Help me stop this horrible stuttering on my SLI rig.

Hi all,

This is my second attempt to stop stuttering in COD4. The config of my Rig is on my Sig (I'm a Poet). If you don't know what stuttering is here is a brief explanation

While you are playing the games seams fluid. Suddentely comes a explosion, or some soldier enters your line of vision and the movement stops for less then a second, procedding aftewards as usual. This is just an example, it can happen any time, including in start up screens when you move the mouse.

I think that tried everything. In my last attempt, tried a fresh install of XP with standard Clevo drivers to no avail (Yes, Windows XP) and updated to the latest BIOS so I guess it is not from that.

I'm starting to think it is my video cards firmware.

If you don't have this issue and you have a config similar to mine please post:

1) BIOS Revision
2) Keyboard Firmware
3) Driver Version
4) Video Card Firmware Version

Thanks in advance for any help.

1) D900c 1.00.11
2) 1.00.05
3) NVIDIA 167.43
4) Parent Card (60.84.5b.00.11), Child Card (60.84.5b.00.b2)

I tried almost all COD4 settings too to no avail. Some settings I guess it minimized the problem, but is always there. My current resolution is 1400x1050.

It seams odd that the video cards have different FWs, but what do I know?

Trance

 

I had a problem with COD4 on my desktop, I did not install it on my D901c tho.

TF2 on the Clevo...

I had to back off my overclock of my FX60, Before COD4 was stable.

Have you tried lowering your Res. in the game?
backing off AA (if it's on)
V sync Off?

Just to see if your stuttering goes away?

is your stuttering just in non lan play, or is it in Online play?

Good luck.

 

I have experienced shuttering mainly in Crysis. What I did was lower the resolution and it seems that it made a big difference. Also, I`ve set every possible setting in the nvidia control panel for maximum performance...
I can`t figure out what causes the stuttering though, I had issues with it in UT3 also before I lowered the resolution(1/2 WUXGA, 960x600 seems to work at over 50 fps, 5/5 details , no stuttering. However,same details at 1280x800 will get the fps down to 10 at times, which is ridiculous.
Based on my experince, it`s all in the drivers.
Make sure your computer is not using resources for other applications while gaming,especially NOT a lot of them...

 

Hi, thank you for your replies.

Is on both, Multiplayer and Single Player. Unless I put it in a real low res graphics settings I can get rid of it 960x600 is pretty low for an SLi Rig running COD4. VSync is also off, and disabled AA also. Even at 1280x1024 the shuttering is there in some occasions. But that defeats the purpose of having such a monster.

As I said tried a lot of different settings. I haven't managed to get fully rid of the stuttering at "acceptable" resolutions on a SLi rig.

Can you guys give the FW versions of your cards? I just can't belive that this machine can't run COD4 at 1400x1050 with without any stuttering at all.

I'm not being picky, let me tell you that the problem is enough to loose some frags. So it does affects the game play.

Trance
PS: Just go to the NVIDIA Control Panel, System Information link to get it if you don't know how.

 

Trance, do you get stuttering on any other games? are they at high res only?

 

I have cod4 and indeed i experiece that slight stutter where the game stops for a split second and starts again.

It's mainly the drivers not the card itself.

also its a bit of lag, cod4 has good netcode, a ping of 100-200 is still playable, you dont need to 'lead' your shots as much, it uses the graphics card to conpensate for the difference in ping to the server and the graphics card is simply updating itself, annoying yes.

if your offline and it happens, its sli driver issues, try using 174.20 its the latest beta driver, i cant find the link to the review now, but performance for 8800MGTX has improved considerably with them. grab them from laptopsvideo2go.

 

That is a test I need to do has COD4 is the only game I have installed for quite awhile (given up on Crysis). I'll try Assassins Creed once it get's out.

I heard so many things about this problem, including firmware related, so I'm gathering data and experiences. It seams that very few d901c owners play COD4 on their rig to get feedback.

Trance
ps: "if your offline and it happens, its sli driver issues" it happens on Single Player mode too.

 

did u set-up the SLi correctly, if your driver doesnt support SLi then you have to do an modification to get it running smoothly.

