Halo 2 high FPS but jerky gameplay?

Taking advantage of the 500gb of HDD space the G50V has so installing all of my games and was going to go back and beat the ones I never beat and play the at better settings.

I got around to installing Halo2 and after all the pain in the but updating it made me do I finally get in game to see it runs like crud. I set everything to max and the res is native 1680x1050 (was going to use a lower res but none of them were 16:10) so got in game and it looked like it was lagging like hell, but it was not lag, its just jerking really bad or stuttering if you would rather call it that.

I started up fraps and sure enough even maxed out its like near 50fps, so what the heck is causing the issue? Most of the cut scenes do not seem to have the problem its just in game, when you move around its almost like playing at 1 or 2 frames per second but not laggy. Totally to me like this tho.

So known issue? Any known solutions?

 

I believe its a known issue, I have the exact same issue where it just lags for 2 seconds.

 

Only thing I could find on google was a lag issue related to when videos are loading in the background but thats not my problem.

The other is a mouse lag deal, the game runs too fast and it cause the mouse input to be sparatic. Solution force v-sync via the control panel. I tried this and I think it helped some but it does it for me without using the mouse I can just strafe past a corner and watch it hop across the screen rather than move across the screen.

I think the next thing I will try is to just use a lower resolution and see if it has any effect.

Im defraging my drivers right now its taking absolutely forever... Raid 0 must make it take 10x longer than normal and its very badly fragmented looks like over 50% so wonder how much performance boost I may get when its done.

 

I have no problems with it. Did you get the updates from windows live? I have no jerky game play or anything runs on the highest settings on my laptop with no problems. You could also try updating your drivers.

 

Just fired up the game for the first time in 2 months and surprise, I'm experiencing the exact same issue you are describing... The game runs anormal speed but my movements are jerky...

 

Just booted it up to make sure and it still runs fine. I don't understand why you guys are getting jerky movements.

 

Try downgrading your driver to a really old version. That seems to do it. Anything higher than the 169's have issues. Try 169.04/28; those give the best performance for me.

 

Try tweaking the game gfx settings then the Nvidia gfx settings. Turning off a few things might help.

 

try not defragging while playing games.

 

I was not

However downgrading the drivers may work, but I would not downgrade my drivers for one game.

 

I'm going to try to play Halo 2 on my laptop tonight. We'll see what happens.

 

I'm having the same problem on my M50Vm-B1 (9600m GS) with the 178.13 drivers. Frame rates are in the 40s & 50s at native resolution but performance is horribly jerky. This may be an issue to take to Nvidia.

 

try enabling vsync and triple buffering in the game and in the nvidia control panel, if it still does it, disable vsync, since you wont go above 60 frames, page tearing shouldnt be a real problem

 

There are no in game Vsync or TB options and the control panel is ineffective. As suggested earlier, and by a bit more searching around on my part, this seems to be a problem with some or all 17x series drivers.

 

The problem went away when I want back to the 175.19 form the 177.89.

 

This game shows issues with newer drivers; it performed the best on the 169 drivers.

 

Hi.

Have you defraged you HDD, Also you can check it`s speed with HDTACH

 

Maybe the drivers are also why I can't use fullscreen...

[Edit] It didn't but it did fix the performance issues.

 

Sorry to dig up a very old thread, but I figured since it's here, why make a new one?

I was having the same issues others were with Halo 2 (stuttering yet high FPS), and I was just curious if it was ever fixed by the 180.xx or 190.xx drivers?

 

I semi got round this by just recording with fraps in the background. Speeded up the game while keeping it at constant fps.

 

I don't think the nVidia drivers' team even remembers that there is a Halo 2 for Vista, much less to fix it! The only stable drivers for this game appears to be the 169.xx's

 

I thought there were vsync options for halos? i know halo 1 has but ive never tried 2.

 

LOL, I dont think thats a good fix.

Play for an hour and then have a 1TB video file to take care of. Plus more work/heat on my computer system.

I never got it fixed so I just ended up not playing the game.

 

Heres one,

Put your pc and gpu into power saving

ATI have the options and they do noticable scale down performance

 

I never said it was the best fix in the world

 

Halo 2 has Vsync enabled by default and the only option to disable it is to force it via command line -novsync.


50 FPS is horrible though, on max settings @ 1440X900, I get 150 minimum FPS, but I get a bit of tearing, so I just leave Vsync on and never get below 60.

HOWEVER, if I'm in a bad server, it will drop if I'm lagging, but only if I'm lagging.

 

Min of 150fps all maxed? Then you must have a monster of a PC.

 

I guess I do forget sometimes to look at what I'm comparing to.

But 50FPS is still low for this game.

My spec's arent' all that phenomenal.

M17
Q9200 (@ 2.93)
ATI 3870 X 2
4GB DDR3


Only thing I regret is going with the 1440X900 screen instead of upgrading.