Games jerky but with high frame rates (not an oxymoron)

magicman

magicman

VIP Member
Recently I've been finding that during any high-graphics game, there will be a momentary slow-down, then speed up of the action. It's difficult to explain, but this often coincides with a brief hard drive read. The frame rates are never affected, and my graphics card is more that capable of doing its job, but the jerkiness often happens, say, near a corner on a racing sim.

Anyone know what causes this? I've got a Soundblaster X-Fi Fatal1ty, and I read somewhere that you have to reduce the PCI Latency, which I've done. Anyone any suggestions?

Cheers.
 
Could be your monitor! What do you have (CRT or TFT) and do you know the responce time on it? Could be that your monitor is ghosting.
 
No it's definately not my monitor. I should stress this problem is only recent, my monitor is a TFT with a nice response time (cant remember exactly what figure), and anyway the hard drive wouldn't be involved in ghosting.
 
Yeah I had a go trying to alter the virtual memory settings, not sure how successful I was. What are the optimum max/min for my system in your opinion?

As far as running programs are concerned, Norton Firewall and Antivirus, iTunes, Fraps, MSN Messenger plus a few other programs that should not be advertised or endorsed on this forum. Nothing that hasn't always been running. That's the mystery...
 
try capping the frame rate, i.e. enabling vsync, this will keep the frame rates constant. what you are experiencing is due to the fact that your eyes can pick up changes in frame rate better than low frame rates
 
Thanks for the input guys. I've uploaded a video that i just took with Fraps, it kinda demonstrates what i'm experiencing. Ignoring the reduced framerate due to fraps itself, there are several distinct stutters, most noticably just before and after the final corner. See what you think...

Here it is. (6.34MB)

PS. I know the stutters may not seem like much, but they're big enough to cause wipeouts on occasion lol
 
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By the way, I ran Toca2 with everything non-essential closed down, just in case it was another program interfering. It didn't help unfortunately. I took a look at the task manager afterwards though, and besides half my 1GB ram being used as system cache, which I thought was quite high, I read that the commit charge shouldn't exceed the physical ram - is that right? And if so, isn't this reading quite high?

View attachment 967
 
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