 

Stutters in the new games comes from fragmented harddrives or drivers/configs.

I had that issue with UT3 and Crysis, until I used Diskeeper and deragged my HDD... now its much smoother.

You must disable spyware software, and anti-virus/firewall suites when gaming.

Also remember to do a CHKDSK C: /F before doing the defrag.

 

Hi Gophn and Naticus,

Gophn: "Stutters in the new games comes from fragmented harddrives or drivers/configs."

But should I defrag a system in RAID 0? I've never defragged my drives, maybe I should.

Naticus: "did u set-up the SLi correctly, if your driver doesnt support SLi then you have to do an modification to get it running smoothly."

Well, I enabled SLi in the NVIDIA Control Panel. What else should I do?

Trance

 

haha he's right about the hdd. I remember I used to defrag my drive every couple of days and didn't do that for a while. Thats when crysis started stuttering. Thanks for the tip

 

get Diskeeper Lite (x86 + x64) for free here:
http://www.intel.com/design/motherbd/software/idu/download.htm

Its in the Intel Desktop Utilities... in the 88.9 MB download

Just extract the files from the EXE and you will see the Diskeeper folders (one for 32-bit, one for 64-bit).

Works great.

 

Neat program

 

I think I already know what my problem is (and probably of many).

I have connect to the USB ports:

* Gaming Pad (requires power)
* 5.1 Headphones (required power)
* Mouse (requires power)

Interesting enough, yesterday I installed drivers NVIDIA 169.04 to no avail, even when tailored to Performance. I disabled SLi and same problem.

Then I thought, let me play with the keyboard. While in the game I discoconnected the gaming pad and bang no stuttring (with no SLi). I connected it back up and almost no stuttering (I've found it once).

There must be something wrong with the USB ports or drivers, or simply I have too many power "hungry" devices connected.

I'll let you know with further testing.

Trance

 

I got the same stuttering in cod4 (not crysis) but only once in a while not all the time. It seems to happen when there is a lot going on so I always just suspected it was computer lag created by computer resource demands. Defragmenting is probably not the problem.
I get it even after defragging which I do regularly.
Anyhow I say "got" cause I'm fed up with multiplayer cod4. I'm going back to cs or finding a new game where you can at least get a descent k:d ratio that isn't skewed by "AI" controlled "Air" deaths. After the first few weeks it just stopped being fun anymore.
Oh and I use an external keyboard, mouse and monitor with my 9260 in sli...
Although it's probably not usb by itself at least for what it's worth all 4 ports are in use on mine.

 

Basically, the problem is that you've probably got too many devices connected to USB period. The power demands of these devices may play a role in the problem, but that isn't the main source of the problem.

Essentially, what you're probably seeing is an artifact of the USB protocol that relates to hardware interrupts. As I understand it, the USB controller communicates in 1ms frames with the various USB devices, and schedules any required interrupts at the end of each frame. In particular, in your configuration, that probably means that there are interrupts from the game controller and the mouse (and the keyboard as well if it's USB) getting piled up at the end of each USB frame, and then being run through the CPU one right after the other. Doing that would cause a repeated set of system interrupts that, taken together in the aggregate could be causing the system to stutter as it processes the interrupts.

In addition to the normal interrupts that may be generated during normal operation by the devices you have attached, you may also be getting additional interrupts caused by the total power demand of the devices causing intermittent resets. Depending on whether the USB system in the notebook is setup to have an overpower condition controlled by one common device (called "ganging" the USB ports) or individually, an overpower condition caused by one device may be causing all three devices to trigger reset interrupts. This is a likely scenario since ganging ports for overpower protection is cheaper than doing each port individually, most system makers gang their USB ports.

For example, on your setup, the most likely source of an overpower condition would be the headphones, which have a constantly changing power demand. So, it is possible that when your headphones impose a peak load on the USB port they're attached to, they trigger an overpower condition that affects the entire bus due to the use of a ganging solution for overpower protection. That would cause all three devices to trigger a reset interrupt, meaning that, together with the two interrupts likely generated by the game pad and the mouse during normal operations, your system may be intermittently generating a bunched set of five interrupts.

