8600M GT Stuttering Fixes

Is powermizer even included with the standard desktop drivers like the 169.09 you can get with modded *.inf-files at laptopvideo2go.com? At least I could not find it in the control panel. Although I noticed that my GPU reduces clock speeds in accordance with the CPU.

 

Ugh, I get terrible stuttering on Eve Online and Crysis. It's definitely worse with the new drivers. With Eve the stuttering doesn't seem to start for awhile. Might be the temperature but the core isn't going down at all. I've tried every trick except for rolling back my drivers. Haven't tried disabling Powermizer since I don't see a place to do that.

 

This worked for me on Diablo 2. And probably some other games which I haven't tried yet. However older games like Unreal GOTY and Rune (same engine) were running constantly at smooth FPS but sometimes would slow down or the game would look like it was running too fast. Disable one the cores of the CPU in the task manager actually helped a little bit too. Some other people may find this helpful.

 

There is no powermizer for vista yet. Hopefully nividia will put it in some time soon.

 

Tht's weird, mine is running perfectly.

 

sorry to say guys, but your problems arent heat related, unless you laptop cpu gets past 95 degrees and your gpu gets past 120 degrees. most likely its the nvidia slowdown bug like the rest of us.

read here:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=207592

 

OK I have no idea how this is happening and doesn't really make sense BUT

I installed FRAPS and have just the FPS overlay running (I did this for testing purposes) and noticed that the stutter was GONE!

I rebooted and ran Bioshock sure enough STUTTER after a little gameplay.

Rebooted again started FRAPS, ran Bioshock... NO STUTTER.

Further testing proved this to be true for other games. I have no idea how but when I have the FRAPS FPS overlay running games don't stutter!?

 

LOL

Hehe, I don't think that's possible ^^

 

Hm, I never had any stuttering on my 8600M GT..
Is the stuttering rare or common with nVidia cards?

 

It looks like a lot of cards from the 8-Serie has stuttering problems...

I also notice some stuttering issues with my 8600M GT GDDR3

 

Intro
I posted this in another thread ( http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=207592), but thought I might as well post it here too.
Lately I've been a bit dissapointed with my Asus G1S, it's a great machine and all. But like many others I've had this annoying stuttering, which made me a little worried (it was quite a pricey machine).

The Stuttering
The main problem I figured out was that whenever the fps moved around (didn't matter if it was from 84 to 90 or 40 to 36 or whatever), I got a kind of stutter, or frame skip if u like. How I figured this out was by using the command 'com_max fps [fps]' in CoD4. So if I played on a small map that I could get a contant 60 fps on, I would set the maxfps to 60 and tadaa, pure smooth gameplay without stuttering (unless the fps went down of course).
Put simply, I set the value to the absolute minimum fps I thought I would get.
This wasn't appliable to most other games I have, and having to change the maxfps everytime I played a new map was a bit annoying, especially since I knew that I could get better fps without it.

Vertical Sync was also a small solution I found helped, but it didn't work in every game and not all the time, also some games were to demanding for me to use V-sync with, I needed everybit of fps I could get.

Thus I've been looking around for different solutions to the problem and to get the most out of my machine, tried several drivers, hotfixes, program/windows/nvidia configurations etc without any luck.


Fix and CoD4 testing
But then just recently I stumbled upon a thread ( http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=207592), saw the post about the 163.67 drivers and thought "what the heck, let's give it a try". And to my big suprise they actually helped. First thing I did was a quick 3Dmark06 test, got something along the lines of 3950, not that great, but not bad either. After that I went on with what matters, the games. Started CoD4, set the maxfps to the default value of 85, and joined a game. Noticed my fps was climbing and falling from 60-90 but WITHOUT stuttering, it was actually playable and smooth like it should be at that fps. You could imagine my joy.
(of course it went below 60 at times but still no stuttering, just normal fps lag).

Oblivion performance
So after comfirming that CoD 4 seemed to run fine, I moved on to Oblivion which was unplayable before. Same thing here, the stuttering I had before was gone, just like that. Though I noticed another kind of stutter/lag but in no way as bad as the one I had before, and this stutter/lag could be due to several reasons (oblivion is a demanding game, and people seem to have a bit of problems running it smooth in general).
I will have to tweak around some with it but overall it was a great improvement.

