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    asusg50 and g51 owners please help!!!

    Discussion in 'Asus' started by alne8, Jul 22, 2009.

  1. alne8

    alne8 Newbie

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    hello everyone!

    Short Version: Recording demos in games causes FPS spikes .. Can't figure out the problem!!! Tested this out in multiple games such as Counter Strike, Counter Strike Source, Quake, L4D, TF2, HL2DM, HL, etc etc etc) problem occurs in every game that has a demo recording feature. And the fps spikes only happen when a demo is being recorded.



    Long Version:

    I just purchased the Asus G51vx-Rx05 from BestBuy on June 28th.. and have been toying around with it since..

    Recently ran into this problem and have been discussing on other forums and it seems like aLOT of people with either the G50 series or G51 series also have this issue.

    If you guys have games that allow you to record a demo to your hard drive, please load up the game with default graphics settings and try recording a demo... Do you notice FPS spikes?

    I have tried this on Counter Strike 1.6, Half Life 2 DM, Counter Strike Source, TF2, L4D, Quake etc etc.. (mostly just FPS games, those are the ones I play the most)... And all have this same issue... Other gamers are reporting the same thing.

    What I did for these games was created my own local server, started recording a demo, opened up the FPS monitoring for each game (net_graph 3 for example in the counter strike series), and while hitting my Left arrow key (which causes my character to just spin in 360 degrees) I will notice a hiccup that is almost rhythmic as the demo is being recorded. FPS looks like it just drops one or two frames.. but it when this happens the entire system just kind of stutters.

    I've tested out a bunch of theories... I switched between AHCI and compatibility mode (tested this on both Vista 64bit, and Win XP 32 bit). My hard drive (Seagate Momentus 7200.3 ST93204021AS), tested running in SATA mode and ATA compatibity mode.. was running on Ultra DMA 6, write caching enabled, performance mode enabled.. etc)

    I also ran some system trace tools... I noticed that with xperf running (xperf -no DiagEasy) under Windows Vista, the stuttering issue seems to go away almost completely, but is still there as sometimes in 1 minute it will spike maybe 3-4 times vs spiking once every 3-5 seconds without xperf running. With sysinternal's procmon running I noticed the same results.

    Under Windows XP however, running procman or any other ETW based tracing software doesn't provide the same results...

    I'm still digging around to try to pinpoint the problem..

    It seems to me that the issue is basically, when the hard drive has a file that is being continuosly written or accessed that it causes these FPS spikes. But when a program like xperf is running where it is polling the system 1000 times per second, the problem is masked since I'm assuming the hard drive is being taxed much harder.

    I tested this theory out also by installing my games to a USB drive, and also a flash drive (so that the demo would record to that media instead of my primary hard drive), and also noticed the same stuttering still. So it seems to be not the actual hard drive itself that is causing this slow down but maybe some driver/bus problem.

    I also tried every single driver combination I could, using the drivers from the CD, downloading specific drivers for reach part from their respective manufacturers, the GTx260 driver, i pretty much tried every driver in the 180xx series and 190xx series from laptopvideo2go.. I also tried disabling devices from both device manager and from the bios (webcam, flash card reader etc etc) to try to isolate it down and still no luck.

    Also tried running O/S with /usepmtimer enabled and PerfEnablePackageldle . (Doesnt seem to be a Dual Core issue.. but I'm also exploring whether it could be a HPET timing issue.. seems like ASUS didn't include that option in the BIOS, so I'm not sure.. When looking at both processors in Resource Monitor it seems that the first processor is taxed a lot more while a file/demo is being recorded/written to the drive. One assumption I had was because the timing of both cores gets unsynced, but after trying XP with usepmtimer flag I'm thinking maybe this isn't the case)


    I also checked to see if writing the demo to the computer was causing high number of interrupt requests or dmc requests, and so far that seems normal..

    I am still stumped :( ... The thing is I play a few of these games in leagues where recording demos is absolutely necessary.. And these games aren't playable at all on this laptop while recording demos..

    AND the worst part is I pretty much am OCD so I can't stop worrying or thinking about this problem and basically I have spent 3 days straight trying to figure out and fix this problem...

    Thank fully I found a community of Asus G series owners that I can share my findings and hopefully with everyones help and insight find a fix!

    Thanks in advance guys!


    (Also for those of you that are trying to recreate this problem, could you also post your model number and what specs you have?)

    Edit: here are links to the few tools i've been using to try to figure out this problem:

    DPC Latency checker: http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

    Xperf: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/performance/cc825801.aspx

    Kernrate: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...59-8d9d-4c22-89c4-fad382eddcd1&displaylang=en

    Procmon: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx

    Process explorer: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

    HD Tune: http://www.hdtune.com/download.html

    Crystaldiskmark: http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskMark/index-e.html
     
    alne8, Jul 22, 2009
    #1