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Micro stuttering - disable core parking

Sh4rkie

Sh4rkie

Sh4rkie

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Joined
26 Mar 2007
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1,645
Stuttering - disable core parking

If i've been living under a rock and everyone says "didn't you know?" then i apologise in advance.

I was suffering stutter in NFS Hot Pursuit even after the fixes issued by the developers. The game ran locked at 60fps but every now and then would drop to 5x and shoot back up again, stutter. I've got a 4Ghz i7 and 480 clocked heavily it irritated the hell out of me especially as the game is very CPU dependant being a console port (33% gpu average). Did some searching and found the link below, tried it and now no more stutter! Well impressed so thought I’d share :)

http://ultimatecomputers.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3644

<edit>
Edited from 'micro stutter' to 'stutter' :)
 
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microstutter can happen in any rendering system when inconsistant gaps between frame updates result in a lower percieved framerate than the calculated one. Multi GPU systems just tend to be more susceptible to producing this effect.
 
Different kind of stuttering at a guess. Things like, I dunno for me Just cause 2, no idea why but with vsync enabled, stand perfectly still I'm rock solid 60fps, generally move in one direction, solid fps, turn a tiny amount of turn around completely and it jerks down to low 20's and slowly (over a couple seconds) gets back to 60fps.

If I disabled vsync it doesn't do this and stays maxed out around 100-120fps no matter what I'm doing. I assume its to do with for no apparent reason maybe another minor thread being run and thinking it can run it on the same core, so for no reason the thread is moved to the next core and you get a minute, tiny little bit of lag. Without vsync and cpu normally far higher workload it probably doesn't get told theres a bit of time for something else to be pushed through that core.

So thats more lag/stuttering, micro stutter usually refers to the uneven output by gpu's in crossfire.Different reason but I guess can have the same actual effect in game.
 
Rroff said:
I found this has a tendancy to induce instability in some systems - even tho they pass stress tests fine.
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Well touch wood after a few hours mine has been fine so far and NFS HP is a rocked solid frame rate which is in stark contrast to beforehand.
 
@ DM, I used to get that with the 'Fear' games, especially the second title. In fact I was tinkering with both games (not the expansions) last night, trying out or sorts of graphics settings, pretty much 100% elimintaed now I suspect due to the driver updates / patches. About the only games I've ever really noticed it on.

Sounds like what you've expressed is a little like what I used to get, turn the mouse one way and the fps drops to 30 in my case, turn again and up it went back to 60. Though in my situation I think it may have simply been game engine related and possibly not micro stutter (completely).
 
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arc@css said:
@ DM, I used to get that with the 'Fear' games, especially the second title. In fact I was tinkering with both games (not the expansions) last night, trying out or sorts of graphics settings, pretty much 100% elimintaed now I suspect due to the driver updates / patches. About the only games I've ever really noticed it on.

Sounds like what you've expressed is a little like what I used to get, turn the mouse one way and the fps drops to 30 in my case, turn again and up it went back to 60. Though in my situation I think it may have simply been game engine related and possibly not micro stutter (completely).
Click to expand...

I think part of it is Vsync, several games seem to have this really bad lag when turning and a very strange "build up" in fps back to your original level, its not like turn 25fps for one frame then right back up. I've seen it in GTA 4 and a few other games, Raven I think had it in GTA 4 and something else when he got his 480gtx.

Vsync probably is , due to lowered cpu load, causing some dropping in clock speeds, and probably more often on cores with turbo, the dropping of some cores in speed and raising in others, the windows probably thinks its best to stick an extra thread on a single already powered up core than bring a low power core up to speed, which its probably correct in thinking from an ultimate power saving perspective. But that causes the thread to jump to another core and you start to have issues.

Whats causing it in some games more than others I don't know.

Plenty of "multithreaded" optimised games still have the main engine on a single thread and physics, audio, gpu driver and anything else it can split onto other threads, thats probably still best because nothing jumps around, as much anyway.

It might be smeg all to do with that :p I can never remember which games I get the effect in other than a couple that stick out, theres definately a few more. Lotro I get this stuttery effect in certain area's and more when turning but also just moving in a straight line which I get less in things like JC2. Also in Lotro I only get it in a few area's, that tend to have more enviromental and newer effects, the newer zones almost exclusively which tend to have more dx10/dx11 effects thrown in.
 
