Stuttering in FEAR

FEAR is the only game that is giving me problems on my new E1705. I have looked around for tweaks but found nothing to fix the constant stuttering and skipping in FEAR. Im currently running at 1600x1200 with settings mixed between high and low. I ran the test and had somewhere around 45fps average, which in my books is good enough to play the game smoothly. However the game constantly stutters, even with my powerful system. I was able to play FEAR at a lower res on my less powerful desktop with no stuttering what so ever.

Do you guys know what I can do to fix this? I read that turning fastwrites off could help, but I dont know how to tweak nvidia cards. Thanks.

 

It is probably because you E1705 has 1GB of RAM. Newer games such as FEAR can take advantage of 2GB.

 

Definitely agree with Chaz. I also have the same problem. Look at your computer. Everytime it stutters, you'll probably see your HDD light blinking. Mine does. It's a good indication that you need 2GB of RAM. I'm gonna have to upgrade before too long. It also stutters quite badly when I first load the game as it's still trying to load everything up.

 

What about boosting the virtual ram? Will that help? What's the recommended size for a similar spec E1705 as scriccs'?

 

Virtual RAM is whats making the system studder. Going into the hard disk to grab the info normally stored in the RAM takes a while causing the studder.

 

I was able to play the game on my desktop with a 2.4 ghz Athlon and 1 gig of memory with no problem what so ever. 1 gig may not be that amazing these days, but its enough to run FEAR with no stuttering, it did on my other computer and a couple of my friends. I know 2 gigs is nice, but its not 100% necessary.

The problem Im having is a game issue like Ive read about. Anyone know what I can do other then upgrade my memory?

 

You are also running it on higher settings with the E1705, so that will use more RAM.

 

Exactly, just turn down the graphics settings some.

 

I went into some settings and the one that actually worked was turning down the sound. Even at 800x600 the game would still stutter, but when I turned the sound down to minimum, almost all the stuttering went away. Now I have the occasional split second stutter every 30 seconds instead of every 2 seconds. The game runs a lot better now. Now onto the task of ocing my 7900...

 

Make sure textures are set to medium. I now people with 7800s and 2gb who can't play with textures set to high, just to much thrashing on the memory from the texture sizes.

 

if turning off the sound solved, maybe there is a conflict with your sound drivers. do you have the latest drivers and latest fear patch installed?

 

Far cry and FEAR are known for sound issues. Try lowering hardware acceleration. It helps.

Ivan

 

Here is a site found by emperor:

http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/Reviews/Specific.aspx?ArticleId=17456&PageId=1

They found no increase in FEAR frame rates from one to two Gigs of Ram which means this game may be more GPU limited.

That said I run at 1600x1200 which 90% of the time is very smooth and gorgeous! I get slight hiccups during drive activity which suggest ram paging. If the above site’s info is accurate the drive activity must happen with a 2 gig machine as well. Anyone with a 2 gig machine see this?

I would suggest you check your graphic setting and make sure AA, shadows and vertical sync are turned off. Run the built in bench mark and post your scores. There is also a setting for max and min sounds as well. Unless we get a dedicated sound processor all laptops, and desktops, must devote some CPU cycles to sound processing. Also what may you have running in the back ground like antivir stuff?

 

Min 23
Ave 41
Max 77

Game looks great and runs fine. Once I get around to overclocking my 7900gs I should be able to bumb up the average 5 fps. I just played for an hour with no problems, just minor hiccups. Ill let you guys know if I can find any more of my own tweaks.

 

Yeah, I had been experiencing the same thing, so I turned the sound down to minimum (playing with mute anyway). Here are my results (specs in sig):

Test 1:
Min 28
Max 125
Avg 56

Test 2: (intense gunfight)
Min 15
Max 99
Avg 43

Test 3: (auto-save half-way through; walking in shadows)
Min 0 (auto-save point)
Max 79
Avg 41

I'm pretty happy with this 'Workstation' card.