One way to see if this is a possible cause would be to vary the volume on the headphones in a slow, predictable manner to see if it has any effect on the stuttering. If the rate of stuttering increases as volume increases, and decreases as volume decreases, then I think you would be safe in concluding that the headphones were most likely triggering additional system interrupts, thereby causing the system to stutter as it gagged on processing a bunched set of interrupts.

 

My USB ports have:
-A USB sound card
-an optical mouse
(sometimes) : - my camera
- my w810i phone
-flash drive.

Lol. Might try cutting down the power requirements , and I`m already downloading the program Gophn sugested. Let`s see if it`s any better than the Win Xp defragger(which when checking the before and after fragmentation level, there was no difference...) .

@Bwhxeon , why are you selling your M570RU? getting a D901c ?

 

not sure what I want.....

 

^ you are one undecided dude....get a super fast desktop and a medium laptop...and still keep it under 3 K then...

 

I think thats what I'm gonna do, lugging around a laptop for work and a laptop for playing isn't much fun...

 

I second (or is that third) the motion - if you're living arrangements permit you to park a honkin' big desktop in the middle of the room to use for gaming, then you'd certainly be better off doing that, and using the change you find when you move the sofa out of the way of your new desktop to buy a competent little business laptop for work - a _Dell, maybe.

 

A EEE Pc

 

Well folks I got a big problem:

DON'T DEFRAG YOUR HDD's WHEN USING A RAID 0 CONFIGURATION OTHERWISE KISS GOOD BYE YOUR DATA!

Yep , it happened with Diskkeeper. I knew it was not a good advice to my particular setup, but lately i'm lacking in confidence . It might not happen to you but why risk it?

Diskeeper managed to make a mess of file handlers, erase the MBR of both my Vista and XP installs even on different partitions (so basically no boot at all). Actually to really recover I had to fully recreate the boot partition (I formated it first and installed Vista biut on first reboot, blue screen on hdd crccheck.

Anyway, I'm in the process of reinstalling the system and recovering some files. Dumn as I am sometimes, I lost some work!

I'll keep you guys posted. I'm inclined to think that it might be the power to support my headphones, or indeed COD4 sucks with SLi due to lack of drivers. This becouse the problem seams to go away when I use a single card setup (again less power?).

Trance
PS: By the way, SLi ot no SLi have no change (or neglegible) in FPS count with COD4. You guys still have not given me the FW version of your cards.

 

RAID doesn't need defragging.
the raid controller sorts this stuff out. its part of the way it stores the files and is setup. you don't need to defrag a raided file system.

 

@DFTrance - you have my sympathies.

 

Dexgo, I knew that then and I know that now man. I just thought, "what a heck let me just try this to solve the stuttering, maybe I'll get lucky and I'm missing something ". Too far streched a thought ... I know.

Trance
PS: Gophn, the reason why a defrag solve you the performance problem on Crysis might have to do with the memory page file. In the case of a RAID system, the page file is "never" fragmented (mine was not). That is one of the benefits of one having a RAID setup (I know you don't have your rig setup for RAID as far as I remember).

 

Diskeeper is giving me a hard time also.
Tried to defrag the system , but man, that`s when shiet started breaking down. IE stopped working, lag in browsing files and explorer,and winamp, so I uninstalled to bastard.
I really wish there was a better defragger than the XP one, since that one does nothing for me right now...

Sorry to hear that DFTrance ... I`m backing up my system just in case before any defragging

 

I hate to say this but the dual 8700's are weak bud.

they only have a 128 bit bus. and SLI usually only benifits at higher resolutions.

and the 8700s are crippled at higher resolutions.

with 1 8800 I have no stuttering at COD4 or Crysis.

I know with dual 7950's you wouldnt have stuttering either.

All the people I know that had the dual 8700's in their XPS's had mega mega stuttering.

Upgrade back to dual 7950's IMO they still are great and preform just as good as 1 8800m.

or upgrade to 8800m.

 

I believe that neither NVIDIA or Clevo have not sorted out SLi on the 8000M video card series.

