9800GTX+ stuttering

[BrokenWing]

I recently upgraded my PC to a Q6600 2.4 CPU, 9800GTX+ graphics card and Corsair TX650W power supply and I'm still getting stuttering graphics in Crysis on medium settings! I've got 2GB of 800Mhz RAM also.

Because it always seems to happen during dialogue or big explosives scenes I'm now beginning to wonder if it's my crappy onboard sound. I've got an Asus P5N32SLI SE Deluxe mobo with the Realtek AC97 onboard sound.

Would it be worth upgrading to say a Creative Audigy SE? I only have a 2.1 sound system, the Logitech x-230.

Or is there something else the matter? I did notice that the built in benchmarking for Crysis lagged like hell until I switched off the SpyBot TeaTimer but now the only system tray app I have running is Avast antivirus.

[Pob255]

Things you can do to rule out some of it, simply disable the sound (best way here is to go into the BIOS and turn it off in there) if you still get stuttering then that's not it.

Check your task manager, best to open it up after booting up without doing any thing else, make sure nothing is stealing your memory or cpu and you don't have a couple of pages worth of things running (many programs don't show up on the task bar but are running in the background none the less)
What should and shouldn't be running and what is safe to kill isn't easy to explain as there are so many thing that could be running.

Other things:
Graphics drivers, which version are you running? have you intalled them correctly?
How old in this copy of windows? ie did you totally reinstall windows or is this a 5 year old install that's had a good time to accuminate a metric [censored] load of junk, which it will do.
Which leads on to "how clean is your windows install" if this is not a clean install what house keeping have you done?
What resolution are you running crysis at?
Which settings are at "medium"?
Have you tinkered with the nvidia driver settings at all?

Sorry but there are so many things that "could" be causeing problems, we need more info to try to track down a fault, esp before you go throwing money on more "upgrades" that could basically be worthless, not fix the problem or even in a worst case senairo, make it worse.

On thing I just realised, you said the "only" systray app is avast, you should have the nvidia control pannel and realtek audio manager in there as well, personally speaking that points to a probable bad driver installation.

[BrokenWing]

Well I went ahead and bought a cheap Audigy SE sound card (£16) and switched off the onboard one because most of the opinions I read seemed to say that the sound quality alone is worth it.

Still getting stuttering though when there is no stuttering the sound is indeed impressive, especially the music score. But back to the issue.

The graphics drivers are the latest, installed the very day I got the new card via Windows Update. I've got Vista Ultimate 64 bit and that was fully installed from scratch 9 months ago. There's been a fair few programs added and taken away since then and in fact the other day I noticed that my 250GB hard drive only had about 6GB free. I've now got about 30GB free and intend to run a defrag - there's one scheduled for 1am every day on my PC but I don't think it get's the chance to run very often!

I upgraded the BIOS on the P5N32SLI-SE-Deluxe mobo yesterday too (what a mare that was!) because I kept getting a "CPU Ucode" error on bootup after installing the Q6600. That no longer appears and all seems well there.

Crysis was running at 1440x990 with everything at medium settings. I tried last night at high settings (which the optimal scanner recommends) and when there is no stuttering it's pretty smooth, which leads me to believe it's not the graphics per se.

Yeah I do have Vtuner, Avast, volume, and the USB remove icon.

There's no overclocking going on just to rule that out too.

Would a list of my task manager apps and services at startup be useful?

[Webby]

Personally I would be defragging that hard drive right now!

Infact I would probably buy another one and split up some partitions for different things to help keep fragmentation down to a minimum. Hell my 40GB partition with windows and a few programs gets upto about 20% fragmented in a couple of three weeks I would hate to see what your drive is like at 200GB and 9 months...

[Pob255]

Yep defrag.

The graphics drivers are the latest, installed the very day I got the new card via Windows Update.

Also this rings GIANT alarm bells for me, unless there's been some real major changes under vista 64bit, then NEVER let windows hardware wizard or windows update install drivers for a graphics card. I'd not be at all surpised if it's running your shiney new 9800gtx+ with default vga drivers.

[BrokenWing]

OK ran a defrag analysis and it said that my drive was 9% fragmented and didn't need defragged. BUT not taking the OS's word I left it running overnight. 12 hours later (!) it was down to 1%. I've left it running today while at work and set it to do a full defrag, i.e. files over 64MB get defragged too. I'll see if that makes a difference tonight.