Half Life 2 - Smooth as butter
The third and last game i tried was HL2 (original), I turned V-Sync off and loaded up my most recent checkpoint (beginning of Nova Prospect). First I was a bit unsure if it was gone or not as I haven't played HL2 in awhile and the stuttering in that game wasn't that bad to begin with, but after playing around a bit I came to the conclusion that it was smooth enough to be considered an improvement. Noticed some small lag (less than a second) ocassionally, but was far from game-breaking and could also be due to other reasons (Got the game maxed out, resolution, AA and everything).

So overall I'm really happy that I tried this drivers out and I greatly recommend people with stuttering problems. May not work for everyone, but still think they are worth a try, since these are the only ones I've actually seen a difference with (with the exception of the stock drivers being generally less efficient than all the others).


Summary
Just to do a quick sum up of my thoughts about the drivers (note, haven't tested them fully)
+ Removed and/or lessened my stuttering problems in CoD4, Oblivion and Half-Life 2.
+ Might have gained a slight FPS increase, in at least CoD4.
+ The games I've tested generally runs more smooth.

- Can't seem to overclock them with Ntune (though that doesn't matter that much to me)
- My 3Dmark06 score could be better (have had over 4000 before with other drivers), but not really a minus as other factors could have contributed to the loss.
- May not apply to all games, only tested a selcted few and not to a great extent.

Not sure if it will hold up in the future but at the moment it works fine.

Notes
Also worth mentioning, before I did the tests I downloaded and installed a hotfix for Windows Vista from Nvidias site, note sure which one it was since I downloaded 3 different ones but only one of them worked. And i also changed LOD to 'clamp' and the performance mode to single display performance mode, like blackbird mentioned in the other thread.

Curious to hear what others thought of these drivers.
And a big thanks to both blackbird and thomaskc.dk for making the thread and mentioning the 163.67 drivers, thanks :].

 

Glad we helped Lord Phol
Thanks for the post and welcome to the forums

 

Regarding the page file that is suppose to be 1,5*RAM.
Is it better if the page file is larger or does that decrease performance? (Better safe than...)

 

For you guys with CoD4 stuttering on 8xxx series cards, enable "Dual Video Cards" in the game options.

 

Even tough we only have one video card?

I think I have solved the problem on my Inspiron 1520 by doing the three following, don't know if one or all made any difference
1 - Updating BIOS to A04
2 - DX10 for XP
3 - 169.09 drivers

Besides the stuttering issue seemingly stopping, I can overclock without crashing.

 

what does that do and why ?

thanks

 

anyone got any thoughts on this...

i got round to testing the 163.67 drivers earlier to see if it fixed the stuttering in test drive unlimited, all installed ok, and when i restarted in to windows as everything was starting up like the sidebar etc,i got a blue sceen of death and it restarted, niv_sys or niv4_sys or something llike that ? , it happened a few times, i wiped and reinstalled the drivers again but it still did the same

so now im back on 169.28

 

It's support for dual video cards - SLI and Crossfire. For some reason it also fixes the stuttering with single cards.

 

My 8600 stutter too but in a funny way.

Whenever i play CSS, i'll see other player or bot stutter back and forward when everything is fine. The game is smooth... everything is fine. Weird.

 

Alright guys, this fix seems to work for pretty much anyone who has tried it


Microsoft Windows XP - Install 163.67 drivers

Microsoft Windows Vista - Install 160.03 drivers

using 163.67 on vista will give you horrible performance

anyway hope this helps

 

Hello, Could you please watch this 2 videos (No more than 30 secs) and tell me if I've this Stuttering problems? Seems to be a major slowdown, not only fps up and down:

See, I'm running a GPU stress test (GpuCapsViewer) and when It starts, everything goes fine see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kl3e6RSvI70
After 5 min it goes slowly with random fps jumps: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMfSrLNXtQo

So... Am I under this Stuttering problems?

 

As far as I can tell, it looks pretty much like the stuttering issue. It would have to be a very steady stuttering as in every 1 or 1.5 seconds.

 

Looks like sttutering.

 

I installed Windows XP Professional yesterday and everything works fine (only one device: "PCI Device" is unknown (It's probably Turbo Memory, XP can't use it...) and I'm currently on the 169.28 driver and I gives fine performance but I'm gone try the 163.67 one

Like when I'm playing Crysis: I get MUCH MORE fps than with vista (like 40fps !) and it goes smooth but when it drops to 35 fps it doesn't go smooth any more (Really weird because in vista i had smooth gameplay on 30 fps...) so Isn't there an option or something that gives smoother gameplay (not more fps) ?

 

With Vista you proberly got lower fps because you didnt put dx10 to OFF. Crysis automaticly detects what the best supported is, and in vista that is dx10 and in XP its dx9.

