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Have you experienced micro stuttering?

overcrocker

overcrocker

overcrocker

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Joined
18 Mar 2012
Posts
9
In single card, dual, tri or quad SLI/FIRE?

I owned the very first SLI card combo, in fact it's the only time Iv'e ever had more than one card, which was 2 x 12mb Voodoo 2's and, although I experienced frame rate drops when the going got tough, I never had micro stuttering. When I was at 60fps it's was smooth as silk.
 
I used to have a 3870X2 512mb and when playing certain games(like crysis) with the FPS being displayed on screen i remember it saying like 30fps but it didnt "feel" anywhere near that fast more like 15fps......then when i got a single card that could give the same frame rate i noticed it was a lot smoother at 30fps and just in general.Thats when i realised what all this microstutter stuff was and that the frame rate counters and what was actualy being displayed where 2 different things. I remember it clear as day so that put my off crossfire or any multi GPU setup ever since.(Probly not like that now though,i hope)
 
Been running sli 580's for about a year and not experience this, only time i have was whilst playing Far Cry 2 because with my then current drivers i used to experience some texture issues so i used to run it on a single gpu and that is when i used to get microsuttering lol, both gpus used to show Vram usage even tho sli was off, maybe driver issues or just becaus ethe sli bridge was still on idk, game runs fine now with current drivers tho with sli enabled.
 
Multi GPU has always worked best when your using it to sustain 60fps its when the output of the individual GPUs falls below 30fps that you start to see less desireable results which is why setups like 470 SLI work so well as the output from one is ok and the pair keep everything silky smooth.
 
A bit on my 4870X2, though it wasn't too bad at all. As frequently mentioned on threads like these, you need higher fps with a multi gpu set-up to equate to the smoothness of a single gpu that, for instance, is showing a lower frame rate.

I might have experienced it a bit less if at the time my cpu was say an i5, rather than a Q6600.
 
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I have had zero microstutter with my old tri-fire cards (5970+5870) in 2 years of owning them.

I am now running 2 7970s and still have no microstutter.

Well happy with the 7970s. ;)
 
I get stuttering on SLI gtx 480, but only when my settings are to high for the vram. For example in BF3 2560x1440 in low/med with some things turned off i have no stuttering but i do when i set to high/ultra with. I actually found that out friday:o
 
When I tried 3850's some time back, the microstutter was horrendous.

Then when using 6950 Toxics, I would get it in some games, such as BF3 even with decent frame rate. Enabling vysnc solved that.

Now with 7950 crossfire, I have seen it on occasion, but only just briefly, and can play without vsync :D
 
Krony said:
Been running sli 580's for about a year and not experience this, only time i have was whilst playing Far Cry 2 because with my then current drivers i used to experience some texture issues so i used to run it on a single gpu and that is when i used to get microsuttering lol, both gpus used to show Vram usage even tho sli was off, maybe driver issues or just becaus ethe sli bridge was still on idk, game runs fine now with current drivers tho with sli enabled.
Click to expand...

That's not microstuttering.


I've read that Tri-SLI somehow manages to get rid of most microstuttering in games.
 
tri and quad GPU setups tend to move the bottleneck to the CPU rather than GPU so the amount of time between frames being sent from the CPU is more constant - however you can be trading less microstutter for higher input latency which can be just as undesireable.
 
Vir said:
I get stuttering on SLI gtx 480, but only when my settings are to high for the vram. For example in BF3 2560x1440 in low/med with some things turned off i have no stuttering but i do when i set to high/ultra with. I actually found that out friday:o
Click to expand...


Its a shame your setup isnt providing better results, i run 2 480's at a resolution of 5960x1080 (bezel corrected) my battlefield 3 runs with every setting on high hbao on, no motion blur, no ingame AA, i now use the fxaa built into the 301.10 drivers as it is very good imo, i game on bf3 every night on all maps and mixed between 32/64 players my game never stutters i dont see less than 45fps and thats only in a meat grinder usually i get between 50 and 70 very steadily.

The only config file tweak i use is to set the ingame render ahead limit to 2 as that seems to be smoother than the reccomended 0 for me. Also i did notice some slight stutter even at 50+ fps but disabling power saving features in the bios got rid.
 
Damnit, ok I think tonight I'll have a try with your settings and see what it gives me as your resolution is much higher then mine! I'll let it know here.
 
Well look i am been genuine i game a lot mainly on battlefield i couldnt live with stutter it would drive me insane my 6950 xfire setup did microstutter a lot no matter what i did that was at the same resolution.

Here is everything i do to game at that res smooth,

My 480's are oced at 850 core and 1900 memory, has to be said i notice no difference in game going from 820 core to 850 maybe 1-2 fps current driver is 301.10
Driver settings for bf3 are on default except the following,
Power management = prefer max performance
Vsync = force off
Tripple buffering = off
Antistrophic filtering = application controlled
Threaded optimization = on (with this set to off my game loads slower)
Texture filtering antistrophic sample optimization = on
Negative lod bias = allow
Texture filtering trilinear optimzation = on
Max pre rendered frames = use 3d application settings
Nvidia fxaa forced via nvidia inspector aswell as this doesnt blur the image like ingame fxaa although i haveused the smaa injector and found that looked similar.

I did find i had to use nvidia inspector to allow texture filtering trilinear optimization to be put to on as the driver wouldnt let me change it.

Then my user config in bf3 directory has
render.forcerenderaheadlimit 2

When you save the user.cfg file make it read only.

No word of a lie these are the best settings i have found from constant fiddling with the game and nvidia drivers the new 301.10 drivers are the best for my setup, oh i also set the colour in nvidia control panel to 56% it makes bf3 look a lot nicer.

With textures on high using afterburner i havent seen my vram go above 1432mb

Oh one more thing i have battlefield 3 set to disable areo theme when its running as this takes the vram usage from 165mb to 60mb before the game even runs just gives a bit more headroom.
 
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Alright great post, I'll have a go with those settings and inform you later (in a few hours). Thanks for summing it all up :)
 
No problem theirs so much stuff about battlefield 3 and gpu's but atleast our setups are similar but your at a lower res so i really cant see why you cant have a smooth good looking bf3 if i can at a higher res. As i also said every now and then i would get a bit of stutter even at good fps but turning off all that power saving crap in the bios sorted it. I mean why be eco friendly when you run 2 480's!
 
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