying, and unacceptable for my kind of rig.
I noticed that when it stutters, the HDD led flashes, so I'm guessing it comes whenever the graphics card is loading textures from the HDD.
Other than that, I have no idea what the exact problem could be; is it the HDD itself, the GPU, CPU, drivers? Any help would be highly appreciated.

Speccs are:

Asus Maximus II Formula
Asus Radeon HD 4870X2
Intel C2Q Q9650, OC to 3,2GHz
Corsair Dominator DDR2 RAM 8GB, 1066MHz
Two WD Caviar Black 1TB in raid0
 
huh...what is ur version of ATI driver?

and try on different HDD see if that helps..

I haven't encounter any stuttering in any game beside Warhead in DX9.
 
Any and every time i had a stutter problem whether it be in game or out, it was always the HDD. I remember when i got my first western dig drive on my old rig and installed windows and a few games when I noticed this annoying ass stutter. It would happen like every 4 seconds in game when i was moving around, game would stutter, like it was skipping a few frames and then it would be back to normal. Shit infuriated me until i found out my drive had bad blocks.
 
well since you have the drives in Raid 0 i wouldnt suspect the hard drives to be the issue. Ram is also sufficient enough to have no problem with the textures, so most likely i would believe what your experiencing is tearing. Do you run your games with vsync on?
 
Calamarth said:
Hey guys. Got an issue with my rig; in any game, like WoW or Far Cry 2, whenever I turn abruptly, I get a stutter. This is extremely annoying, and unacceptable for my kind of rig.
I noticed that when it stutters, the HDD led flashes, so I'm guessing it comes whenever the graphics card is loading textures from the HDD.
Other than that, I have no idea what the exact problem could be; is it the HDD itself, the GPU, CPU, drivers? Any help would be highly appreciated.

Speccs are:

Asus Maximus II Formula
Asus Radeon HD 4870X2
Intel C2Q Q9650, OC to 3,2GHz
Corsair Dominator DDR2 RAM 8GB, 1066MHz
Two WD Caviar Black 1TB in raid0
Click to expand...

I experience similar stuttering when I'm in a new area in WoW (ie after hearthing), which I interpret as memory being loaded. once I do a couple 360s though, the stutter goes away. do you always have the stutter when suddenly changing your view or does it just happen when you're in a new area?

my guess is stuff is being written to the page file, which then has to be written to RAM / VRAM, so a SSD would probably do a lot to minimize the stuttering
 
Wow, thanks for all the response! First, I use the latest ATI catalyst drivers, 9.1. Converge, your stutter seems to be the same as mine in that it appears to be skipping a few frames, and then it's back to normal. However, my stutter does not come every 4 secs or so; only when I turn around very suddenly.
Udgnim, no it's not only when I move into a new area; it's constantly whenever/wherever I am, if I turn abruptly, or turn my camera out over open fields (long viewing distance; loads of textures to load).
In my speccs I forgot to mention that I'm running a Thermaltake ToughPower 750W; could this be too little for this beast of a comp? Also, I have another relatively old Samsung 400GB HDD in this rig which I only use for storage; do you think it would be worth installing any of my games on it, and see if I get the same issues?

Edit: I tried installing it on the other HDD, and still had the same issue. Wouldn't this suggest it's not HDD related?
 
Calamarth said:
Wow, thanks for all the response! First, I use the latest ATI catalyst drivers, 9.1. Converge, your stutter seems to be the same as mine in that it appears to be skipping a few frames, and then it's back to normal. However, my stutter does not come every 4 secs or so; only when I turn around very suddenly.
Udgnim, no it's not only when I move into a new area; it's constantly whenever/wherever I am, if I turn abruptly, or turn my camera out over open fields (long viewing distance; loads of textures to load).
In my speccs I forgot to mention that I'm running a Thermaltake ToughPower 750W; could this be too little for this beast of a comp? Also, I have another relatively old Samsung 400GB HDD in this rig which I only use for storage; do you think it would be worth installing any of my games on it, and see if I get the same issues?

Edit: I tried installing it on the other HDD, and still had the same issue. Wouldn't this suggest it's not HDD related?
Click to expand...

ok, well from your post im not sure if you have tried it out, but as i posted earlier, are you running with vsync on, as you may be experiencing tearing even if the frames drop from like 200 to 100.
 
Turning around suddenly could be that you've got your settings too high for your video card, this results in textures and models which exceed the amount of vRAM you have, a common problem on low memory video cards, one I ran into myself with only 512mb 4870's in xfire.

Try lowering all your settings to min and see if you still get it, if so then it's not that, maybe try vsync forced on to see if it's tearing you're actually seeing.