However, there are huge performance drops by running dx10 at the moment.

Just thinking.. 40fps would be a very wierd difference if they were both running dx9.

 

It was in dx9 ! On vista I have always played Crysis in dx9 mode (not in dx10)

I think I had 33 fps under vista and now i got 40 fps under XP...

 

I think I might have found the stuttering problem. I noticed that in the Nvidia Control Panel, it was set to Multi-Display performance. Most of my games stuttered every 15-20 seconds or so. I changed it to single display performance, and put threaded optimization to on, and it stops. All my OpenGL games were really crazy with the fps, but this fixed it permanently. Also, I noticed if I OC'ed too high it happened.

 

hi guys,

well, its nice to hear that some of the suggested fixes have worked for some people. however, none of the fixes suggested here didn't helped me to get rid of the stuttering issue on UT2003... i wonder why it works for some and not for the rest. shouldn't the fixes be consistent for every 8xxx user? or could this be a problem with UT2003?

i recently updates the BIOS as well. could this problem be a GPU revision version or GPU BIOS version related?

i also noticed in this forum, everyone who complain about the stuttering issue normally had 4GB system RAM... could there be a link somewhere?

cheers !!!!

 

I'm afraid you're plain wrong there. There's like a dozen people with less than 4GB of RAM.

 

Thanks gr33nf4c3 and lozanogo for watching the videos and provide me the answers . I've installed the 163.67 and those issues disspared, instead of the slowdowns I've low permoance on low fps (similar to the issues with crysis at 30fps described by sgtmatt1) anyway the fps are more constant right now, and barelly goes down when playing on call of duty 4, except in downpour and overgrown xDD.

If you call to your notebook provider and tell them about this issues with the graphic card what's they answer? they fix it or they just pass?

 

I haven't tried calling them yet but I'm pretty sure they would blame the gfx card manufacturer or say it is a driver issue since many laptop brands have these issues.

 

I've tired all these things and nothing has helped, anyone have suggestions or any news on the current problem?

 

anyone tried the new 174 drivers ?

 

I did and they didnt help my stuttering

 

Let me link you to what I wrote in another thread. The 174 thread. It may be applicable to you. Don't know how much you know about gpus and such.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=220569&page=4

Bottom post.

 

Odd questions how can you tell if you are shuttering?

 

becuase it looks like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMfSrLNXtQo

 

At school can't view youtube video will do when i get home or I will test with cod4.

 

just wanted to let everyone, I changed my "max pre-rendered frames" from 3 to 1 and my stuttering is completely gone. =) Cheers!

 

anyone tried out the new drivers from dell?

 

I have tried all of these and nothing has worked. I don't even hit 80 degrees C and I get downclocking and stuttering. This is really pissing me off because I tried calling DELL and all they told me is that I need to pay for some kind of premium customer service...

 

I'm still looking for a fix too, after having tried every single suggestion I've encountered. I've tried absolutely everything, and I've been on the phone with both Nvidia, and DellSupport, to no effect. I've probably invested 12-14 hours of time trying to fix it.

The most frustrating part is that this thread is almost the only place on the internet where people can even agree that this problem exists. Dell won't replace my video card because my list of symptoms doesn't match their standard criteria for paying the cost to replace a part, even under warranty.

Anyone have any more help on this problem?

 

Well about 3 weeks later, 5 calls later (more than 10 hours on the phone) and after using the DELL online chat technical support... I finnaly got an ok DELL Assistant. He immidiatly agreed that this is a problem and offered to replace my GPU. Of course I have to call them, have them send me a box, call FedEx to come pick it up, and say goodbye to my laptop for 2-3 weeks. I'm willing to do this, but not quite yet because I need this laptop for a big editing project coming up.

So Jolarix, just keep making calls and make your case really elaborate. I'm hoping that getting it replaced with another 8600m gt will work. If it doesn't, he's willing to replace it with a different model, such as a gs or a 8400.

 

nish101, I'm going to do the exact same thing... I'm calling Dell today. Post here to let us know how your replacement goes, and if it fixes the problem with stuttering.

 

Update

I got my motherboard (and by extension also my integrated video card) replaced by Dell today. It was covered under warranty.

And the problem is completely gone. I feel vindicated knowing that it was a hardware issue and not a software one. You can mitigate the symptoms with the great advice on page 1, but for me the only thing that truly worked to solve the stuttering was a full replacement.

Thank Xenu for next-business-day warranties.