DDR2 vs DDR3 improvement on same mobo

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Little_4nic8er

Gawd
Joined
Oct 24, 2009
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So my mobo (See sig.) accepts both versions. Though I have had issues with the one and only set of DDR3 I tried on it.

In a separate discussion here, though off topic to the thread, (Thus my posting this.) I have been discussing Fallout 3's FPS drops during exterior to exterior cell loads. My system can manage it at 60 FPS (V-sync'd) 95% of the time on Ultra High at 1920x1200, until I hit those cell loads. It drops to high 30's at the worst but then goes right back up 2 seconds later. I was hoping an SSD would solve, or mitigate the issue, but it's only helped ever so slightly.

I was planning on getting a new P45 chipset (Current is P35) mobo so I can go crossfire, but it is DDR2 only. (It would also mean I can put my C2D e6850/8800GTX back into play for my friend to game on.) I found some DDR2 1066Mhz RAM. (Would also work in this board.) What I am wondering if it would be worth putting off the crossfire mobo in favour of getting DDR3 1333Mhz for this board. Do you folks think it would be a good move?

I can't afford a second GPU for some time after buying the new mobo. (Back ordered and too expensive right now.) Though I think a second GPU could also "fix" the problem.

I'm just so confused. Considering the different chipsets/timings, and all, what would be the best bet here? Is DDR3 1333Mhz going to be hindered by the P35 chipset? (As mentioned, the one and only stuff I tried would BSOD so I am a bit leery of DDR3 at the moment for this board.)

Thanks for any advice you may be able to shed on this dark corner of my PC.
 
Are you sure you're not just obsessing about some little issue a bit too much here? DDR3 definitely will not make that loading issue stop, neither will a 2nd gpu do anything to fix that problem. In fact, if it's bothering you that much a 2nd gpu will probably hurt your gaming experience if you're noticing little things like that a brief 2 second drop to 30fps while the game loads...

How much memory do you have? You don't have it listed. If you only have 2Gb or something you might want to considering upgrading to 4 or 8Gb.

Also, have you tried turning vsync off?

Have you considered that you're spending money trying to "solve" the game dropping to high 30 fps for 2 seconds? On my system there's a slight jitter while you change environments but it's really not a big deal, I really can't imagine how it's ruining gameplay so much for you that you want to spend money to fix something that may not be fixable.
 
Oh I know I'm obsessing, no argument there. :D None of this solely for Fallout 3 though. I'd just like to iron out whatever bottlenecks to the best of my ability for all games/apps, present and near future. (Games being priority.)

I have 6GB total. (2x1GB 2x2GB)

Like I said. I want to get my e6850/8800GTX back into play, and this kinda gives me the excuse to optimize this (Both) system(s) the best I can in the process. If I get the DDR3, I can put it in this system, and move the current 6GB to the other PC.

The issue I have is the RAM type/speed and chipsets differences. (I don't understand the this stuff as well as I'd like to. :confused:) I'd prefer a newer chipset that allows for a DDR3/s775 combo optimally. I'm just hoping someone will help me do this right I guess. I'm not ready to move on to an I5/I7 build yet, when I can spend less, and have 2 decent rigs in the end. Seeing both will be mostly for gaming and a bit of video encoding. (Which an I5/I7 would be great for, but it's not done often so isn't really worth the cost.)
 
I don't think that faster ram would really be worth it. Sounds more like a software issue or just the game engine (very good possibility) to me. It's been a long time since I've played FO3 or Oblivion without a ton of mods.

I really don't think that moving to DDR3 would be worth it. You would be better off waiting for a real upgrade like to i7/i5. It's the only way that you will see a substantial improvement in bandwith. Have you tried the famous Fallout 3 "quad core fix"? Also give D3DOverider a shot since you are using vsync, it made a huge improvement in DA:O recently for me.

Sadly I thought that an SSD would make a huge improvement with FO3 or more importantly Oblivion with a crap load of mods so this is a bit depressing to hear.
 
Yeah the Gamebryo engine definitely could be optimized better. It's been an issue for some time, since Morrowind. (Loved that game. Oblivion to.) Fallout 3 uses an updated version of course, but it's still got it's quirks.

