Stuttering in games

Reiver · 1 Feb 2006 at 11:45

I've been getting a sort of loading pause when i turn into new areas in FEAR and HL2 or when something is about to happen in the game. The game sort of pauses and stutters for a second then it's ok. It seems to be loading pauses and not something in the background as it happens at the same places. When for example in a warehouse in FEAR i look up, it stutters, fps drops by maybe 10 frames (from 60) if i look down again and look back up it doesn't happen again. I've two 80gb HDDs in sata raid0 and 2GBs of RAM so i was expecting better loading performance and a much smoother game. As i know my RAM is ok i figured it might be my hard dries so i tried to a file system benchmark on SANDRA but each time it just freezes and won't complete. Is this the likely problem and is there any way to test my HDDs to find out?

Jimbo Mahoney · 1 Feb 2006 at 11:49

A Benchmark is not going to be the same as real-world performance.

What's your stripe and cluster size?

Reiver · 1 Feb 2006 at 11:56

I'm not too sure about cluster size but i set the stripe to optimal which iirc was 32k.
I just ran HDtune and got this result.

Does the way the transfer rate degrades towards the end mean anything?
EDIT: I've got my drives partioned into one small partition for windows formatted at install using NTFS and whatever cluster size is default. The second bigger partition was formatted in windows using NTFS and an allocation size of 4096 bytes.

Defcon5 · 1 Feb 2006 at 13:21

I think the transfer rte goes down the further away ro the start of the drive you get, or something. HDDs arnt my speciality!

Have you memtested your Ram?

Jimbo Mahoney · 1 Feb 2006 at 13:25

Defcon's right. Transfer speeds decrease towards the 'end' of the drive.

32k stripe sounds reasonable. I was worried you were using something extreme like 8k or 256k.

Do all games stutter, or is it just these two? It might just be the games themselves.

Reiver · 1 Feb 2006 at 13:39

Memtest showed no errors and super pi completed OK. I've not run prime95 as i've read that it has an issue with my mobo so i didn't think it would be a reliable test.
I'm not really sure about other games as these are the only two i've installed so far (built last friday) i tried a demo of timeshift and it did it as well but performance in it was pretty awful generally. I've got Doom3, B&W2, Far Cry and Civ 4 sitting waiting to go on. Which one of these would be the best to test on?
Thanks for the replies btw.

babyface uk · 1 Feb 2006 at 13:41

i'd go for doom3 and far cry,

Babyface UK

Reiver · 1 Feb 2006 at 13:48

I've checked my IRQs and the USB contoller and Raid controller are sharing one. Considering i've been having a problem with my USB mouse sometimes not getting power until i disconnect and reconnect could this be the problem. Also the G-card is sharing with my wireless network card. What's strange is not all IRQs are assigned so i don't see the need for sharing.
Doom3 it is. I've been wanting to try playing it at Ultra settings since i got it.

Reiver · 1 Feb 2006 at 14:24

Hard to say conclusively at this point as i've only had a bit of a run aroung the first area but none of the stuttering when entering new areas only screen tearing from the ridicously high frame rate

I'll have to give it longer to say for sure but it looks like it's FEAR and HL2 causing the problems.

Jimbo Mahoney · 1 Feb 2006 at 15:05

Maybe that's just the way they are?

Reiver · 1 Feb 2006 at 16:55

Maybe. I've heard a lot of complaints about them stuttering when i was googling for an answer.