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Thread: Somber discovery, but apparently a major issue for many.

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    Thumbs down Somber discovery, but apparently a major issue for many.

    Yes this is the somber discovery of the monster that is "Micro-Stuttering"
    Until a few days ago, i knew nothing about this apparently brushed under the rug issue that effects so many people. Like many i always just dismissed it. Putting it down to things like, "it's hot day, it must be effecting the gpu's a little." or "the game is just buggy" etc etc.

    However, ever since i recently installing some pretty heavy duty games, and having to tweak the settings of said games to get up to a comfortable 40-60 fps, but still finding that i'm seeing some pretty noticeable micro lag, i became intrigued. Then having trawled various forums, i read about this micro-stuttering. Which, when you know what phrase to type into google, is sure enough, pretty well documented. Of course no one tells you that, oh by the way, even tho you have invested in a supposedly superior setup, such as crossfire. You may or may not experience an effect in some games that almost completely negates the fps boost afforded by a crossfire setup, and also makes you think, "hang on, am i playing this game with two souped-up bad boys, or has someone just ripped them both out, and left me with some manor of crappy on-board graphics instead..."

    Having just discovered what this thing was that had been bugging the hell of of me, in previous games, aswell as in the new ones. I then learned that, ATI and nivida have known about this issue since way back in 2007/8... and have seen fit to do absolutely nothing to attempt to fix it. That is even if it is fixable.

    Ok, sorry if that seemed a little ranty, but finding out that what you thought was the next step in gpu evolution, and that you were lucky enough to have such a setup, actually has a fundamental flaw embedded within it. Namely, the lack of sync between frame rendering, seemingly inherent to all crossfire/sli setups, is a tad annoying

    However, having read forum after forum and article after article, i'm kind of in information overload at the moment. I have managed to slightly reduce the visibility of the effect, by running some games in either, windowed mode, or turning off Catalyst AI, for games on fullscreen at higher resolutions, which effectively force's single card use. The weirdest thing tho, is that even when i completely disable crossfire, and run left 4 dead 2 for example, on the single card, i still see the micro-stuttering, or at least something extremely similar. Now my understating of MS is that it only effects an array of linked cards ?

    Has anyone else noticed this MS effect showing up on a single core, single card ?

    And also please share any solutions you have tried and found yourself for micro-stuttering on crossfire.

    Thank you.
    Last edited by Dave_07; 28-06-2010 at 07:49 AM.
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    Re: Somber discovery, but apparently a major issue for many.

    I think you're being a little quick to blame ATI or nVidia for this - game software is perfectly duplicated, and graphics cards are more or less as well. If there was an inherent problem they would not be able to demonstrate a single case where there was no micro-stuttering, let alone show that it doesn't occur in the vast majority of cases. That leaves variables in the rest of the system that are outside of ATI/nVidia/game makers' remit.

    I also agree that you won't be seeing MS on a single card.. or at least, it won't be caused by the same thing that causes MS in SLI type setups. So I quite strongly suspect something else is at play here that's not really graphics card related.

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    Re: Somber discovery, but apparently a major issue for many.

    Quote Originally Posted by kalniel View Post
    I think you're being a little quick to blame ATI or nVidia for this - game software is perfectly duplicated, and graphics cards are more or less as well. If there was an inherent problem they would not be able to demonstrate a single case where there was no micro-stuttering, let alone show that it doesn't occur in the vast majority of cases. That leaves variables in the rest of the system that are outside of ATI/nVidia/game makers' remit.

    I also agree that you won't be seeing MS on a single card.. or at least, it won't be caused by the same thing that causes MS in SLI type setups. So I quite strongly suspect something else is at play here that's not really graphics card related.
    Indeed, and it's these variables that makes MS so insidious.
    However MS is documented, a proven concept apparently, and it's a by-product of the rendering times achieved by the two cards, the time delay spacing between each frame becoming inconsistent, which the human eye then perceives as a split second lag. This is as far as i can understand is what is happening. What alot of people seem to argue over is whether the reason for this happening, is something external, something 3rd party, or purely down to the way a crossfire/sli setup works.
    I'm not sure if it is just purely down to the way crossfire operates. (Although it can feel like that at times ) If it's not, and there are additional external factors at work, then what are they ?

    Personally i'm at a loss, because when your dealing with what you think is purely a display issue, you don't expect that settings like mouse filtering would do anything, but for me, turning on mouse filtering in some games that have MS seems really help to reduce the MS, but i have no idea why. Unfortunately all these tweaks and adjustments ever seem to do, is just reduce the ms, nothing as of yet has made it completely go away. Also as an experiment, yesterday, i rolled back all the tweaks and adjustments i had made in one game in particular, left for dead 2. I did this because i wanted to see just how bad the MS was when you are playing everything at defaults, not harmful settings. Just a set of normal settings that 2x 5870's should be able to more than handle in crossfire.
    -1280x1024 / 1024x768
    - 8x AA / no aa
    - All details at high / medium
    - v-sync on and off.

    I was shocked by what i saw. It was like the game had turned into a flip book, the staggering between frames was horrendous. Now i know for a fact from my own memory, that when i first played L4D2, when i first installed it, however many months ago. It definitely was not anything like what i saw in the rollback test i did yesterday. I tried the test in other games, and frighteningly, even in games that i had never seen micro-stuttering in before, the same thing happened.
    Moral of the story ? - just changing some game settings back to defaults, should not have this kind of effect unless there is definitely something wrong.

    I am actually very eager to find out how many of the Hexus community have had this issue, and what you did respectively to try and address, or reduce your MS.

    Because opting for the single card solution, is only going to be a alternative for so long. eg I doubt that a single 5870 is going to have much luck in taking on a beast like crysis 2, where as two of them is obviously going to give you a much better gaming experience. Also i think i should be able to use two cards, after all, i did pay for two cards..
    Last edited by Dave_07; 28-06-2010 at 07:08 PM.
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