It is not working as intended yet. Wether it will ever work with th 8700M GT series it remains to be seen. Exacly for the same reasons I believe 8800M GTX SLi is yet to come.

I've given up hope over COD4 in SLi mode. I'll just play it in single card mode (more playable, more frags, identical looks) but I feel my money wasted over marketing speal (not good).

I hope the same does not happen with other games to come. Such as Assassins Creed and FarCry otherwise ... well you conclude.

Trance
PS: Given up on Crysis too (what is the point of such potential if we cannot get to it) There goes the value proposition of Clevo cutting edge gaming rigs at least with the 8000 video card series and the unmistakenbly sucking MXMIV benefits.

 

maybe Clevo sux when it comes to drivers and SLI.

have they every had a Great working SLI for any medium?

I know Dell "Just" came into the game. and is beating us down with Drivers/Support/SLI.

well it's like when Sony jumped into the Video Game Market.

First Timer and Murdered the Competition and raised the bar.

this will trully suck if they never get thier sit together.

 

The Go 7950 GTX where great SLi performers, so there is still hope. I know, my initial system was with those cards.

Trance
PS: ... and DELL SLi solution it is cheaper then a Clevo SLi solution ... at least if you buy them in Europe.

 

Dell came late to the game and they are hitting bullzeyes!

Clevo came way early and is becoming vaporware.

what if they release and it's buggy and not good?

 

I know I read lots about the 7950's I intitally wanted them.

I would choose them over any other cards cept the 8800m. which preforms just like 2 7950's i think

trance, how many 3dmarks did the sli 7950 with q6600 quads get?

like 10k? or more?

 

I would get less then the 8700M GT in SLi (not much less). But in games (where it matters) no stuttering at all at high res.

Trance
PS: Judging by other people yet with those cards they get "excellent" results with Crysis so I guess they are still hot.

 

Hello DFTrance, long time. I would rather have been replying to your post under happier circumstances but alas.. As far as your stuttering or that momentary lag is concerned well, at least in my opinion, it is not your cards or anything like that, it is your Hard Drive accessing info for the game you are playing, hence the stuttering when you first load the game and move the mouse, your memory and the memory in your cards are loading the textures and needless to say the memory is a lot faster than your HD. If you will try to keep an eye on your HD light when the lag happens, you will notice the HD light is coming on, now it does that all along but more so during the stutter and especially when you move your mouse when you first load the game. Of course I could be totally wrong, but from my experience, games with heavy graphics tend to cause bit of stuttering here and there. Nature of the beast. Try running the game from your SATA 3.0Gb/s 72K HD and see if that makes a difference.

As for Raid0 well I think it is way overrated. I used to run my 9260 with raid0 but I had one of my HDs fail since the way they sit in the bay on top of each other creates too much heat. I had the Seagates and downloaded the Seatools booted up to check the Temps since you can not do that in windows if you are running raid0 and the temps were in the high 60s all the time and that is under normal load. So Sager replaced my HDs and now I am running single HD setup and one of the HDs is under the Battery in the third slot. I personally saw no difference in performance when it comes to gaming or normal operations between the 2 setups. Plus the HDs run a lot cooler especially the one in the third bay, surprisingly it runs in the high 30 to low 40s under full load, go figure. I am mentioning this so maybe someone can avoid a HD failure due to heat. You can still use raid0 with one HD in the first slot and another in the third slot under the Battery. Still I see no reason to use Raid0 unless you are into Benchmark results. As a matter of fact I just ordered a 200 gig Seagate Sata2 3.0Gb/s with 16MB of cache from Newegg and will just run that in the third slot. I might just have a 2 months old Travelstar 80gig 72K HD up for sale.

I am still waiting on eleron911 to sell me his 7950GTX for a reasonable price.. Come on eleron911 hurry up and buy your 8800GTX, don’t you want higher frame rates? LOL

 

Helloooooo WackMan, long time no letter's

Well I don't think it has to do with what you point out. Why?

* 1) The drive light is not blinking most of the time ... when it happens
* 2) In single card mode happens a lot less, if ever at all.

What I experience in my rig is that every say 20 seconds I get shuttering in COD4 when in SLi. So is pretty much all the time, in every single map.

