Stuttering Issues

Ok I'm in a bit of a bind here.

Using the Asus A8JS
with 7700go


I sometimes get stuttering issues playing games.
However I've checked my GPU temps using Rivatuner, it's not even hitting 80 degree celcius, and there were no artifacts present on screen.

It can't be because of high graphics settings because sometimes it works without stuttering, sometimes it doesn't. It only seems to hit certain missions in a game.

For example, playing Company of Heroes, mission 11 I think (The one where you gotta blow all the Nazi Panther tanks away), it stutters. Sometimes the stutter goes away though.

I've been thinking of several answers to this puzzle, but I can't seem to get rid of it no matter how hard I try.

1) CPU, GPU overheat => Can't be, because my temps are ok and there are no artifacts

2) Windows Restore Center => I've switched this option off

3) Windows Indexing => Indexing was already complete

4) Defrag => Done that umpteen times

What other solutions might there be?
At my wits' end here.

 

Since CoH is an online game, it could just be some connection issue, depending on how the game handles it. Or, it could be something to do with your hardware: Maybe you've got some background process that does heavy computing occasionally, anti-virus or something... or maybe it's the game loading stuff into ram. If you're low on memory and the computer is forced to swap to the hard drive, that could give you issues too.

 

The online issue is not the problem since I don't play it online.
The stuttering happens only to a specific mission.... it's really really strange.

I don't get stuttering while entering into a skirmish with the AI on an 8 player map (Route N13)

 

how much RAM do you have?
it could be a RAM issue, that you are running out of RAM and it is using the HDD for pagefiline...i know that happened to me when i had 1GB

 

exactly.

this sounds like classic "ran out of ram - game uses page file in place of working memory - game stutters"

your solution is either to switch back to xp (xp uses less resources than vista), or to simply add more ram to your machine.

 

How much RAM do you have is the most important question.

Also some games will stutter regardless while they load textures,etc... from the hard drive during game play.

Unless you have some super RAID 0 or RAID 1 setup.

 

ideally this is untrue. if you have enough ram, you won't need to load more textures during game play. you can load everything beforehand. that is the idea.

 

That's the idea, yes, but some games don't do their preloading correctly and you get lags ingame because of it.

Also, are you using Vista? If so, the state of the nVidia drivers on Vista is still pretty bad - at least on my Go6800 I got a lot of stuttering where there was none in XP, especially with FSAA enabled. Vista seems especially poor in regards to memory management as well, so you might be running into paging issues as well if you have less than 100GB of RAM.

 

Ideally it may be untrue but I have heard of it happening on many systems.

BF2 and BF2142 for instance, I know people with Dual-Core, 2gig RAM, 7950GTX, Win XP, systems that stutter for about a minute after the load is complete. Plenty of other people do with less,equal, or more powerful systems.

I'm unsure of other games because I haven't played too many PC games but the same problem can be assumed.

And I mean stuttering as when you see the HDD activity light lit up while your game stutters.

 

yeah i mean i definitely acknowledge that some games might just be coded improperly, but adding ram should solve the problem for games, assuming they are coded well.

 

I've got 2gb RAM, using Vista Home Premium

The thing is it happens for Homeworld 2 as well. But for only one particular mission... Since Homeworld 2 is such an old game I shouldn't have any problems with stuttering at all...

How do I monitor the pagefile thingie?

 

Do you have a harddisk light on your laptop? does it blink a lot when the stuttering starts? If yes then your harddisk is being accesed and something is loaded. It might be new textuers or the pagefile moving data from and into the ram.

 

Yes the stuttering starts when my HDD is blinking... How do I tell the system to load everything into RAM first?

As for Vista Nvidia drivers, my A8JS came preloaded with the drivers, so I'm not sure whether it's new or how should I go about updating the 7700go Drivers for Vista... can someone point me in the right direction? I've been wanting to update them for a long time.

Also

Under Windows Task Manager => Performance tab
My physical memory stats are:

Total 2046 MB
Cached 1460 MB
Free 43 MB

What's up with that? There's so little free mem and the total doesn't add up to 2GB!

Under System

Page file 1052M/4314M

 

its counting your page file i guess.

i didn't know you didn't have updated video card drivers. that will almost CERTAINLY improve your performance by huge margins in a variety of games, and most likely eliminate your stuttering issue as well.

http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/drivers/vista

i personally am using 162.18, i recommend that one

OR

the latest driver that passes whql

OR

simply the latest driver

 

Ok i've downloaded 162.18 and unzipped it to a directory. How do I get it installed???? There's so many files here!

Thanks in advance

 

Ok I've pointed 162.18 via Device Manager to my Nvidia card... Turns out that I already have this version!

Trying out 162.22 now....

 

Ok seems like I'm not doing it correctly?

Using Device Manager, I:

1) Right Click on Nvidia 7700go under Display Adapters and click Update Driver Software

2) Then I manually browse and direct the device manager to C:\Nvidia 162.22 (The folder I extracted the drivers to.)

3) It then tells me that I have the latest drivers installed.


So I d/l 163.14, do the same thing, and it tells me I have the latest drivers installed.

Then I looked inside the folder, and found setup.exe

I run the setup, and it tells me

"The NVIDIA Setup Program cannot locate any drivers that are compatible with your current hardware and will now exit."

 

oh oh ok.

step 1: download the modded inf file from laptopvideo2go.com (the one that goes with the specific driver you want to install). then drag the inf file into the driver folder, and click "ok" to replace the original with the modded version. you can find the inf files on the same page as the "download drivers" page. its important that you use the correct one that matches your driver version.

step 2: uninstall your current gpu driver. you can take care of that in add/remove programs in the control panel. it should be listed as nvidia gpu driver or something obvious like that.

step 3: reboot

step 4: on boot, you will see a "found new hardware" window. follow the prompts, you will have an opportunity to point that "found new hardware" program to a specific directory. point it to the driver folder.

alternate step 4: if you weren't successful with step 4, as an alternative you can double click on setup.exe in the driver folder

 

Masterchef, thank you very very much. That worked for me. Finally, the stuttering is gone and I had overall improvement in my framerates as well.

THANK YOU!