crysis stuttering

Did you find any good white-papers on the subject? I've found papers that discuss issues related to the additional latency created on current multiple-core systems, but nothing that expressly discusses GPU stuttering, or micro-stuttering.

However, it will be interesting to see if the next generation of Intel quadcores (not the Q9xxx CPUs, but the ones to come in 2009) which will have Intel's new Quickpath point-to-point communications system (the replacement for the current FSB, which has grown whiskers on its whiskers).

 

Your problem has a name, and it`s called CRYSIS.
It stutters even on tri SLI 8800M GTXs...

 

oh look everyone, i brought an old thread back from the dead! lol....j/k

seriously though, i believe i have found the culprit to the sli micro stutter with crysis. it is because the 512 megs of video ram is not enough to run the game in all high or very high settings as the video ram gets saturated and stutters. from my testing you need the 1 gig card to avoid micro stutter. i will simply post my reply from another forum that helped me figure out that i was running out of video ram with this game;

i loaded up the original crysis to a saved game state that i know micro stutters. the original crysis plays better than crysis warhead at the same settings on my rig. they said warhead was better oprimized but i found that to not be true at all. anyway, i played crysis on 1920x1200 all high settings. i dropped some settings to low while keeping the critical settings (shaders, shadows, object quality) to high and lo and behold the micro stuttering all but dissapeared. i made sure that i was almost getting a constant 30fps and strafing as normal and there was no microstutter. it played like a single gpu! with all high settings it was 100% assured to have it micro stutter at around 26-40fps. i would guess that all high settings or a combination of settings in the game overloads the video ram.

i built the desktop rig for comparison. the desktop rig consisted of a 780i motherboard, c2d 1.86 overclocked to 2.3 ghz via FSB and dual 8800GTS 640 cards. the gpu's were also overclocked a little as well. i believe the desktop system experienced a cpu bottleneck in sli mode because switching from high to very high to medium settings did not show much of a difference in fps, but this does not matter. what matters is the micro stutter, and i can honestly say that the desktop cards did not exhibit micro stutter, or if they did it was barely noticable. even though my laptop was crushing the desktop in terms of fps (20fps vs. 35fps at one point in a side by side comparison, for example) the desktop had a smoother gameplay experience because it did not exhibit micro stutter. i believe the 640 megs of video ram on the cards was what it took for the game to play smoothly while the 512 megs of ram on the laptop gpu's were insuficiant for playing crysis on all high or all very high settings.

 

I get a micro stutter in Crysis every 5 seconds on my laptop. I'm fairly sure this is due a battery/wireless check the game does every 5 seconds, where it calls a dll called IntelLaptopGaming.dll
I haven't found a way to disable this check though

 

I would be interested to hear if that turns out to be the actual culprit and if so, how it can be fixed! Keep us posted!!

 

Crysis is one of the few games that micro stutters on my NP8662 (GTX 260M, 3GB RAM, Q9000), it also stuttered back when I ran a 2.4 Ghz Core2Duo. Otherwise I get about 50+ fps on high at 1680 X 1050. Other demanding games I play have no micro stutter!

 

I've got a similar rig (np 8662, gtx 260m, 2 gb ddr3, p9600 @2.66ghz) and Crysis is the only game that stutters for me as well.
Try timing your stutters. I think you'll find that they're always 5-6 seconds apart, even when you're at a menu or staring at the ground. If anybody knows how one might go about disabling the battery/wireless monitor in Crysis, speak up! All I know about it is that it calls IntelLaptopGaming.dll every 5-6 seconds. I've heard of people disabling their wireless and taking their batteries out, and fixing their microstutters.

 

I just took my battery out/turned off my wifi, and all the stuttering has all but vanished. I get a random tiny stutter every now and then, but I attribute that to my rig (I only get between 20-30 fps normally) Anyway, if your having stuttering on a laptop, try taking out your battery and turning off your wifi, this will at least name Crysis' annoying system monitor as the culprit.

 

I also took out my battery, disabled wifi and plugged into the mains and the stuttering disappeared almost completely. Consider that I was running a defrag of a virtual Vmware disk in the background while playing Crysis and it is obvious that this IntelLaptopGaming.dll is the main cause of stuttering.

What a shame that such a ''feature'' has managed to ruin the smoothness and enjoyability of the game flow.

There must be a solution to this.

 

I contacted Crysis devs about this and surprisingly, I got a response. I have just sent them details about the problem and have also directed them to this thread.

 

Any news from Crytek on this?

 

No, they suddenly went quiet and I received no further responses at all.

 

LaptopNut have you got any word back from Crytek? I have the same problem and find if very annoying to have to disconnect from wifi and take out my battery every time I wanna play crysis.

After researching this problem extensively this is the only solution that works. It would be much easier and enjoyable if there was away to shut off the system monitor that every 5 seconds checks the status of the wifi and battery.

Also how did you contact Crytek, do they have an email or tech support? I would like to try to contact them as well. EA support is a joke.

 

I was getting responses from Crytek until I mentioned intellaptopgaming.dll being the issue, after this and explaining how the stuttering went away after disconnecting the battery and wifi, they simply ignored further emails or questions.

I used the Contact form on this website.

http://www.crytek.com/contact/

 

Perhaps they're just a bit embarressed you located the problem file, after all these years of them searching. And now they're too busy developing a new patch.

 

Who knows, I had no idea of the problem file until reading what magickraut wrote and then a few of us tried playing without the battery in and wireless disabled and the stuttering went away. To think that such an unnecessary feature is causing a commercial game to do this is beyond ridiculous.