There is an outside chance that bad mouse drivers may cause this, some slow machines can have problems with very high DPI mice and extremely quick movements where the cpu spikes quickly causing problems, although this is very rare and tends to only show up on slow computers.

However I stongly suspect that objects in games behind you are being taken out of memory to fit in other models/textures you're actually looking at, and quickly turning is causing them to render again and be loaded back into vRAM which can't be done very fast off the hdd.
 
Calamarth said:
Ah yes, forgot to mention that. Yes, I'm running with Vsync on.
Click to expand...

weird, have you tried to force it in CCC as Frostex mentioned, or have you tried enabling Triple Buffering while v sync is on?

I find this surprising as when i ran Far Cry 2 back when it came out, i ran it on all max and had no issues what so ever when turning. Hell, the only game that gives me anything close to what you described is Crysis and GTA IV as i only have 2 gigs of ram, but even for those games it it doesnt happen that often.

Also about the HDD Led flashing, im on a Raptor X 10K rpm hard drive, and no matter what im doing in a game, even standing still, my HDD led flashes, so i would think that's normal.
 
try turning off/on vsync and mouse filter if its there. I don't know if CF works the same as SLI but with SLI i would get a weird stuttering in games when vsync was on/off and/or having the mouse filter on. I pretty much had to try games with the settings to see which way the stutter went away. The stuttering I was getting was only when moving the mouse to look around. The game was acutally running just fine. L4D was another good example. With vsync on it was unplayable because every time I moved the mouse, it was like the game was getting 10FPS even though it was getting way more.

Your system shouldn't have trouble. I have a shitty and slow hard drive I don't have that issue. Now if my virus scanner is doing a system scan, it's a different story.
 
I tried turning Vsync on/off with or without Triple Buffering. I also tried lowering all settings, and the problem still persists. I doubt it's the mice (a Logitech G5, btw) since I get the problem if I turn around quickly using keyboard-strokes as well.

Frostex:
However I stongly suspect that objects in games behind you are being taken out of memory to fit in other models/textures you're actually looking at, and quickly turning is causing them to render again and be loaded back into vRAM which can't be done very fast off the hdd.
Click to expand...

I'm not quite sure I follow you here. Are you saying it's a HDD problem that can't be fixed?

Also, I have not tried forcing Vsync in CCC; I can't find the option.
 
Heres the CCC Option

Default:

2n7dsee.jpg


Always VSYNC:

2u3w9ba.jpg
 
Do you have spyware or other background tasks running? If not then Im guessing its something borked with Windows and the fastest solution would just be a reinstall.

insuffecient power has been known to cause stuttering but I doubt thats the case for you since it doesnt do HDD stuff when its the power
 
Don't have any background tasks running, unless you want to count programs such as Trend Micro and Firefox. You say you doubt it's insufficient power because it wouldn't do HDD stuff, as in it wouldn't have affected the HDD if it was insufficient power? But couldn't it be the GPU that's starved for power, thus causing the stutter upon load?
 
A Thermaltake 750w. I guess it's at the minimum of what I can have with this kind of rig, which is why I'm rather concerned about that.
 
Calamarth said:
A Thermaltake 750w. I guess it's at the minimum of what I can have with this kind of rig, which is why I'm rather concerned about that.
Click to expand...

well if im not mistaken, the 4870 x2 only needs around 600 watts to run, so your PSU should be fine. Which makes me believe something else is the issue. Have you tried running the card in a different system, or maybe a partition with a clean install of windows?
 
No, I haven't tried running it in a different system of any kind; it's definitely on my to-do list unless somebody comes up with another brilliant solution that requires a bit less work. :')
 
Calamarth said:
No, I haven't tried running it in a different system of any kind; it's definitely on my to-do list unless somebody comes up with another brilliant solution that requires a bit less work. :')
Click to expand...

Also, im pretty sure this isnt the problem, but have you stress tested both the CPU and the GPU to make sure both are stable and do not artifact when under load?
 
What stripe are the 1TB drives in? maybe too high and having problems reading small files, recommended seems to be 64k stripe for Raid0 for optimal performance, not just the fastest.

What kind of speed to the drives get with HDTune, they seem about normal? Maybe a bad chipset driver or a bad setting for the HD's

Try starting the game, unpluging the mouse, and use the keyboard, does the stutter go away? No? try plugging in the mouse and unplug the keyboard, stutter go away?

How far did you turn your settings down, Don't turn down the resolution, turn down the textures and AI, turn off AA/AF if enabled.
 
Calamarth said:
I tried turning Vsync on/off with or without Triple Buffering. I also tried lowering all settings, and the problem still persists. I doubt it's the mice (a Logitech G5, btw) since I get the problem if I turn around quickly using keyboard-strokes as well.

