(troubleshooting) DX GOTY microstutter

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PV
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(troubleshooting) DX GOTY microstutter

Post by PV »

I reinstalled DX after a year or so.
I'm getting some noticable microstutter ingame I wasn't getting before.
I read about issues with multicore and CPU throttling but 'fixing' with Kentie's fix it made my game run at wildly varying speeds... kind of the opposite of what it was supposed to fix? The thing is, it only happens when I enter a map, then it goes away after a few minutes and sometimes it just comes back. It seems I get it more often on maps with large drawdistances and places with a lot of entities but maybe I'm just imagining that.

I'm getting it with all renderers, including the new DX10 and OGL ones, with or without CPU throttling, with or without multicore.
I also tried disabling Cool and Quiet on my CPU but that doesn't seem to be the cause either. Are there any other known causes?
I'm running Win7 64bit on AMD Phenom X4 and GF GTX660 with 16GB RAM.
I could run TNM and such without problems a year ago and no hardware changes, so I'm wondering what might be causing it.
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gamer0004
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Re: (troubleshooting) DX GOTY microstutter

Post by gamer0004 »

Could be that your GPU clocks back to 2D mode? DX isn't a very demanding game, so I can imagine that after loading a map, it takes some time for the GPU to "recognise" that more power is needed, and then when you're in part of a map where the number of 3D objects rendered is very low, it might clock back. There is software to monitor your GPU, you can log the frequency of your GPU and see whether it sometimes drops to a very low frequency (like 200-300 MHz). However, be aware that this often occurs naturally when loading a map.

Also, it could have something to do with your RAM. I have some very vague recollections about page sizes, virtual memory page filing or something which some older applications can't deal with or something. But that may just be my memory playing games with me rather than an actual thing :P
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kocmo
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Re: (troubleshooting) DX GOTY microstutter

Post by kocmo »

Yeah, you should monitor your CPU and GPU clocks.

If you have a second monitor, run i7TurboGT and GPU-Z (sensors tab) on it, and keep an eye on the clocks. Make sure that at least one CPU core runs at maximum multiplier. You can also monitor CPU and GPU clocks via an on-screen display in game, using something like MSI AfterBurner.

Edit: actually, since you say "no hardware changes", I think that either your CPU and/or your GPU may have started throttling from overheating. So, check their heatsinks, and also monitor their temperatures while playing the game.

Also, you can enable the NVidia dynamic vsync (or however the feature is called?).

Deus Ex can be surprizingly CPU-bound at times (overclocking your CPU will help big-time):
Image

P.S.: Hey, are you the developer of Unreal X-Editor :-) ?
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