The same thing is also mentioned here:

http://www.incrysis.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=14529

 

There has got to be a way to disable this!! I hate that all support goes through EA and not Crytek, thoes are the only people that could actually help anyone with a problem like this. Im sure it is a simple fix just deleting a file or editing one. I just wish Crytek could help us. Anyone who plays with a laptop is going to be affected so . Crytek please help us!

 

Hey I got in contact with crytek as of now all they can tell my is to remove the battery as well as disable the wifi. He claims that laptops arent "fully" supported in there games yet. Im still waiting for a second reply, doesnt look very promising.

Second, I was on the phone with EA support and after about 45 minutes and trying several things I was moved up several tiers of support, I belive to the 3rd or 4th tier, now I have to wait until they get back to me. They made it seem like they will find a fix to the issue, but it is ea.....but tier 3 or 4? Im sure they are much more techincal and helpful compared to the lower end guys......just a waiting game now.

 

So, I finally got a response from Crytek. They basically told me there is no fix for this other than removing the baterry/disable wifi. He would not/could not tell me if they would ever fix this problem.

After much tinkering and research I cant find a better solution. But, Does anyone know how crysis can tell if you are using a laptop or a desktop?
There has got to be something telling crysis that "I have a battery" So the game every 5 seconds checks the remaining battery power.

If we could figure out how crysis knows that there is a battery and disable this in windows itself. Hopefully this will solve the issue without having to remove the battery.

Feedback is always helpful!!

 

I don't think it's crysis checking to see if you've got a battery or not (but I'm open to being corrected with appropriate citation), but rather the fact that the battery monitoring software built into the computer monopolizes the FSB when it polls the battery to see what sort of condition it's in and receives the data back from the battery itself. That transaction probably takes a lot of time (from a computer app's point of view) during which the FSB is monopolized and nothing else can use it, including the GPU and the CPU. Most likely, the battery monitor doesn't cause this problem when the battery's taken out because it doesn't get a response at all and quickly times out, thereby releasing the FSB. The same most likely happens with the WiFi.

 

So I finally found a solution to this!!!! No disabling the wifi or removing the battery!!

After a long day of going through all of windows I found out what was really causing the problem.

And yes I know these steps are very basic but I wanted to help people who are not as computer oriented as well.

Step 1(wifi)
Go to "control panel" ->click "system"->click the "hardware" tab-> click "device manager"-> now scroll down until you see "network adapters" and expand->find the wifi adapter and right click, it should say something like " intel wireless wifi link 5300"(thats mine)->after right clicking go to properties->next go to the "power management tab"-> uncheck any options that are checked.

That takes care of the wifi aspect of the problem.

Step2(battery)

While you still have the device manager open find where its says "batteries" and expand->there should be 2 options to choose from, click that says something to the effect of battery control method. In most cases it will be this "microsoft ACPI-Compliant control battery method"->Right click it and go to "properties" -> Under the "General Tab" go to the bottom and "disable" the device

Thats it!! The only downfall to this is when disabling the battery control method you will lose the icon which tells you how much battery remains. This can be easily enabled after playing crysis if you want, but it is not necessary. You will still get the warning when you have less than 7% left (in my case) so you will have plenty of time to plug in.

This is the perfect solution until/if crytek ever makes this feature optional. You will still have your battery, incase of an accidental tripping over the cord or the power goes out. And you will also be able to still be connected to the internet

 

You most likely did find a solution, but not to a problem created by Crytek - hence, they never will make this feature optional - the source of the problem is the driver software that comes with your notebook, not the gaming software you installed on it.

 

Its really not a problem with just my laptop. Its a problem with nearly every laptop. This feature is completely pointless unless you had some kind of super battery that lasted 10 hours, playing crysis.

 

I don't think you're reading what I've written - this "feature" you keep going on about (pardon the yelling, but...) HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH CRYSIS. It's a feature of the firmware in every single laptop in the world (does that disambiguate what I meant when I said "your") and thus there is very little that the developers of Crysis can do about it.

 

Maybe you just dont understand what the problem was. It is a feature in crysis there is a battery and wifi icon in the upper right corner of the game. This is not there if you have a desktop. It is not a laptop telling the game to put it there. IT WOULDNT BE THERE IF IT WASNT WRITTEN IN THE CODE!!!

Here is a scrennie, maybe you just misread the problem or something:
http://mysite.verizon.net/revelin/Crysis_1.jpg

 

http://mysite.verizon.net/revelin/Crysis_2.jpg


try that link other was dead? worked earlier

Hopefully it helps you understand better ?

 

Crysis is the only game (I know of) that experiences stuttering directly due to this ''feature''. It has also been logged calling the intelaptopgaming.dll specifically to read the battery and wifi levels during game that are displayed on the meter icons in the games GUI which causes the stuttering each time it polls for this.

How many other games do you see doing this?


Every other game I have played apart from Crysis has absolutely no problem due to this driver software in all laptops so the feature does have something to do with Crysis.

 

While Running Crysis in Windows 7 32/64 Bit, I no longer experienced any of this stuttering.

 

Graphics cards downclocking to stop from overheating?

I know what you're talking about. I get a brief stutter in my source games as well, i.e., DoD:S, CS:S and TF2.

I monitored my graphics card during cpuz and it would downclock randomly at times.



I've clocked it lower, but I haven't really been on it much to monitor lately.

Google Powermizer as well.