 

From previous post;

No O.C. or AA - shadows on medium, anisotropic 4X

Min-30 FPS
Average -46 FPS
Max – 89 FPS

O.C. 500/1100

No AA - shadows on medium, anisotropic 4X All settings at 1600x1200, max allowed on a 1900x1200 screen.

Min-39 FPS
Average -60 FPS
Max – 118 FPS

The way I like it: AA 2X really cuts down on jaggies but murders the frame rates, shadows on high, anisotropic 4X, sound set to Min.

Min-30 FPS
Average -47 FPS
Max – 98 FPS
These setting runs really smooth except when loading a sound, saving or unknown disk activity starts up.

If I find a dual pipe, cheap, I will push the chip higher. I went to 600/1100 but was running at 87C so I backed down to 500/1100 and run about 79-81C depending on room temps. The NVIDIA control panel reports that the chip will "slow protect" at 102C.

The 7900GS has been a real O.C. champ so far.

You guys with FX/GTX chips have dual pipes and should get some more performance with O.Cxing, but I haven't seen anything on them on this forum to back that up.

 

I would like to OC the Quadro, but I don't really feel like going through all that work of flashing the vBIOS. I'm happy with avg 45fps at max settings with 4xAA/16xAF.

 

Curious, what resolution are you running? If your running the above settings 1600x1200 your chip is outstanding!

I would have to drop to 1400x900 to like your settings. 1400x900 on my screen is way to fuzzy.

 

1024-768 max settings i got MIN29 AVG45 MAX100 TOSHIBA P100-SD8 duo 2.0 120hd (5400rpm) 2gb ram 7900gs

 

1024-768 max settings (FSAA 2) (AA 2) MIN33 AVG61 MAX143

 

Not bad..Welcome!

How do you like your Toshiba? Way back i ran to CC to snag one on sale but sold out. They were about $1900 before tax.

 

Its pretty sweet paid 2299cdn at london drugs

 

just put in 2 gigs 667 ram i got from new egg in my e1705, downloaded the FEAR demo, and set everything to high (even turned soft shadows on), ran smooth as butter. didn't expect soft shadows to run smoothly, bro has an ATI x800 xl downstairs and that gets 15-20 fps barely with soft shadows.

i love this lappy

 

From previous post, I am runnin at 1024 res. It won't let me go any higher, but I know I could. It's running at 4x AA, and if I could turn up the resolution, I could turn down the AA and be happy. Also, about the soft shadows, from what I've read, if you have AA turned on, Soft Shadows don't do anything even if it's showing on. I tried testing this, and it looks to be true. If I turn off AA, the shadow edges get very soft and the edges are a lot less defined.

As far as performance, I turned up the Virtual Memory on my computer to 2048 (it was set to 1500 something), and it has made things a lot smoother, even with sound at max. It's not really choppy at all now except when I first start playing and it is loading. That's considering almost 60 processes running in the background. Symantec AV uses a LOT of processes. You may need a 7200RPM drive to keep from experiencing stutter though.

 

I have the Geforce go 7900gtx card in my laptop and on fear i can only get max fps of 60 to i have to uncap the fps on fear?

 

as long as you find the framerate to be sufficient, i see no need to uncap it.
a stable framerate is at least as important as a high framerate, and by uncapping, it might fluctuate a lot more.

 

You may have Vsync enabled. Vsync is a setting which caps your framerate to the max refresh rate of your display.

 

ohh ok yeah i turned vsync off and i get max of 215fps but vsync on makes it look so much better.

 

Yep that's what vertical sync does, it keeps the screen from redrawing until every 1/60 of a second on LCDs. Sometimes the tearing and flashing will drive you nuts depending on scene lighting.

 

Just for the record, if the problem is a shortage of memory, changing the resolution will not help. It still has to load all the same models and textures and everything else that seriously eats memory.
The resolution just changes how many pixels the GPU has to compute.

So if you're low on memory, use low detail level on textures/models, if the game allows it, but don't worry about resolution or antialiasing.

On the other hand, if the game is shader-bound, which is often the case when you just get low framerates with no other problems, the problem is that each pixel takes too long to compute for the GPU. So the obvious solution in that scenario, is to lower the resolution, which gives the GPU fewer pixels to work with.

