stuttering in games

hmm...don't blame my IGP for this one. it runs fine.

when i play RTS games (i love rts), i pause on areas where there is low processsing (not sure cpu or gpu), then scroll to areas of high detail, the game will stutter for a short while, then return to smooth again.

fyi, game is CNC Generals

i've disabled power savings and set to high performance.

specs:
intel c2d t5800 2ghz
Intel gma 4500MHD / GM45 Montevina / centrino
3GB dual channel ram 667MHz
5200rpm Scorpio Blue 320gb


*oops i posted in the wrong section. can some moderator plz put it in the correct section? thnx

 

Its the GPU. The intel 4500 is not powerful enough to run the game perfectly smooth. I know people who have tried also.

 

Its actually not necessarily the GPU thats the problem. The same thing happens to me (doesn't matter the setting) and the only way to improve performance is to disable a cpu through "Set Affinity" in task manager.

I have a thread about my problem here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=411344

 

hmm thanks rascalking. but i don't get why disabling proc affinity would speed up gameplay, cause i thought dual core would mean more power? (i know that these older games i play might not support multithreading). anyways i'll try it, it just might be heat, cause this lappy burns, even when idling in an air-conditioned room.

iGrim, last time i had a Pentium 4 2.8GHz with Intel Extreme Graphics 2, 1.5GB RAM and CNC Generals runs well on low settings. NO WAY the GMA 4500MHD could not run it properly.

 

CnC Generals isn't that demanding I think, considering it's a 4 years old game.
I'm playing Counter Strike: Source in M4500HD with maximum setting without any stuttering (there are still some minor slow-down btw).

Have you tried to update the IGP drivers?

 

You see the problem is that the intel integrated GPU= crap , trash and not worth buying. They have no power and are nver able to properly play games. I leanrt it the hard way when i used a dumb desktop with intel graphics to play games for 4-5 years because i was poor then. When i got my NVDIA card, i could only say wow.... so here's a tip..throw away ur notebook.......

 

Come on, they can run some games especially old ones quite fluently. Maybe the problem is that too much detail (i.e. buildings, units are concentrated with background scenery) is being asked to be rendered by the GPU all at once. Try dialing down the settings for any differences.

 

@razznuts: im no noob i know what and when to update drivers. CNC Generals IS around 4-5 years old all right, and how come the Extreme Graphics 2 can run it fine. CS:S has extremely low requirements.

throwing my notebook is out of the question i have to use it through college and uni (my parents won't get a new one for me)

the settings are lowest, aside from the res (1024x768).

ah and rascalking, the affinity thingy works a bit, i think. could be wishful thinking (fingers crossed).

 

I suspect it's a processor issue, and I don't think it's quite the same as rascalking's, as his problem seems to occur regularly, while yours occurs with a specific trigger. FWIW, I've seen much the same issue when playing Act of War (a similar era game, with somewhat more demanding graphics requirements) on my aging system (NX860XL, T7200, GeForce Go 7900 GS). I suspect the stutter we see is the program dumping the tables of information on the area we were just viewing, and reloading the data needed for the area we just moved to.

Although... if setting the processor affinity actually works (never tried that) I now have an oddball theory that the CPU is actually speedstepping down while we're in a lower detail area, and the stutter is the processor jumping back up to speed when we hit an area with more objects for the CPU to track... If that was the case, setting the affinity works because it makes the whole program run on one core, keeping that core at full speed at all times and thus negating the stutter of the stepup. Pure speculation there, though.

 

uuuu....CNC Generals and CS:S are two different games...Intel Extreme Graphics 2 can NOT run CNC Generals at any resolution and detail faster than like 4 fps.

 

@judicator i also suspected speedstepping. however, i already used RMClock to set power profile to ONLY 10x. it shows 1.99 or 2.00 in the system tray, so doesn't look like much speedstepping. This problem isn't specific to Generals only. NFS Most Wanted, Warcraft III and CABAL Online also have this prob . it really spoils the fun. Oh and Generals can be demanding also, when you select the Disable Dynamic LOD.

And @iGrim, Extreme Graphics can run Generals. Im not lying. If i were, why would i bother putting up with this crap.

 

No offense, bro. No such intention at all.

It's just I did notice a bit of performance increase after I updated Intel driver.
Well.. that's definitely not your case.

If you said CS:S system requirement is extremely low, Isn't it wrong if I say CnC:G's is ultra low?

Anyway, It's my mistake since the first place to compare games with different genre.

I'm playing Warcraft III and if I hovered back from empty to densely populated area, I'll also notice a slight slowdown, (I believe you can't say it's stuttering.)

Anyway, As you might know, Intel GMA driver has it's own power-saving, when you say high-performance, is that Windows', Intel's or both?

I used to have annoying stuttering issue and found out Intel GMA power saving was actually the culprit.


Good luck

 

min reqs for CS:S
1.2ghz,dx7 card

min reqs for CNC Generals
1.8ghz, dx8 card

slight slowdown? its a bit more than that. this is relative tho
the power settings are high performance (windows) and disable power savings (intel gma).

 

Ah, you're actually comparing CS:S minimum requirement with CnC G recommended requirement.

CnC Minimum requirement:

Processor: Intel Pentium III/AMD Athlon - 800MHz
Memory: 128 MB RAM
CD-ROM/DVD-ROM Drive: 8x
Hard Disk Space: 1.8 GB
Graphics Card: 32MB - Nvidia GeForce 2 or ATI Radeon 7500 AGP video card.

have you tried benchmarking your system and see whether you got the value you should?

btw, When I said 'slight slowdown' I mean the game was still fully playable.

