Game stutters, then I lose half FPS

Almost every new game I play now has a mini-stroke (game suddenly pauses, stutters for a bit) and then I lose have the FPS.

I'm using an inspiron 1520, 8600m GT. I went from 177.39 to 180.42 to fix the Far Cry II glitch (and was giving my the stuttering in Dead Space and Fallout III) so I went back to 177.39 to see if it was the new drivers. Same deal.

Can someone please recommend a driver? This is getting really annoying.

edit: Also, I'm not sure if this is the GPU problem. But when i go page down in the web browser, it stutters. I think it might just be the rate of my monitor. But it never did that before. So meh.

 

sounds like your gpu is over heating, and its down clocking to protect itself. what temps do you read?

 

Around 65 - 75c. Which from what I'm told is normal. =/

 

Download gpu-z and cpu-z and run them in the background.

When your performance drops alt-tab out of the game and check to see if your processor or gpu is downclocking.

It's more than likely your gpu.
Here's how to disable powermizer:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=261929

 

Hi, my name is John and I will be your technician for the evening .


Okay, jokes aside, lets do some reconnaissance .

1. What OS do you have?
2. When was the last time you did a defrag?
3. Did you scan the HDD for errors, both bad sectors and OS ones?
4. What temps does it have when the stutter occurs?
5. Is cooling an issue for your laptop?
6. Did you run memtest?
7. Have you considered a format?


If all the steps fail, I am inclined to think you have a GPU problem. Either downclock, either you broke it.

Crap, I am third already .

 

If its an intel cpu it could be that overheating, i dont know about now but i know that the old Pentium 4-M cpu i had in a laptop years ago when it got too hot it used to clock right down to try and cool its self.

 

I doubt it is THROTTLING that badly. It ain't a Prescott .



P.S: I am not bashing INTEL. Have been an INTEL user all my life. I LOVE INTEL .

 

LOL true that!

Or a pentium D

 

If you didn't have the problem before with the 177.39 drivers and got it after upgrading to 180.42. I would suggest you go back to a restore point created before upgrading to 180.42. Hopefully you still have one. Driver sweeper must've deleted something important and the new drivers made changes that can't be overrided when rolling back. Try doing a system restore.

 

If any if your IDE channels read "PIO Only", set it to Ultra DMA and restart.

 

Calm down wishmaker We need to limit the amount of exclamation marks your aloud to use in a post(can a mod code that for the forum plz?!)

It's most likely a bad driver that's making it downclock.

Disable powermizer or uninstall your driver with driversweeper and install a new one.

 

I modified so now you can sleep at night .

 

download the powermizer switch. And turn powermizer off.

 

You guys are just making it more complicated than it should be. By the time he does all these advanced things, he probably won't have a restore point to go back before he upgraded his graphics driver. And just reinstalling the old driver or even running driver sweeper will just cause more complications, because it makes more changes to the registry which might have been the prob to begin with. The fix should be as simple as doing a system restore.

 

Others have experienced this problem with Nvidia GPUs and Vista, it is usually accompanied by an error message along the lines of "display driver stopped responding" and usually refers to the nvlddmkm.sys file, which is part of the Nvidia drivers. If you google "nvlddmkm crash" or "nvlddmkm downclock" you can find other responses to the problem.

I have a 1520 with identical specs and have found that the problem arises most frequently as a result of overclocking. However, I have found it to happen whilst running at stock clocks as well. After monitoring temps/clocks with Rivatuner and i8kfangui I've found that the problem is unrelated to heat.

Choosing different drivers can reduce the frequency of the problem but not prevent it altogether. I'm using 180.42 at the moment simply for the performance boost and am just dealing with the downlocking.

Others have had success disabling powermiser in the registry. I did this and it did indeed work (display driver would still crash but clocks would stay up) but after a while for some reason I was unable to change the clocks from the 'low power 3d' setting so I abandoned this idea.

In sum, experiment with drivers/revert to your previous ones.