Games stuttering...?

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Circuitbreaker8

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Jul 22, 2004
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Ok, i'm have this wierd problem with my system ( in sig ) Every game I play has a stutter problem now! It runs smoothly...then skips one or two frames, then goes back to normal! Whats going on?! I'm using the cat 5.7 ( ati cp ) and i'm running XP pro. I ran spybot/adaware and got rid of everything...any suggestions?

Edit: It happens in movies too
 
Circuitbreaker8 said:
Ok, i'm have this wierd problem with my system ( in sig ) Every game I play has a stutter problem now! It runs smoothly...then skips one or two frames, then goes back to normal! Whats going on?! I'm using the cat 5.7 ( ati cp ) and i'm running XP pro. I ran spybot/adaware and got rid of everything...any suggestions?

Edit: It happens in movies too
Click to expand...
What game are you playing? If it's BF2, well just get 2 gigs of ram.
 
What's your PageFile setup like? Have you run defrag? Have you shut down all services and killed all apps in the taskbar that you don't need?

BF2 runs fine for me with 1GB of RAM so you should be fine. What are your video settings?
 
My PF usage is only 160Mb and I have 24 processes running

BF2 used to run fine, along with every other game ( SC:CT, FC etc.. ) but now anything that uses my videocard stutters! Even movies!
 
Check the temperature on the card. Get some canned air and dust that sucker out. Might be related to heat.
 
fubak said:
Check the temperature on the card. Get some canned air and dust that sucker out. Might be related to heat.
Click to expand...

Happened to me the other day. Playing Warcraft 3 the sound card locked up in a sound loop and I noticed that three of my fans were not spinning. I hooked up a Hardcano fanbus and we're cooking with Crisco again.
 
If I were you, I'd take your games to a speech therapist. Beyond that use Filemon.exe (from System Internals) and see what's hitting your system. You've got some rogue process that's doing file access when you don't want it.

(FYI: Spybot and Ad-Aware aren't always perfect... far from it now a days.)
 
I'd still take a duster to your components. It may not be the vid card but something else, like the dust on the heatsink of the processor, it may even be your audio drivers for the ZS. Its a good card but it flips its pancake once in a blue moon.
 
could be your hard drive is malfunctioning? If you have the time, back up all your important files and just delete your whole partition and reinstall everything from scratch. It could be a pesky peice of software messing with your system, or your hard drive could be messed up. Or try using system restore to a date where everything worked.
 
I doubt its my HDD becuase my games are on one HDD ( and they stutter ) and my videos are on my normal HDD ( they stutter also )
 
fubak said:
Is your OS on the same HD with the Games or the Videos?
Click to expand...

My OS is on my 80Gb IDE drive which has some videos ( not even a gig ), music and apps

My games are on my 250Gb SATA drive ( which windows only reads as 127gb )
 
IT could still be that IDE drive. Wouldn't hurt to run some utilities and see if it's still running like it should. Something like HDTach would do this, wouldn't it?
 
maybe the HDD is running in PIO mode rather than DMA? just a thought

also check in ur bios that u dont have fastwrites ewnabled, or if ur on A64 then enable fastwrites i think it is....that causewd studdering for me before, disabled fastwrites and its chill now
 
I have an A64 system, so disabling FW screws things up for me. How do I check what mode my HDD is running in?
 
^^ Its seated

I'm defragging my HDD now, so we'll see how that goes. I don't think I defragged it since I formatted in April :p

-I just got this 250Gb SATA drive in June and all it has is 3-4 games on it...think I should format this one? Also...why is windows only reconizing it as 127gb?
 
Circuitbreaker8 said:
My PF usage is only 160Mb and I have 24 processes running
Click to expand...

what's your page file set at?

i've read alot of tweak guides and this does affect your performance. i read the tweak guide on xp (the tweakguide.com one) and it said to have your page file at the amount of ram you have 1024mb for you and that it does affect game performance.
 
This is probably a one-in-a-million shot, but do you A) have Firefox, and B) leave it running whenever you start a game?

I had/have a sporatic problem where Firefox will sometimes decide it wants to use 28% of my processor for a second, stop, wait another 2-3 seconds, then repeat. It can be fixed by just closing/restarting it, but it was causing a similar problem to what you are describing.

I can't recall if it affects movies, though...
 
Whoa... there are some pretty esoteric suggestions going on. Don't go after those until you start with the basics:

1) Eliminate the possibility of other programs hijacking the CPU/Harddisk
2) Eliminiate the possibility of a faulty driver (DirectX 9, Video card drivers, sound driver, etc.)
3) Eliminiate the possbility of an incorrect hardware setting (PIO, Fast Write, DMA, bad overclock, etc.)
4) Eliminate the possbility of a failing hardware component (Vid card failure, hard drive failure, CPU or MB component failure

Go in that order. If you're cracking open the case to dust off your fans to fix the problem, make sure that you've done steps one through four first. It doesn't sound like you've done step one yet.

Get filemon, get TCPview, watch your task manager and make sure nothing is running in the background, writing to the hard drive or phoning home over the network first. It's the easiest and fastest way to solve your problem.
 