 

well there this GPU emulation software in the forums here. Here's the link.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=408550

It might help although ur games aren't supported by the software but if were u , i'd give it out a try....

 

woopsy @razznuts, my bad. and shouldn't that min reqs for cnc generals be all the more reason that this shouldn't lag on my lappy?! (just joking)

@sean, i'll try out that 3d analyzer again, although i know that it crashes NFS MW (last time i tried it). will just fiddle around with the checkboxes.

fyi, i managed to iron out those stuttering in Generals with this stupidly long (imo) list of tweaks:

all effects disabled, texture and particle at lowest
disable pagefile (hey it actually works! after all i have 3gb dual channel ram)
vista and intel gma settings at high performance/no power saving
hdd sata tweak
services thingies
no antivirus/antispyware (i suspect Avira might account for some of the lag. i have 64bit vista, so its quite all right)
disabling unneeded devices (including my cd/dvd drive, card readers & wifi)

but NFS MW still stutters...

 

Time to get to the point.

The Intel 4500 graphics are not powerful enough to run the game well.

If you cant understand this then Im sorry...

 

There is a BIOS menu and you can turn off the power saver or something that undervolts your CPU or GPU

 

well @iGrim, fyi i played NFS MW on an even lousier system before

Intel Pentium D 2.8GHz
512MB RAM
Intel 965 chipset/gma

and it worked well. Somehow something isn't right.

@generationgx, i have undervolted the cpu already. it seems to help the temps slightly and (again might be wishful thinking) the games seem to run slightly better.

 

Something I noticed when I was reading AnandTech's review of the new Lynnfield i7s... they mention Core Parking as new feature. Basically, Core Parking keeps threads from moving to another core if there will be a big drop in performance. Apparently that's a bigger issue with hyper-threading, due to the mix of physical and logical cores, but I wonder if that's also the case with non-hyper-threading C2Ds. That could explain why setting the core affinity might make things run better.

 

Your theory doen't stand on solid ground. Games are designed (i.e. programmed) as one big loop. So, when the focuse is on the game window a cpu will run at its full speed, even if the game doesn't need all the power offered by the cpu. So if you play a game that can run with, for example, a pentium 3, whether you play it with a pentium 3 or a core 2 duo, both CPU will run at their full speed as soon as the focus is on the game window.

Now, the only thing that will vary is whether or not a game supports multiple cores CPUs. If it doesn't, then the entire game including the game loop will be run by one core while the other core will be either idle or will likely be doing Windows house keeping.

If a game support multi core cpus, then the game loop will be run by one core and the rest of the game elements (like memory managment...) will be run on the rest of the cores.

Anyways, whether or not a game supports multi core cpu, all the core on a cpu will run at the speed of the core running ther game loop. The only difference will be that the load of the core running the loop is 100% while the other cores will have a load of %100 or less (often less then a 100%). I mean the core under the haviest load dectates the speed of the entire CPU.

What I've just explained above hold true for all CPUs (mobile and desktop) up to and including core 2 duo. The i7 and i5 cpus are different, because, if I'm not mistaken, they can run their cores at different freqhencies. In other words, one core can run at 2Ghz while the other one runs at 1.2Ghz.

 

Actually, Enhanced Speedstep apparently dynamically sets the speed based on CPU load. Thus, no matter where the focus is, if the game doesn't need the full power of the CPU (well, actually, core) the CPU will downclock to a more appropriate level. Even so, you are correct that speedstep should probably set the same speed on both cores, so it probably wouldn't be downclocking. Since that theory is now gone, I wonder if core parking (or perhaps more appropriately, non-parking) has anything to do with it core affinity working.

 

I have to disagree. Games are not designed as other types of applications. Most application that run under windows as event driven. That means that the computer/CPU is idle monitoring the activity of the user. When a use make some sort of input, such as a mouse a click, the cpu/computer will respond to it by processing the necessary information and outputing a result.

The operating system (in this case windows) handle the event. Events are also monitored through a loop, but somehow this loop is optimsed in such a way that the CPU looks almost idle in the absence of user input. If a computer is switched ON, and left ON for a little while with no applications running in the background, and with no input from a user, the cpu load is never 0. It always oscillates between 0% and some low value (3-4%). This is because of the event handler looking/monitoring for user inputs.

Games are different and Speed Step can't do anything about them. Games are not events driven. They rely on a loop, and when ever a computer is executing a loop it forces a CPU to run at it's full speed.

If you want to beleive the above or not it's rally up to you.

Have you tried to manually force you CPU to run at its fasted speed all the time? This will allow you to elimitate the CPU as source of
there are different ways to do that:
1- disabling speed stem in the bios (if applicable)
2- changing the power management under windows.
3- using RMclock

 

I read that the intel 4500 is about 20 to 30% fater that the intel x3100. I played NFS MW on a laptop with the x3100. The game was smoth in most cases apart from some section in the motorway where there is a lot of trees. The laptop I played the game on has a T7300. So I think that the slow down in the game was because of the GPU not the CPU.

Since the intel 4500 is faster the game should run smother. The 4500 should even handle NFS undercover (low setting of course).

 

If you read the second half of my post, you'll note that I don't really think that's the issue anymore. It was just a theory to explain why setting core affinity might work.

 

You dont seem to understand something here.... NFS and C&C Generals are two completely different games.....

 

My mistake I was thinking of something else when I wrote the above post

 

they are completely different games, i'll agree. but imo i think the NFS requires more power than Generals (am i right?). It might be my lousy 2GHz T5800 as well...