FIFA 12 stuttering

i have installed FIFA 12 on my SONY VAIO SA290 (details in my signature) and have OC'd the GPU from stock GPU/memory frequencies of 485/800 to 650/950. the temperatures are stable at 75C max for the GPU, and the CPU is stable around 75C with 15% in-game usage but occasionally goes up to 84C max. the video drivers are the factory-installed Catalyst drivers (version 8.823-110226a1-114653C) with 2D driver version of 8.01.01.1123 (if i'm not mistaken, it corresponds to Catalyst 11.2). i can't update to the latest AMD drivers due to the way SONY repackages the Intel HD3000 and AMD Radeon HD drivers for the graphics switching to work.

i output the game via HDMI to my HDTV which has a native resolution of 1366x768 and have enabled vsync. when i play the game, it suffers from occasional stuttering, which seems to be common for Radeon cards (there is even an option in the game settings for "ATI micro-stuttering" that's supposed to help this but doesn't in my case). i have not been able to fix this by lowering the AA (currently set to 4x), texture quality (currently set to High), or the resolution (currently set to the HDTV's native resolution). except updating the drivers, i have tried almost everything i could think of.

do you guys have any suggestions? do you think Firefox being open with many tabs could affect the game in anyway?

 

well, i updated the drivers to the new SONY ones (which are supposedly Catalyst 11.6), and the stuttering is still there, although less frequent. any ideas?

 

The game hasn't been optimised really well. A pretty good fix is downloading d3doverrider and forcing vsync + triple buffering, and at the same time, disable vsync in game.

It pretty much solves any stuttering issues, but again, get hiccups here and there. Not ideal, but does the job. Remember d3doverrider needs to be kept opened (minimized) to enable its effects.

 

Ah I see EA still hasn't fixed this, Grrr, I noticed this in the demo as well. I'm so glad I ended up going with PES 2012, and that it turned out to be awesome. The stuttering issue with Fifa 12 was so annoying, anyways I hope they put out a fix.

 

thanks for the info. i'll try that.

 

didn't work for me. i tried the latest D3DOverrider with v-sync and triple-buffering enabled once using Global Settings and once as a separate fifa.exe profile while unchecking the v-sync option in FIFA 12's settings. i then tried the game with and without the ATI Micro-Stuttering option enabled, but with the same results. the game played smoothly only once, but it was not reproducible once i quit the game and restarted it.

in fact, i never heard the "beep" that shows D3DOverrider has intercepted D3D calls.

you think the same option in RadeonPro might help? or any other ideas?

 

Hmmm... you need to hear that beep... force detection to high perhaps?

Forcing vsync on d3doverrider worked for me... NOT forcing it in radeonpro

 

it is forced to high. the thing is i have Origin installed in a sandbox (using Sandboxie) due to privacy concerns (Origin scans some unrelated folders on the hard drive). the game installed and runs just fine in the sandbox, and i tried running D3DOverrider both inside the same sandbox that FIFA 12 runs and also normally as an administrator outside the sandbox. i cannot hear the beep.

btw, i have set the sound scheme to "no sound" in Control Panel/Sound, so my Windows does not make any sounds at all. could this be the reason that i'm not hearing the beep? i will try to enable the Windows Default sound scheme and re-run the game again. but when does one actually hear the sound? is it exactly when the fifa.exe executable starts to run or when one starts playing a match?

thanks

 

The game stutter on my xps m1730 8800 gtx on Vista - no matter what settings . But on XP it runs great . 1920/1200 , high + 4xAA . Stabile 60fps all of the time .

 

ok, here's an update: when i enabled sound schemes in Control Panel and set it to Windows Default, i could actually hear D3DOverrider's chime when fifa.exe would start, so this program can actually detect that game. also, if i don't run it in the background and not enable the in-game v-sync setting, i get very bad tearing pictures from the moment the executable starts showing anything on the display; with D3DOverrider, however, no tearing whatsoever. this shows that it's actually detecting the game AND doing its magic (whatever it is). but it does not solve the micro-stuttering.

what i did to almost resolve this issue was to check the "ATI micro-stuttering" option from the in-game settings. with that, the game runs much smoother with almost no stuttering, except very few instances, and it's much more pleasant to look at.

to recap, here is my settings:
1) force v-sync and triple buffering with D3DOverrider's global setting (no individual profile for fifa.exe)
2) uncheck v-sync from in-game settings
3) check ATI micro-stuttering from in-game settings
4) all default settings in the CCC

i had also closed all my browser windows (Firefox) since i had read somewhere that it might conflict with other programs that D3DOverrider interacts with (don't know if it actually is true or not).