what's limiting my gaming performance?

almoststew1990 · 10 Jun 2014 at 22:36

Ive cobbled together the following gear and put a fresh xp install on with Sp3, steam and not much else.

Q6600 @3.3GHz
4GB DDR2 @ 730MHz or something
1GB ATI 5870
1080p screen.

In games such as Mafia II and Fallout NV I get good frame rates if I stay still. When I start moving around and new stuff has to load in (I guess?) I start to get stuttering. What do you think is the limiting factor?

It happens a little less when I lower the settings. Overclocking from 2.4 to 3.3 also only helped a little bit.

This is a secondary PC I have infront of my exercise bike so I won't be doing a big upgrade or anything.

almoststew1990 · 10 Jun 2014 at 22:45

Interesting, I thought xp wouldnt use more than 1GB of RAM and those games use more than 2GB, unless it doesn't work like that? Is there a way to check?

I take it RAM speed doesn't matter?
It is worth noting that I havw 4x 1GB, two of which are 800MHz and two of which are 660MHz, all of which are different timing s but all seem to work together OK...

almoststew1990 · 11 Jun 2014 at 09:37

Its a WD or Maxtor 500GB SATA from 2009 or 10- I can confirm when I get home from work.

Is there a way to test the health of the HDD in terms of gaming performance? I have a 250GB HDD hanging around but that is an even older Seagate one.

Could it be a lack of or problem with VRAM? The textured might be able to get out of the HDD fine but not find their way into the 1GB VRAM?

almoststew1990 · 11 Jun 2014 at 10:06

At some point I'll put my 7970 from my proper PC in the Q6600 PC and put the 5870 in the proper PC. Proper PC has haswell i7, 8GB of 2133MHz RAam and an SSD so this could rule out a few of the possible causes.

Edit- just remembered I still get stuttering at 720p with low settings so :/

almoststew1990 · 11 Jun 2014 at 21:45

Swapped over my gpu- I have the same stuttering problem with the 7970. Looking St the 'adjusted/ realistic' required specs for Mafia 2, even the c2q beats it by a country mile. I might look into getting a small SSD on the members market.

first I'm going to try the 2GB of matching RAM only- the required specs say 2GB rrecommended and on the basis I have a very lite install ATM I would have thought that RAM quantity with 2GB wouldn't be an issue.

almoststew1990 · 12 Jun 2014 at 06:34

wazza300 said:
i just tested my i3 540 at stock,pulled out 4gb leaving 4gb and used a 5770 1gb gpu

could play mafia2 just fine everything turned up inc apex physics turned on an aa,no stuttering at all

l.a noire being multithreaded stuttered though,not with 8gb of memory

Good to know. It sounds more and more like it is HDD related then.

Also, no anti virus installed and I think I'll do a defrag over night. Will I still need to if the HDD has recently been formatted?

almoststew1990 · 13 Jun 2014 at 16:34

Right, I've been able to spend a bit of time on this!

(2002 wants its stock XP wallpaper back

)

The HDD seems to be fine- chkdsk didn't flag anything up. Mem check came out fine. I have now defrag, it said 0% fragmented before (and after). I've cleaned out the registry and I am just about to update the bios. Could any bios setting s (memory remapping or whatever for instance) be causing it? Page file size?

It seems Mafia II is using about 600k mb and the total used is 1.3GB, so the quantity of memory is fine right?

Does anything in the above jump out at you as being the culprit?

almoststew1990 · 13 Jun 2014 at 17:56

I have massively improved the issue- turning Pagefile off! I guess XP can't be tempted to store game files in the Page File now. Anyway it only stutters a tiny barely noticeable bit now which I think is just down to the DDR2 and old CPU. Wehey!