I've tried most everything I think. I've even had a private discussion with one of the developers on the BGS forums about it and he tried to help me get it ironed out. Sadly nothing suggested helped. (Specifically about the hitching, and having to use iFPSclamp.)

Don't get me wrong, the SSD has helped, just not a compete resolve. I don't regret getting it, though had I paid what was being asked, instead of the price I paid, I may have been. ($185 vs $300.)
 
I haven't spent much time with FO3, but I have some familiarity with Oblivions behavior. The biggest performance killer on Oblivion when its loading areas outdoors is when multiple threads start trying to malloc/free from the heap simultaneously. The Oblivion heap can only be used by one thread at a time, so effectively only one of those threads can run at a time. Furthermore, the CRITICAL_SECTION object used to negotiate which thread gets access to the heap has some severely sucky behavior on most versions of Windows that eats up a lot of extra time, and making one thread hog the heap for itself and not let any other threads use it until it's all done.
On FO3 similar issues exist, but the locking occurs at a slightly finer granularity so it happens a little less, but the same basic thing happens. Also the negotiations are handled in a different way that makes threads hog the heap less often, so instead of stuttering you just see poor FPS for a few seconds.

There's also a bunch of time lost to blocking on some CRITICAL_SECTION object at offset 0x180 in to some Gamebryo class with "Renderer" in its name. I'm not sure what that's about, as that blocking seems to be completely unnecessary. That happens on both Oblivion & FO3.

I doubt faster memory would help that much with those issues. A fast SSD will not help the heap issues at all - the time spent loading from disk is not a limiting factor (the main thread does not block for that I believe), only the number of heap allocations & deallocations it has to do, and the pattern of which threads do them. A change of OS might help (the OS provides the implementation of CRITICAL_SECTION objects). Changes to the ini settings that determine how many threads are used by default may help. And the OBSE plugin dlls I've released, Oblivion Stutter Remover and Fallout Stutter Remover can help. Both suppress all operations on the unnecessary CRITICAL_SECTION at Renderer+0x180. The Oblivion version can replace the heap with a smarter version that can let multiple threads use it at once, but it does not enable that feature by default because there are still some stability issues with it. The Fallout version does not yet support replacing the heap, but it can tweak the process by which threads negotiate which one gets access to which part of the heap when to be slightly more efficient. Oblivion Stutter Remover versions are available on tesnexus, Fallout Stutter Remover is available from fallout3nexus. More recent development versions are linked to from recent posts on the forum threads for each on the bethesda forums.

Also, I've heard you need to be a little careful when picking SSD brands... the Intel ones are good, and some (but not all) of the OCZ ones are pretty decent, but some of the others can really suck.
 
SkyRanger-1 said:
I haven't spent much time with FO3, but I have some familiarity with Oblivions behavior. The biggest performance killer on Oblivion when its loading areas outdoors is when multiple threads start trying to malloc/free from the heap simultaneously. The Oblivion heap can only be used by one thread at a time, so effectively only one of those threads can run at a time. Furthermore, the CRITICAL_SECTION object used to negotiate which thread gets access to the heap has some severely sucky behavior on most versions of Windows that eats up a lot of extra time, and making one thread hog the heap for itself and not let any other threads use it until it's all done.
On FO3 similar issues exist, but the locking occurs at a slightly finer granularity so it happens a little less, but the same basic thing happens. Also the negotiations are handled in a different way that makes threads hog the heap less often, so instead of stuttering you just see poor FPS for a few seconds.

There's also a bunch of time lost to blocking on some CRITICAL_SECTION object at offset 0x180 in to some Gamebryo class with "Renderer" in its name. I'm not sure what that's about, as that blocking seems to be completely unnecessary. That happens on both Oblivion & FO3.

