Do your driving games stutter?

[b6gm6n]

Hi folks...

This thread if it ever gets off the ground will be all about games that STUTTER!
You know what i mean... 3D shooters or Driving games that Stutter during play...Ruins the enjoyment of the game slightly and can be very annoying...

Now I've been around the web and searched various forums and posts etc to find this is a very common problem... I've also gathered some information on how to reduce this problem...sadly for me the problem remains, but i want to share with you my thoughts and tips & tricks to hopefully attract other users experiencing this problem with a view to amassing a more ideas to this very annoying problem.

My rig is this, Running Vista32 (DX10) 3 gig ram, decent NVidia Motherboard with an NV8800GTX graphics card and a Sound Blaster-XFI extreme sound card... sounds ok and in fact it is ok... bar this stuttering problem on some games... I know your rig might be very different but even so... i hope we can improved upon things...especially gaming.

The outline of my problem (is the same as most it seems) stuttering as the game loads extra information during play.... for example driving games... as you drive faster the stuttering becomes worse as the game loads in the background objects for the next part of the track...this is my main problem, games do run beautifully on my system...but driving games seem to be the bain of my life...

Having an 8800GTX handles everything wonderfully... i played Lost Planet DX10 and it was superb throughout... any driving game though...looks great, but stutters...

Many have said this is due to the hard drive being not able to be read fast enough to pump everything into memory, could be... i have a SATA 7200rpm drive... well formatted NTFS, everything enabled (advanced performance, write caching etc)

I've tried games with the sound off/on less detail/maxed... same thing, drivers checked, processes and services off... no anti-virus running etc, USB devices unplugged... I've no swap file on my vista machine i turned that off because of my memory being over 2 gig, everything runs great...other demos do look and run well... i just wondered if you have heard of anything more on this or found a solution yourself?

Would love to discuss this...

[Wayne Luke]

Do your games load textures off the CD/DVD while playing? If you have the space see if the installer will copy all textures to the hard drive. A swap file might help as well. It would allow the game to preload textures to the faster hard drive before it needs them.

My machine is an HP a6130n:
AMD Athlon X2 5000+ with 3 GB RAM,
8600 GT vidcard / 256 MB DDR3 (I allow it to take up to 768 MB of System Memory as needed),
Hitachi 400 GB 7200 RPM ATA133 w/ 8mb cache.

I use onboard sound though for two reasons. 1) I wanted to keep the computer less than $900 retail and 2) I am tone def so can't tell the difference between most onboard and expensive sound cards anyway.

The video card is the only addon that I have with it. Cost me $130.00 at Newegg. I went with a prebuilt PC because I needed it that night due to my last PC dying and it was actually cheaper than building it myself once the cost of Windows was added on.

I attached my dxdiag.txt file.

[b6gm6n]

I have 3 slots filled with DDRII667 1 gig sticks... 1 slot empty, I'll insert the final stick soon, i think that'll help...

Now here's a thing... i installed my 8800GTX ran the first demo and it died horribly... i had an over clocked card (610mhz/1800 mem-speed) i had to install riva-tuner to control it... or rather bring the speed down so a game would actually play...otherwise anything and everything would crash...weird, you would think this card would have run at a safe speed straight out of the box... anyways, I'm not too sure if it's anything to do with riva-tuner or my memory or my hard disk...I'm just about to install the last MOH-Airbourne Demo and see how it runs... and i bet it runs well... not constantly asking for road data like a driver would... i had Test Drive Unlimited...loved the game but the stutter would drive me crazy, it was then i researched all about riva tuner and my card etc...

The only other thing i haven't tried is my memory timings... but I'm not to up on those.
I thought about getting a new HDD a fast one and installing a game fresh onto this, see how it go's, I've seen that people can create partitions and put the swap file on one and the game on the other so the disk head doesn't have to move so much and transfers of data are faster...

Could be my FSB (front side bus) but as i say... normally games run ok...I had a thought about my AMD duel core and older games not utilizing the capabilities of this...i tried a single core fix on need for speed and it didn't make a difference...

anyways going to try this MOH demo...

-b6