I'll also double check that I've installed the NVidia drivers properly - I've made so many changes to this PC recently that I forget what I've run.

Regarding system tray apps Avast Antivirus is the only app of significance. I did have VTuner installed - it's some little app called TBPanel.exe that came with the graphics card CD drivers but I uninstalled that in favour of the NVidia System Tools. There's also an RALink sys app for my wireless USB stick.

I played about with Task Manager and PerfMon and I was shocked to see that 56% of my 2GB memory was being used when just idling! Going through the list of apps there were loads of little things like jusched, realsched, GoogleUpdater etc. Loads of little things that sit there going "Do I need to download an update? No? Oh then I'll just sit here using resources in case there is an update IN 6 MONTHS TIME!!". Bah!

Annoying as these seemed to be when I killed off every unnecessary process that I could find I gained maybe 1% more memory, down to 55%. The weird thing is that after playing a session of World In Conflict I loaded Task Manager straight away and found that memory usage was 44%, as if WIC had agressively demanded more memory and squeezed the other running apps a bit.

One last thing I need to ease my mind about: when installing the new Q6600 CPU I didn't get any thermal paste with it (!) so just stuck my Thermaltake Golden Orb II on the new CPU with the remnants of the old paste on it. Temps ater a 4 hour session of World In Conflict (on very high settings) were around 46 - 48 degrees, so I think it's working OK. Could a bad contact cause temperature spikes or something though?

While playing WIC there were more than a few times that cut scenes stuttered too, then suddenly the characters would speed up like an old black and white movie, while the sound was completely out of sync. I got stuttering occasionally during gameplay too, especially during intensive firefights.

I realise as I write this that I'm complaining that Crysis stutters in high, WIC stutters in very high, but I'd have thought a Q6600, 9800GTX+, 2GB beastie should find this within range.

(Stops to take a breath...)

[Webby]

I find it hard to believe that your disk was only 9% fragmented... perhaps the windows defrag is just rubbish? I find it particularly hard to believe as you said at the start how you had removed a number of games/programs to get some more space this normally results in fragmentation when you install new things as the are gaps all over the place. Personally I use O&O Defrag lots and lots of options to play with but then again maybe it had defragged previously/recently and that is why.

One way to test it it is just having the graphics set to high would be to turn them down to say medium in crysis and see if it still stutters if it doesn't you have your answer! My brother plays Crysis on a 8800 GTS 512MB OCed at 1920*1200 on most things medium and textures and one other on high, he gets average frame rates of 40 and never sees it drop below 25, so I would expect your 9800 GTX+ to beable to at least match this.

[Richdog]

Just do me a favour and try 1024*768 at medium settings and let me know if that's smooth or not.

[BrokenWing]

Wow O&O Defrag is the business. Um... 29.66% defragmented!

Windows defrag is indeed a pile of crap.

After the Defrag will run with low / medium settings and get back to you.

[Pob255]

One thing to note is vista handles memory differntly to xp, it will happly use up around 50% reguardless of how much you have then dynamically shift memory usage depending on demands made by individual programs.

On update and pre-cashe programs, quite a lot of software does it now and are very annoying,yes they use very small amounts of memory, but they are also additional processor threads that the cpu still have to check per cycle, just incase they are doing something.
You can safely kill them + remove them from startup as all they generally do is knock less than a second off load times for the relavent program, they can be usefull if you use said program all the time and have a slow cpu, but with fast cpu's and little usage they just get in the way and hold things up

jusched = java pre-casheing
realsched = realplayer pre-casheing
GoogleUpdate = updater, not sure which google app

others common ones are
qttask = quicktime = it's often a triple whammy as you'll also get itunes which has an additional 2 pre-cashe exe's (you often have to remove this more than once as it writes it's self back into the start up at times)
reader_sl = Adobe acrobat reader = pre-cashe and version 8 has an updater as well (I've still yet to find a pdf I cannot open with version 6 )
DVD player software = I know both windvd (WinCinemaMrg) and powerdvd (pDVD (I think)) have a pre-loader, which you can happly get rid of.