I doubt faster memory would help that much with those issues. A fast SSD will not help the heap issues at all - the time spent loading from disk is not a limiting factor (the main thread does not block for that I believe), only the number of heap allocations & deallocations it has to do, and the pattern of which threads do them. A change of OS might help (the OS provides the implementation of CRITICAL_SECTION objects). Changes to the ini settings that determine how many threads are used by default may help. And the OBSE plugin dlls I've released, Oblivion Stutter Remover and Fallout Stutter Remover can help. Both suppress all operations on the unnecessary CRITICAL_SECTION at Renderer+0x180. The Oblivion version can replace the heap with a smarter version that can let multiple threads use it at once, but it does not enable that feature by default because there are still some stability issues with it. The Fallout version does not yet support replacing the heap, but it can tweak the process by which threads negotiate which one gets access to which part of the heap when to be slightly more efficient. Oblivion Stutter Remover versions are available on tesnexus, Fallout Stutter Remover is available from fallout3nexus. More recent development versions are linked to from recent posts on the forum threads for each on the bethesda forums.

Also, I've heard you need to be a little careful when picking SSD brands... the Intel ones are good, and some (but not all) of the OCZ ones are pretty decent, but some of the others can really suck.
Click to expand...

Are you who I think that you are? If so you are the man. :D Oblivion stutter remover is by far one of the few mods that I consider completely necessary. Thanks for you effort. Just checked Oblivion Nexus and he is the man.

I have been wondering what the cause of some of my performance issues in Oblivion obviously modded were for quite a while and what upgraded would help.

I also have one more question. Probably the most annoying issue that I have with Oblivion (very heavily modded) and FO3 as well with MMM, Fook, and quite a few others is that when I am traveling and a couple of NPCs spawn I see a quick stutter. It's just a sudden drop in framerates. It always ruins the surprise when I come into contact with some enemies. This also happens when I use the recommended heap manager in the readme, I haven't tried any others to be honest. What could be the cause of that?

Once again thank you for all of your effort. You made one of my all time favorite games much more playable.

Edit Super Hotkeys, too! You are the man.
 
Yeah, I'm me. Oblivion/Fallout Stutter Remover, Super Hotkeys, Enhanced Magic System, and a few smaller mods. I used to visit HardOCP but stopped about a decade ago. I noticed a thread linking to this one from a google search.

I don't know the cause of stutter on encountering enemies. Obvious candidates include disk access to find enemy data / textures, Facegen working to generate face meshes from their compact face data, AI suddenly needing to think, etc. Several of those have ini settings in Oblivion.ini that might effect them. I have not noticed stutter associated with running in to enemies in my test runs (which are generally running from Cheydinal to Anvil with OOO and a few other mods active, but no MMM or FCOM; I use a Core 2 Duo w/ 4 GB, 32 bit XP, and an NVidia 9600). If it's an issue involving critical sections then it might show up in the log file. You could try installing OSR4 (putting the dll in Data\obse\plugins, deleting the OSR ini file there, then start Oblivion so that it will generate a new ini with default settings; ini file format changed dramatically between OSR3 and OSR4, so OSR4 should not be used with an OSR3 ini file), setting bEnableProfiling to 1 in the CriticalSections part of the ini, and running through Oblivion making note of when in the log file you saw that particular stutter (preferably a lot of that sort of stutter). To figure out when in the log file that was, you'd probably have to turn on console output (bLogToConsole in the Master section) and look for a line that included "time" followed by a number in the console output at the time of the stutter and remember what that time was. To see the console output during play without pausing you would need to toggle debug text ("tdt" from the console).
OSR4 is currently here: ftp://71.115.222.171/sr_Oblivion_Stutter_Remover.dll
the FO3 equivalent, FSR2: ftp://71.115.222.171/sr_Fallout_Stutter_Remover.dll
A typical line you could read the time off of looks like this:
time 25.91: 4:0:00700395 waited on CS 00b3f600 for 2 ms (init 1)
Click to expand...
The time in that one is 25.91, meaning that 25.91 seconds had passed since Oblivion.exe started when that line was printed to the log file and the console. In theory you could use a stopwatch instead of looking at the console output.
The log file gets saved as sr_Oblivion_Stutter_Remover.log in the Oblivion directory. You can get a log file to me by posting it (preferably in a codebox - the log files can be kinda large when critical section profiling is enabled) on the bethesda forums in the OSR or FSR forum threads, or uploading it somewhere and linking me to it from the OSR/FSR forum threads.
If it showed up in the log file that would include the address of the critical section involved, a list of all instructions using that CS, and the thread & CPU number of any thread that blocked for an extended period of time on that CS. Which might or might not be useful in figuring out exactly what was going on or how to stop it without wrecking Oblivion.
There's no documentation yet for OSR4 / FSR2.
 
