General question about games

geeza

geeza

geeza

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Joined
30 Aug 2004
Posts
9,206
How come a lot of my games play really smoothly but at the start for about a minute or 2 they stutter? Take F.E.A.R for example, the test things says everything is 100% over 40fps or whatever is the highest, then in multiplayer on a new map or when i change weapon it goes all crappy for a couple of minutes?

Really annoying in car games when you go round a corner and it just stops and you then end up in a barrier/wall :mad:

Ive never seen a console game do this, so is it just the **** coding of programmers or do I need a raptor drive?
 
geeza said:
operating system and a few program. how come some new games work great and some run terribly?
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Poorly coded engines are one cause. I found Quake 4 runs perfectly on my machine on full settings, as the Doom 3 engine is so well coded, but the FEAR engine just feels horrid to me, clunky and laggy.

Will also be down to hardware and caching, so lots of RAM will help, as well as powerful CPU, in theory, but some games just love to have stuttering issues nomatter what you've got set up, ie Half-Life 2.
 
You probably need more RAM. 2GB would do nicely. If you already have 2GB - it might be worthwhile to cleanup your PC. Run AV, anti-spyware, defrag, remove unnecessary applications.
 
Boogle said:
You probably need more RAM. 2GB would do nicely. If you already have 2GB - it might be worthwhile to cleanup your PC. Run AV, anti-spyware, defrag, remove unnecessary applications.
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I have

opteron [email protected]
2gb (gskill HZ)
X1800XT

44 processes running on task manager, norton antivirus and norton firewall, msn, daemon tools, creative sound thing, motherboard monitor and something for my phone
 
Ulfhedjinn said:
44 processes is a huge amount in my opinion.
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processes.jpg
 
I normally only have around 26 processes with all my media player, internet browser etc opened up.

Norton AntiVirus tends to seriously hog system resources and you also have some unnecessary processes running. Such as 'ipodservice' and 'ituneshelper' etc. As suggested, try running system cleanups and remove unnecessary apps from the windows startup.
 
geeza said:
I have

opteron [email protected]
2gb (gskill HZ)
X1800XT

44 processes running on task manager, norton antivirus and norton firewall, msn, daemon tools, creative sound thing, motherboard monitor and something for my phone
Click to expand...

Well there's your problem ;) Norton does nothing but cripple performance. It would be ok if it could catch a virus, but then again that would make it useful software as opposed to the malware that it is. Creative doesn't need to run in the background unless you really want to add effects to all sounds. MBM is ok - but remember its probing your hardware every few seconds.
 
Boogle said:
Well there's your problem ;) Norton does nothing but cripple performance. It would be ok if it could catch a virus, but then again that would make it useful software as opposed to the malware that it is. Creative doesn't need to run in the background unless you really want to add effects to all sounds. MBM is ok - but remember its probing your hardware every few seconds.
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what virus prog and firewall do you recommend? I was thinking AVG free and just windows firewall (or is windows firewall crappy)
 
Christ, look at all that junk, it's not suprising you have stuttering issues in some games (disclaimer: yeah, I know some people have 5 billion processes running and no problems - go you).

I've currently got 21 processes loaded including FTP client, IRC, web browser, wireless monitor etc. Really you should be looking to get this down below 20 before loading a game. I think both Norton and your phone thingy are responsible for quite a few of those processes.

First of all try disabling all that crap and then see how your games run. As well as the stuff you mentioned, you appear to have Ipod, Itunes helper, java update scheduler, print spooler etc running, get rid of all that.

I know that when you've spent hundreds on a so-called 'fast' PC, it can be frustrating to have to optimize and not have a lot of things loaded, but it's worth doing no matter what kind of rig you have.

In more generic terms, the stutter you talk about can sometimes be down to a large amount of textures suddenly being loaded when you enter a new area. Even with very fast system/video memory, this can still slow things down. Obviously having a fast, defragged hd will help to some extent.

The primary reason this doesn't happen on a console is because the developers know precisely the hardware they are working on and the amount of texture memory required is watched very closely. It's one of the reasons why console games often have very small 'levels' with frequent LOADING screens etc.
 
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I've got 42 on the go, but then I am programming at the moment. I had a feeling I was kicking off too many processes.

*starts digging through code*

*cries*
 
Nothing wrong with having a lot of processes loaded when you are not gaming - that's what our fast cpus and oodles of RAM are for :)

Worth noting that you can even setup your own batch files to stop and start services before and after gaming using the "net start/stop" command. For example I have my Print Spooler service disabled by default as I rarely do any printing, and then a simple batch file on my desktop to load it when needed:

net start "Print Spooler"
pause
net stop "Print Spooler"

Once I've finished printing I can simply press a key in the command window, it will automatically shutdown the service and close.
 
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