Sh4rkie said:
Yeah i'm possibly at cross proposes regarding the terminology of 'micro stutter'.
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The terminology "micro stutter" never existed before multi GPU but as sadly people who don't make the effort to find out what the specific terminology really means & people start to use the term in a generalized way which is bad because there are many types of stuttering but being specific becomes more of a problem because too many specific terms become generalized.
 
Ejizz said:
Enter the Duff-Man...
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Heh :p

As others have already already pointed out, this is regular ('macro') stuttering, not microstutter, so my 'services' are not required :D

I'll admit, before now I had never heard of core parking as a feature in Win 7. It's intertesting that it's improving game performance for a lot of people... I'll bear it in mind if I have any stuttering issues, but I never really use vsync personally (can't stand the input lag).

Anyway, great post, OP - always nice to find out about new software features that can affect game performance :)
 
Yup, this is another one of my pet peeves with Intel/AMD/Nvidia and MS, I've said so many times, each one of them(mostly the first 3) should have a "recommended setup" type page where they list every update you should have, every ridiculous thing MS does to kill performance and how to fix it, etc, etc.

MS are just retarded and have a lot of reasons to have stuff like this turned on, Intel/AMD/Nvidia are all about performance and should have a detailed "perfect" windows setup to see the best performance in various situations. Something like this if it makes gaming smoother(not seen if it does yet) should be well known and well publishised by AMD/Nvidia at the very least.

On Vista there was a less well known second "multicore" update that was a pain in the behind to find and improved performance in Lotro amongst several other games, yet neither AMD/Nvidia recommend it or seemingly even know about it.
 
hopefully my 6970 will turn up today i will install this and then give this Core Parking feature of Windows 7 a go looks promising :cool:

Thank you for sharing this info :)
 
Scougar said:
What is hpet?
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High precision event timer (wiki link). Generally used for syncing media streams, and various other synchronisation functions. The OS must support it, so it has no function on XP.

In most cases you won't see much difference by enabling / disabling it, but sometimes if it gets a little screwy then it can pass unwanted interrupts, resulting in tiny pauses in media or gaming. I've not had any problems with it personally, but some people report that disabling it removes some stuttering in video playback or (less commonly) in 3D games.

Worth a try if you're having stuttering issues though.
 
grr, see, yet another potential thing to fix gaming, how the **** Nvidia/AMD don't make a big list of these things to check as fixes I really don't know. AMD really should have this magical "fixes" page with a link to gpu clock tool which lets you disable power play essentially, it fixes 99.9% of GSOD/BSOD and various instability in various things, its a magic fix all button at the cost of 20-30W idle power, almost required for dual screen setups. Though I noticed on recent driver install, not clicking enable overdrive does completely fix my screen flickering in dual screen, its only when you pee around with overclocking(in general) that its an issue and it did get fixed ages ago.

Why on earth Nvidia/AMD don't just have "disable powerplay" options in CCC/Control panel I don't know, would save a LOT of hassle. Same goes for incorporating a proper and not literally awful UI overrider from the Rivatuner lot to force various modes like vsync/trip buffering in games that don't have the option.

Such basic things that both companies can probably add in a couple hours worth of work, though AFAIK one of the reasons they haven't/don't is MS doesn't allow such control of DX function or it won't grant WHQL status, another completely retarded move, which is why trip buff is only for opengl games in the CCC.

If they all just got together and worked on end user experience rather than MS daft WHQL rules we'd all have that much more of a simple time with the very basic things.

Still no excuse for Nvidia/AMD to not release their own "over rider" type program, up to date, that works all the time and doesn't need a 3rd party company to make it.
 
drunkenmaster said:
how the **** Nvidia/AMD don't make a big list of these things to check as fixes I really don't know.
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It would certainly be a very handy resource... I guess the "problem" is that listing all the possible incompatibilities could be seen as admitting that faults exist with their hardware/drivers, and so could be used as ammunition for 'the opposing side'. I guess some PR execs would take exception to this?

It's no excuse though really, and I'd always prefer to see a pragmatic approach to incompatibilities (which everyone knows are a fact of life in computing). Pretending that problems don't exist doesn't really help anyone.
 
Vista does not have this problem at all. NFSHP was perfect for me start to finish FPS wise it only affects Windows 7.
 
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