What is normal stuttering and what isn't?

Hello all,

I am asking you the following and probably stupid question about stuttering as I am a little bit confused now, after updating my nvidia drivers to 177.83. I sometimes note, mainly in cod4, that (when waliking or turning / spinning) there are some jerks in the scenarios representation as though there was an hesitation in their building. I sometimes think that it is linked to the HDD (I have 2 raid0 HDD) loading the game frames but other times I do not see the HDD light on and I see these jerks. It does not happen periodically but sometimes and it does not really prevent me from playing. I do not rememeber to have seen this with 165.77 driver but maybe I did not really pay attention to it. I note this behaviour as well during fsx (much more eveident with 175.32 drivers) , i.e. every 15-30sec there is a small hesitation visible in the game but without a real drop in the fps. These jerks seem to be much more rare in crysis or dirt (colin mcrae).
My question is then: is it normal to have sometimes this kind of hesitations in the scenarios building during cod4 or fsx or other games? Is this a 'stuttering' or should the game be smooth always and indefinitively? How a real stuttering might be qualified / recognized vs. what I see?

Sorry again for the newbie / noob question but I would like to understand a little bit more about all of this.
FYI I set COD4 at max / ultra setting (1900x1200) and I saw the same hesitations even at 1240x768 resolution.

Thank you for your kind help

Ciao

 

consumers would not be happy if *any* 'stuttering' were 'normal'

games do not use the hd too load game frames, for example in cod it is only used when loading the map (when you see the loading screen before entering a game in multiplayer); after that everything runs off ram and the gpu. you definitely have the graphics power to run this smoothly (at max i think, not an expert though) so i would say its a driver issue. try out some other drivers and see if you get the same stuttering.

it could also be an issue with your sli, make sure its enable in cod and the drivers support it as well.

 

I heard that aimbot software makes your frames stutter

Ok, now seriously: Have you played enough other games to check for a similar occurrence? Like cheese said, this could just be a small driver issue for COD4. You may want to try loading different driver versions and seeing if it changes. If this same thing happens in other games, I'd start suspecting it could be some hardware.

 

thank you for your answers; it is indeed strange as the game always runs at 60fps (with everything at ULTRA and V-sync) but sometimes (and not often) there are very short jerks as if there was a hesitation in the scenarios building. Anyway the game is very playabvle but I would like to know whether other people experience always an undefinitively fluid scenes buliding as soon as walking (indeed as soon as I run the scenes are very fluid)
Thank you