I say 20 seconds ... is just for you to get an idea. What I mean, is that most probably it will happen in the next explosion or in the next corner. It is not consistent as in some very rare cases I can play with no shuttering at all in SLi but in next reboot or scene who knows

Trance
PS: I'll buy one of this WDG1SU5000 in conjunction with Acronys True Image to secure myself further over storage related failures.

 

Ah the frustrations of owning a high end gaming laptop.. You remember I went through that when I first got my NP9260. It seems to do better when I stopped using raid0 and stopped being so picky..lol I still experience a few hiccups here and there but nothing major so I overlook them.. What else to do.

I feel for you my friend, as for me not being on too much, well work and life, you know how that goes..

Hope you can sort your problem out soon and nothing is more frustrating that having some program screw up your computer.

Good luck my friend

 

I came across something else that might be a hint in the direction of a solution to the stuttering, assuming (as I am) that is related to system interrupts hitting the cpu and overloading it. Apparently, wireless adapters can sometimes generate too many system interrupts (due to bugs in the firmware, I believe). This possibility is obliquely referred to in this online forum(not on notebookreview.com). See the posts by posters Phenom9600 and molotov about two-thirds of the way down the page.

So, another element to check (once you get everything put back together and it still stutters) would be the effect that turning the wireless adapter on and off has on the stuttering.


EDIT: Also, while I don't really know to what degree a software RAID-0 setup taxes the system, it definitely does put an additional load on the CPU, and the RAID controller is probably continually using the CPU even when it's not accessing the disks for purposes of doing monitoring and the computations necessary to keep track of the RAID'ed disks.

Finally, it may be that at bottom the stuttering problem is due to all of the various things you have going on with the system that are increasing the number of interrupts going to the CPU: USB devices with high power demands, software RAID controller, and (possibly) issues with the wireless.

 

I guess your problem is different from mine, but I will write this post anyway.

Is your stuttering regular? I had stuttering/pauses regularly every 5-10 seconds when gaming GTR2 with my original graphic driver. One of few drivers that did not stutter/pause was 174.16. In my case it was a driver problem.

(I have Clevo 570 + Vista 32 bit + 8800M. Just to add, all but the original drivers downclocked the card until Clevo updated their bios recently.)

Thinking of it, one other solution for me was to change the ACPI driver. That removed the stuttering/pauses. The downside was that only one core was used I believe.

 

Since nobody mentioned this before let me say that the nVidia default and recommeded setup for COD4 (AND Crysis) is SINGLE CARD.
SLI is not recommended by them.
Yeah I know you can make it work but that's still the nVidia recommended setting. Cod4 runs fine with a single 7950 gtx (9260) and didn't perform any better (for me at least) in sli. Even so using a single card never stopped the occasional stuttering on mine.

IMO this is not a fragmented disk problem.
I see this same issue on every system I've ever been on that uses an on board audio chip instead of a dedicated sound card and I'm talking desktops here not laptops. I've also seen it in many apps not just games. Even windows media player skips playing mp3's on those systems IF enough other stuff is going on. That includes single and dual core systems.
Now, whether that's because of irq's as one guy suggested or the cpu is just too busy at that moment to get to everything or something else, I don't know. My solution for my desktops was add a quality dedicated sound card and the problem would disappear.
For my 9260, I've just learned to frown and move on. Other than updating the Real tech drivers (which I've done twice to no avail) there's little else you can do for a laptop. Real tech audio isn't nearly as good as creatives audigy stuff. That's just the way it is. On the usb sound card(s), my nephew bought several different ones for lanning and didn't get the same qual on those either.
Creative does make a pcmcia slot sound card for laptops but I don't know if it is any good and it cost ~$100 which is the same price or more as comparable pci slot based cards for desktops!
... for what it is worth...

 

I'll try that since I have an external USB Audio Card from Creative.

By the way, it is the first time I read that the NVIDIA recommended settings for COD4 is not SLi. Indeed, if you install the latest drivers from laptopvideo2go you will see that once SLi is enabled, in the profiles section for COD4 the NVIDIA recommended Settings is SLi.

http://forums.slizone.com/lofiversion/index.php?t14701.html

On Vista x64 with the latest drivers drom laptopvideo2go I can confirm that I get better results with a single card.