If you're CPU-bound, resolution doesn't make a scrap of difference, and detail level on models/textures doesn't have a big impact either. Instead, look for "extra" features you can disable, or any options that gives you fewer objects on screen (lowering the max draw distance, or using fog is an old trick to achieve this. Lowering the amoung of shrapnel from explosions, particle effects, the length of time before corpses fade out and similar options can help too. If there's an option to lower the detail level of animations, or how many units are onscreen at a time (more relevant in strategy games), those options are nice too.

And if you're just the victim of hardware incompatibilities and/or shoddy drivers, you just have to update drivers, disable sound hardware acceleration or other such tricks. That's usually what gives you stuttering, as opposed to simply a low framerate.

That's the short story of performance tweaking.
Of course I simplified a few things, and left out some aspects, but hope it's helpful anyway.

About VSync, keep in mind that your monitor has a fixed refresh rate. LCD's typically redraw the screen 60 times a second (60 hz). CRT's range from 60-12 Hz). The framerate reported by the game is slightly different .That is simply how many times per second a complete frame has been rendered by the GPU. It might not be shown on the screen at all, but it's been rendered internally, and so it contributes to the framerate. Needless to say, that doesn't make your game run more smoothly, because the extra frames aren't seen by the player anyway. In fact, it can even harm image quality. Say your monitor runs at 60hz, but your game renders 120 frames per second. What happens then is that the monitor starts drawing a frame, and when it's halfway through, that frame is replaced. So the result is that you get the top half of the screen from one frame, and the bottom half from another. In other words, tearing.

So what vsync does is just force the game to only render a new frame when the monitor is actually able to display all of it. If your monitor can only display 60 images per second, there's no point in rendering more than 60.

So for practical purposes, there's absolutely no reason to disable VSync. The one place where you might want to do it is when testing performance. If you get a framerate of 300 without VSync, it obviously means you can raise the detail level a good deal without having to worry abotu performance.

 

Well done and beautifully said. I picked up a thing or two there. As for my problem, I think it was a memory problem involving sound. Now I have a SB Live external which allows me to put the sound on high and take a little stress off the cpu. Game runs flawless now. Only problem is Im addicted to Oblivion which is gonna take me months to play. I still have FEAR and PREY to get through before college .

Anyone know how far I am in FEAR btw? Im still in the offices looking for the girl and guy, I know very vague. Im hoping Im atleast close to half way through.

 

Did the SB Live! 24-bit External fix the problem? ...Great!!!. I didn’t t know that it could take some stress off the cpu. I was thinking to buy such thing but I wasn’t sure it could fix some sound issues. Then… Do you recommend the sound upgrade?

 

Sound cards can actually hog a good deal of CPU. Some onboard sound cards can eat around 10-15% CPU under load, so getting rid of that can give you a noticeable FPS boost.

Creative's cards are generally the best at offloading the CPU. Other brands of cards are still better than onboard (and in many cases offer better sound quality than Creative), but typically use more CPU than Creative's cards.

Keep in mind though, stuttering and such is typically because of hardware/driver problems (often with the sound card), rather than actual CPU load.

 

"So for practical purposes, there's absolutely no reason to disable VSync. The one place where you might want to do it is when testing performance. If you get a framerate of 300 without VSync, it obviously means you can raise the detail level a good deal without having to worry abotu performance."
Sorry Jalf, I totally disagree there.

When I play FEAR my GPU cannot maintain all scenes above 60 FPS. When I turn VSync on I eliminate a lot of screen tearing and such but the games becomes very sluggish trying to Sync properly. For this reason you’ll generally find people keep VSync off.

I can count on two fingers the games I have where I can maintain 150+ frame rate

 

Ok, fair enough. I was mostly referring to the guy above who got a framerate of 215 without vsync. If your framerate is below the monitor's refresh rate, it's a bit different, and disabling vsync can sometime give better results.

 

NP! Could you do us a favor and post your machine in your sig? That way if I got questions, lots!, i know who to look for

Thx