Frostex:

I'm not quite sure I follow you here. Are you saying it's a HDD problem that can't be fixed?

Also, I have not tried forcing Vsync in CCC; I can't find the option.
Click to expand...

No. I'm saying that outside of the loading screens there should be little to no HDD activity during the gameplay, either another application is using the drive for something which isn't ideal, or the game is needing to read files from the drive mid-way through the current level/stage of the game, again not ideal.

All hard drives are slow when compared to the speed required to read off large textures/models quickly into RAM or vRAM. If you need to load any game data into vRAM during the level then you're likely to get stutter, often you'll get it when resources have to be suddenly loaded this can happen if you rotate your view to be looking at textures/models which were previously not loaded into vRAM.

Ideally your game settings should low enough so that all the levels data fits into RAM and vRAM so it requires no swapping during gameplay (only level loading)

How much did you lower your settings? Ones you should concentrate on are texture size/quality/resolution and anti aliasing both use up lots of memory. If you have lowered these to min already then I apologise maybe its something else, this is just my first hunch based on what you've said.
 
Initially, I only lowered the settings halfways or so. This time around I took everything to the lowest (didn't touch resolution, which, incidentally, is 1900*1200) and the stutter became barely noticeable, but didn't disappear entirely. Instead of "skipping several frames," it seemed as if it only "skppped 1 frame." So it seems like you're on to something here Frostex, but I don't see how max settings in WoW would pose any issues to the 4870X2...

RogueTrip, I tried unplugging the mouse, testing, plugging it back, unplugging the keyboard, testing, plugging it back. At no point did the stutter disappear.
As for what stripe the drives are in, I've honestly no idea. Either way, here's the results from HDTune:

 
My apologies for double-posting, but I really needed to bump this one, as the problem simply can't be lived with, and I need some answers. :') Besides, I have 2 more things to "throw into this."

1) Could it be an idea to increase the PCIE Frequency and possibly the NB voltage?

2) This is probably just crazy, but I have some streaming-problems on my PS3. Everytime I stream a video of sorts to my PS3, I get what seems to be the exact same stutter at certain "high-FPS moments." A perfect example is when the intro-song/scene is being played for The Big Bang Theory; the streaming ALWAYS stutters at that point. I get the same thing if I try to stream from my laptop. Could this in fact suggest a general network-problem? Like I said, it's probably a crazy thought, but figured I'd throw it out there. =P
 
Might want to try another PSU, maybe not enough to handle your system or maybe have a defective PSU.

Another thing you might want to try is setup performance monitor with HDD and all and run a game for a bit, exit the game and look around for something fishy.
 
I have the same problem in WoW as well. Although I don't have nearly the system you have, but for WoW my system is definately respectable and I'm only running @ 1280x720 on my projector w/ 3gb of ram, 3800x2, and a ATI HD4670. My old p4 w/ a 6800gt and 1gb of ram running the game off an old 40gb hd doesn't have this issue.

However, one difference between the 2 systems which I just thought of is my p4 has a dedicated NIC. WoW is an online game. I got a pretty decent older 3com card in my p4, where as my htpc which I also play wow on has an onboard nic and not a dedicated one. I believe the motherboard is a nforce one, not sure of model, and I used to get dropped from WoW a lot before I changed some setting for the NIC. Not sure the exact setting as I'm not near this pc now.

I don't know if it will make any difference for you, but I'm definately going to pull the 3com out of my p4 and move it to my htpc and try it myself, because it's very very annoying.
 
RogueTrip, I have tried running the game whilst looking at the performance monitor (dual-monitors ftw :p). HDD activity peaked at some 3000-4000kbps during my stutters, but that should be entirely normal. Otherwise, it stayed at 100-200kbps. Nothing looked fishy with the CPU or RAM usage either.

Dawill, it's interesting to hear that others are experiencing the same issue. As it stands, I do have a dedicated NIC in this setup, but it's using wifi connected to a router which is located in the floor above, which isn't exactly optimal. To test this thoroughly, I will take my comp to a friend's place tomorrow, and test it there with his cabled connection. Looking forward to hearing the results from your tests as well, because you're right; it's an extremely annoying problem. :) Impossible to play end-game with it.
 
I tried my comp at a friend's place and his network, and it made no difference, so the crazy idea is put to rest. Also, when I was at his place I used the onboard NIC, and not the dedicated NIC I normally use at home for wifi.

I'll probably try and reinstall Windows over the weekend. I've got real doubts it'll change anything though, primarily because it's a completely fresh build with a fresh installation of Windows already ... But I'll give it a go, and see what happens.
 
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