I have yet not recovered my XP install.

Trance
PS: I guess it may not be recommended for 8700M GT based SLi's.

 

I sugest going to XP. Man, if Vista stuttered in COD4, there is absolutely NO stuttering in XP.
Just a heads up.

 

Ok, just 'cause I like researching obscure technical issues, I've come up with another thing to check for regarding the stuttering - IRQ conflicts. A number of posts from various fora around the web touch on systems stuttering due to an IRQ conflict. For example, this post from one of the NVidia forums concerns problems that include stuttering and graphics issues, and suggests that, in the poster's case, having the graphic card and the sound card share an IRQ line could be the cause of the stuttering.

Now, while I don't enough to say if this makes any sense, it could, so it would be useful if someone with a stuttering system checked to see if any IRQ resource conflicts show up and, if they do, whether resolving them helps with the stuttering.

Also, Microsoft has apparently redesigned (or, as they're wont to say, "enhanced") the interrupt architecture of Windows in Vista, as described by this whitepaper. The paper isn't terribly enlightening (to me at least) on the subject at hand, but it does suggest that there might be some underlying conflict involving IRQs that the "enhancements" have caused/aggravated, particularly when a driver or device is used that is based on the old architecture (the Vista architecture is supposed to be backwards compatible, but that almost never works out 100% without multiple updates and hotfixes).

 

Does the stuttering occur in 3dmark06?

 

Just to clarify that it stutters in both OSs. I'm recovering XP since the disaster.

No

I'm available but were to start since Everest diagnosis no conflicts? Also how to go around changin IRQs on a Clevo? I knew how to do it on a desktop but not on this lappy ... yet.

What is interesting is that no one with an SLi system as mine came yet and said ... "look I have no stuttering in SLi and COD4 and here is the driver version I use and my FW version is this one". So I guess it is a really common problem and people resort not to say anything and ignore it, tottally avoid the game or simply play on single card mode an don't tell their family afraid that they would have to justify the reason why they spent that amount of money on a high end laptop gaming system.

Trance

 

It does for me. For some reason I seem to get lower min fps than in Vista, although the overall score is at least 200 points bigger.
Trance, you said it stutters less when in single mode?
Then obviousely the problem is the driver.
If not, it`s the allknown 8600M GT stuttering effect we all know about, and since the 8700M GT is basically a higher clocked 8600M Gt...well...fiddle sticks

 

I recently purchased a ProStar 5729 and I also have this problem, but I only have one graphics card. Half life games work just fine, but crysis and world in conflict stutter every few seconds. Ran 3dmark 06 and I get 9359 >.> so it would seem my graphics card is ok. Crysis makes my system kind of screech when it starts in the add screens also, but it stops once I get in game. I know on desktops game stuttering can be caused by a weak psu, is it possible my power brick if faulty?

 

What RAID controller are you using? That is another source of stuttering that some people have experienced (although others have not).

Unfortunately, the more I google around, the more it seems like this is the sort of general-purpose symptom that has multiple, sometimes independent, causes with different solutions.

 

Ok dftrance got some things for you test. First test is to remove all usb accessories and try running any games. Second test is to try those games while on battery mode only. Last test is remove the battery and make sure you are plugged directly into a outlet. I think those test will atleast let you know if any specific device is the problem.

 

I'm honestly looking for people that say "it doesn't stutter if not in rare occasions" at some decent resolution for an SLi rig, say 1600x1050 or something,

That person then can tell us the RAID controller being used, FW version of the both 8700M GT that is being used, BIOS version, Driver Version and eventually a snapshop of the IRQ config taken from Everest or similar tool. That may be the only way I see us finding a general solution.

Otherwise if everyone has this problem I think the "experts" need to have a deep look for a solution for us if we request for one.

Trance
PS: Look I can bare stuttring once in awhile in SLi like I do on a single card but not as often as I described. Especially when we are advised by NVIDIA to use SLi if we have it.