Circuitbreaker8 said:
I just got this 250Gb SATA drive in June and all it has is 3-4 games on it...think I should format this one? Also...why is windows only reconizing it as 127gb?
Click to expand...
This isn't causing your studdering problem, but it is formatted incorrectly. If you formatted it FAT32 then a hard drive partition can not be any larger than 132GB (or 127 viewable). Reformat it as NTFS or divide it into 2 partitions.
 
Torgo said:
This isn't causing your studdering problem, but it is formatted incorrectly. If you formatted it FAT32 then a hard drive partition can not be any larger than 132GB (or 127 viewable). Reformat it as NTFS or divide it into 2 partitions.
Click to expand...

It is formatted as NTFS..
 
You could fiddle around with Performance Monitor to try and capture what is happening. Empirical data is always good.
 
I'm the Dude said:
You could fiddle around with Performance Monitor to try and capture what is happening. Empirical data is always good.
Click to expand...
On that note, what is the commit charge peak reported in task manager (performance tab)?
 
Torgo said:
Whoa... there are some pretty esoteric suggestions going on. Don't go after those until you start with the basics:

1) Eliminate the possibility of other programs hijacking the CPU/Harddisk
2) Eliminiate the possibility of a faulty driver (DirectX 9, Video card drivers, sound driver, etc.)
3) Eliminiate the possbility of an incorrect hardware setting (PIO, Fast Write, DMA, bad overclock, etc.)
4) Eliminate the possbility of a failing hardware component (Vid card failure, hard drive failure, CPU or MB component failure

Go in that order. If you're cracking open the case to dust off your fans to fix the problem, make sure that you've done steps one through four first. It doesn't sound like you've done step one yet.

Get filemon, get TCPview, watch your task manager and make sure nothing is running in the background, writing to the hard drive or phoning home over the network first. It's the easiest and fastest way to solve your problem.
Click to expand...


Ok well, I ran Filemon.exe and a whole bunch of my files came up...what do I do?
 
Phoenix86 said:
On that note, what is the commit charge peak reported in task manager (performance tab)?
Click to expand...
?

Check this after you see the stuttering in a game.
 
I was having this problem too with WoW and BF2. I completely uninstalled all the video card drivers and used a driver cleaner, and then reinstalled. Fixed everything.
 
Genocidal[v2] said:
I was having this problem too with WoW and BF2. I completely uninstalled all the video card drivers and used a driver cleaner, and then reinstalled. Fixed everything.
Click to expand...

I tried that yesterday..still there :( I'm just gonna format my HDD
 
Circuitbreaker8 said:
Ok well, I ran Filemon.exe and a whole bunch of my files came up...what do I do?
Click to expand...
Let it run for about a minute. The log is going to be fairly large if you have a bunch of programs running. Now you need to decipher the information:

The two most important columns are the process and request. The process will tell you what program is running, the path shows you where the action was occurring and the request will show you what that program is actually doing.

QUERY INFORMATION is just doing a quick read of information, READ is opening a file, WRITE is writing to a file, etc. The filter is your friend at this point. What you're looking for is a process that shouldn't be there or one that's behaving badly. Exclude each process with the filter once you determine that process is fine. For example, svchost.exe is almost always benign (it deals primarily with TCP traffic and wouldn't cause stutter) so you can filter that out. I've got a process called BTTray.exe which is my Bluetooth adapter. I can filter that out.

You can use the path to help you figure out if a process is somewhere it shouldn't be. You'll see programs running off to c:\windows to fetch icons, controls and GDI crap all the time. However, if you see a process hitting c:\program files and what not... focus on that.

For example, I did a quick scan and noticed a process called cidaemon.exe doing a bunch of read/writes all over the place. That happens to be the Windows Indexing Service that runs all the time in the background. (I actually want it turned on, but perhaps you don't.)

What you can try doing as well, once you have a good filter built up, is run filemon.exe and then try to repeat the stutter. Once it happens, quit your game/movie and check filemon. Use the timestamp to see what else was running around that time. I bet you good money you'll find your culprit. At the very least, you'll know what was running on your system at the time. It could perhaps point to a bad driver or codec. The log will tell you all you need to know.
 
Phoenix86 said:
Phoenix86 said:
On that note, what is the commit charge peak reported in task manager (performance tab)?
Click to expand...
?

Check this after you see the stuttering in a game.
Click to expand...
Hellooooo?

This problem won't be cured by a format.
 
check your sound drivers make sure they are up to date, if they are try disabling them and then test for the hitch. I had the same problem a year ago, even my mp3's were hitching. I ended up uninstalling all my SB drivers and then redoing them and the problem went away. anyway, best of luck with it.
 
Circuitbreaker8 said:
Why not?
Click to expand...
Becuase if your memory bound, aka you don't have enough RAM, you can reformat until the cows come home and you will still have the same issue.

edit: and when I saw "this problem" I should have clarified, I mean the problem I'm looking for. Not that I know exactly what your problem is.
 
Phoenix86 said:
Becuase if your memory bound, aka you don't have enough RAM, you can reformat until the cows come home and you will still have the same issue.

edit: and when I saw "this problem" I should have clarified, I mean the problem I'm looking for. Not that I know exactly what your problem is.
Click to expand...

Enough RAM? I have 1Gb ram...

Anyways, I tried reinstalling my sound card drivers and something is still messing up. Movies don't play smoothly anymore ( I get stutering in those )...maybe its my chipset drivers?
 
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