I'm sure there's a few others just cannot think of them atm.
There are some windows services you can safely kill, eg if you don't have a printer then you can safely kill spoolsv.exe (windows print service)

I use HijackThis to keep xp's startup as clean as possible (not sure what it's like for vista) but be careful, as you can remove important startup settings & programs.

[BrokenWing]

First off guys, thanks a million for all the advice.

I uninstalled and reinstalled the Nvidia drivers just to be sure and ran the defrag a load of times.

It took 4 runs first dropping from 29% to 20% to 8% to 0.31% and it's amazing the difference it has made. I'll definitely be buying this app.

Even so, I've finally decided that I'm never going to get Crysis to run perfectly on high. It runs pretty smoothly with textures, shadows and shaders on medium and everything else high. There's still a bit of a stutter when I load a game for the first time but it's nowhere near as bad as before and 2 seconds later it's gone. Then it's jaw dropping visuals all the way.

World In Conflict is just great now - smooth eye candy with all those particle explosions and no stuttering. So thanks again, I'm off for another massive session.

[Webby]

Glad you got it all sorted in the end Its amazing what a good defrag can do for system performance and noise if your hard drive seek is loud!

[Ed Omega]

Things you can do to rule out some of it, simply disable the sound (best way here is to go into the BIOS and turn it off in there) if you still get stuttering then that's not it.

Check your task manager, best to open it up after booting up without doing any thing else, make sure nothing is stealing your memory or cpu and you don't have a couple of pages worth of things running (many programs don't show up on the task bar but are running in the background none the less)
What should and shouldn't be running and what is safe to kill isn't easy to explain as there are so many thing that could be running.

Other things:
Graphics drivers, which version are you running? have you intalled them correctly?
How old in this copy of windows? ie did you totally reinstall windows or is this a 5 year old install that's had a good time to accuminate a metric [censored] load of junk, which it will do.
Which leads on to "how clean is your windows install" if this is not a clean install what house keeping have you done?
What resolution are you running crysis at?
Which settings are at "medium"?
Have you tinkered with the nvidia driver settings at all?

Sorry but there are so many things that "could" be causeing problems, we need more info to try to track down a fault, esp before you go throwing money on more "upgrades" that could basically be worthless, not fix the problem or even in a worst case senairo, make it worse.

On thing I just realised, you said the "only" systray app is avast, you should have the nvidia control pannel and realtek audio manager in there as well, personally speaking that points to a probable bad driver installation.

You know what, its good to see someone post sensible advice clearly and simply. I doth my hat sir

[Ed Omega]

First off guys, thanks a million for all the advice.

I uninstalled and reinstalled the Nvidia drivers just to be sure and ran the defrag a load of times.

It took 4 runs first dropping from 29% to 20% to 8% to 0.31% and it's amazing the difference it has made. I'll definitely be buying this app.

Even so, I've finally decided that I'm never going to get Crysis to run perfectly on high. It runs pretty smoothly with textures, shadows and shaders on medium and everything else high. There's still a bit of a stutter when I load a game for the first time but it's nowhere near as bad as before and 2 seconds later it's gone. Then it's jaw dropping visuals all the way.

World In Conflict is just great now - smooth eye candy with all those particle explosions and no stuttering. So thanks again, I'm off for another massive session.

One other thing to note, the DX10 code path of Crysis which you will be running as you have Vista, is notoriously more demanding than the DX9 version as it is supporting better graphics and is well known for stuttering. The defrag advice from these guys here is definately on the ball as for some reason Crysis likes to migrate all over the hard drive and this fix has been mentioned on several forums.

Now you have got that sorted, buy yourself some good thermal paste (Arctic Silver 5 or nanotherm etc) and get your heatsink working properly. Once that is done you have a processor which will overclock nicely and with little effort - and this will give you another improvement in gameplay- tho this will vary from game to game depending on how processor intensive the game is.

[rootjuiceUK]

No one think turning Avasts on access scanning off would be of benefit to him while he's playing his game? I always turn Avasts On access Scanning off while playing games otherwise it'll be scanning every file the game tries to open slowing things down, just remember to turn it back on after. I tell anyone who is having problems with there pc to visit http://www.tweakguides.com/TGTC.html download, READ and follow some if not all of the advice in it. It covers all of the advice give to the op so far plus a lot more. He also does game guides but start with the the TweakGuides Tweaking Companion first that will get any problems not related to games out the way first.