I skipped most of the thread but I'll throw this out in reply to the first post. In general, all the "C" type boards I have seen offer just about the same, if not better performance with DDR2 as opposed to DDR3. You are only going to get a very minor improvement in memory bandwidth at most as it is the same memory controller. Most seem more stable with DDR2 also.
 
SkyRanger-1 said:
Yeah, I'm me. Oblivion/Fallout Stutter Remover, Super Hotkeys, Enhanced Magic System, and a few smaller mods. I used to visit HardOCP but stopped about a decade ago. I noticed a thread linking to this one from a google search.

I don't know the cause of stutter on encountering enemies. Obvious candidates include disk access to find enemy data / textures, Facegen working to generate face meshes from their compact face data, AI suddenly needing to think, etc. Several of those have ini settings in Oblivion.ini that might effect them. I have not noticed stutter associated with running in to enemies in my test runs (which are generally running from Cheydinal to Anvil with OOO and a few other mods active, but no MMM or FCOM; I use a Core 2 Duo w/ 4 GB, 32 bit XP, and an NVidia 9600). If it's an issue involving critical sections then it might show up in the log file. You could try installing OSR4 (putting the dll in Data\obse\plugins, deleting the OSR ini file there, then start Oblivion so that it will generate a new ini with default settings; ini file format changed dramatically between OSR3 and OSR4, so OSR4 should not be used with an OSR3 ini file), setting bEnableProfiling to 1 in the CriticalSections part of the ini, and running through Oblivion making note of when in the log file you saw that particular stutter (preferably a lot of that sort of stutter). To figure out when in the log file that was, you'd probably have to turn on console output (bLogToConsole in the Master section) and look for a line that included "time" followed by a number in the console output at the time of the stutter and remember what that time was. To see the console output during play without pausing you would need to toggle debug text ("tdt" from the console).
OSR4 is currently here: ftp://71.115.222.171/sr_Oblivion_Stutter_Remover.dll
the FO3 equivalent, FSR2: ftp://71.115.222.171/sr_Fallout_Stutter_Remover.dll
A typical line you could read the time off of looks like this:
The time in that one is 25.91, meaning that 25.91 seconds had passed since Oblivion.exe started when that line was printed to the log file and the console. In theory you could use a stopwatch instead of looking at the console output.
The log file gets saved as sr_Oblivion_Stutter_Remover.log in the Oblivion directory. You can get a log file to me by posting it (preferably in a codebox - the log files can be kinda large when critical section profiling is enabled) on the bethesda forums in the OSR or FSR forum threads, or uploading it somewhere and linking me to it from the OSR/FSR forum threads.
If it showed up in the log file that would include the address of the critical section involved, a list of all instructions using that CS, and the thread & CPU number of any thread that blocked for an extended period of time on that CS. Which might or might not be useful in figuring out exactly what was going on or how to stop it without wrecking Oblivion.
There's no documentation yet for OSR4 / FSR2.
Click to expand...

Thats what I thought. :D Thanks, I'm going to reinstall Oblivion with a few mods this weekend. The combo of mods that I'm pointing my fingers at is FCOM, Natural faces, Roberts male and female replacers, RPB, Deadly Reflex, RAEVWD, and QTP3 Reidemized but I'm going to cut back to just OOO and MMM with a few smaller mods and see what happens. Thanks for the tips.
 
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Thanks for all the replies. I am going to hold off and put the money towards an I7 setup sooner rather than later. I think I'll see if I can just sell my e6850 at this point. Then when I get the I7, I can lend this rig to my friend. (With an 8800GTX instead of the 5870.)

This means I can install the full version of W7U instead of the RC. I had been considering a 775 crossfire board (And why I did not install W7U on this rig.) but I guess I'll just wait for the I7 build to go crossfire. As it really is not needed. Everything runs great so far, minus these Oblivion/Fallout 3 stutter issues, but they are limited, not constant so I can deal with it.

Thanks for the modding work to. I've done a few simple things for myself but always appreciate those of you modders that do all that amazing work, and share with us. :)
 
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