[Herra Tohtori]

A little background.

I've been having problems with games using DirectX graphics for some time, don't quite know when it started however. Frame rates are good on average, but some D3D games have been having a periodic stuttering as their problem. That was not affected by antialiasing or anisothrophic filtering settings - hell, it wasn't even affected by setting all detail to minimum on game settings. OpenGL games, however, have worked normally. Considering the GPU is a 7600GT with factory overclocks to 650/1600 MHz core/memory, those games should run pretty well so it's not actual performance issue although it feels much like it.

It was quite like having insufficient RAM (or GRAM, or memory bandwidth) for some reason, but some tweaking in RivaTuner seemed to help - specifically, Direct3D blitting settings reduced the stuttering in, say, Lock-On: Modern Air Combat, but didn't quite manage to remove it entirely. In fact, the exact same stuttering phenomenon was there in the dxdiag's Direct 3D tests as well. on a period of about 4-5 seconds, the picture would stutter with low frame rate for perhaps ½-1 second, while otherwise running at perfectly acceptable frame rates. It may not sound like a serious issue, and true enough - it didn't actually make games unplayable, but it was damn annoying nevertheless.

Well, since the school's out and soforth I decided to dig in to the problem. Long story short, I suspected a faulty DirectX installation and consequently ended up re-installing XP (again) to install the latest (April 2007) version of DirectX 9.0c. Well it didn't work but obviously took quite some time. I tried pretty much every ForceWare driver that would work with 7600GT, no joy. Out of spite I finally decided to try out the NVidia's Quadro 160.02 driver instead of the ForceWare series they so fondly like to offer on their driver download pages. The reason was simply that I run out of options - every driver on ForceWare series seemd to be plagued by the same problem. By the way, have you noticed that the latest ForceWare driver (94.24) defaults to the proper (old and good) NVidia control panel? Seems like they have received some... feedback... on the new fancy interface.

Anyway, on the subject... It appears that the Quadro driver not only works, it also fixes the D3D problems and even offers seemingly better frame rate at least on D3D apps, but it might just feel like that, I haven't done any actual benchmarks on the subject. Often, however, the best benchmark is how the games feel.


So why am I posting this here? Because I'm likely not the only one who suffers from lower than expected D3D performance. And trying Quadro drivers is quite not the most obvious solution because the ForceWare drivers are the recommendation and should be used if possible, since they likely do have game-specific optimizations and might make some specific games run poorly or not at all.

But if you do have mysterious stuttering with some D3D games, it might be worth it to give the Quadro driver at least a try... I would very much like to know if the effect, or the problem itself, is more widespread or if my PC (or GPU) is an unique case.

[CP5670]

Does the framerate actually go down or does it seem to stutter despite a consistent framerate? The latter is mainly an issue on SLI setups, but it can occur on single cards as well with combinations of certain games and vsync/TB settings. I haven't run into it otherwise though.

This sort of behavior was actually a common issue on the old nforce3 chipset with AGP 6800 cards, but it's not an issue on newer chipsets. However, it can also indicate that there is some rogue app running in the background. One thing you may want to try is to disable the nvsvc service, which seems to have no real purpose and has caused (different) problems for me in the past.

The Quadro drivers aren't a great option since they lack a lot of optimizations that are in the Geforce ones, and some games are known to run slower with those cards/drivers.

[Herra Tohtori]

It was indeed stuttering despite otherwise consistent framerate.

I have an MSI MS-7184 motherboard with ATi XPress 200 chipset, so there's no [obvious] connection to nForce chipset problem you mentioned. I'll take a look on the nvsvc32.exe, though.

As far as other rogue applications go, it's not likely since it happens right after clean XP re-installation... which leads me to wonder if some of the HP's crap programs are to blame... you know that obstinate stuff they like to stuff into their OEM systems, equipped with suitable obscure filenames that you have no way of knowing whether it actually is required for some function of the system or not... I tend to remove most of them as soon as possible but perhaps I'm missing something.


And yeah... I know the Quadro drivers aren't actually designed for gaming use and that Forceware drivers are, but aside from the optimizations, they should be pretty much similar. And since I'm not planning on playing any brand new titles on this PC (which would most benefit from the optimizations), I don't think I'm gonna hit any serious performance issues with other games.

But anyway, it's pretty much like with all things related to computers - if it ain't broken, don't try to fix it (a lesson I have yet to learn ).  If the Quadro drivers solve a problem without immediately causing another, I'm gonna use them... and if they have problems with some game that is further ahead on my priority list, they'll have to make room for the Forceware drivers. But before that, there's no reason for me not to use them, as they indeed seem to be free of the D3D problems that come with ForceWare drivers.

[Davros]

your problem with lock on should be solved by increasing pci latency to 64
and lowering your soundcards ahrdware accleration

[Herra Tohtori]

Right, PCI latency... where do I change that? Because my motherboard / BIOS doesn't offer any kind of options to change anything at all. If there isn't a way to change that value via software, I'm out of luck.

As far as sound card goes, reducing it's hardware acceleration makes no sense but what the hell, neither do many other things... I have an external USB sound card (SB Live! 24bit), and I'm not sure but doesn't reducing hardware sound acceleration just put more load to the CPU (kinda the opposite of what I actually want)? And as to PCI latency, what device's PCI latency should I be changing? The USB hub's latency? Or in overall?

...and at any rate, PCI in my system obviously has nothing to do with graphics in itself. Are you saying that the problem (on Lock-On's case) is actually a sound problem as opposed to a graphics problem? *curses*

Perhaps I should try Lock-On with some kind of -nosound option or similar and see what happens, before starting to meddle around with my hardware settings...

[CP5670]

I don't think the PCI Latency settings have any effect on PCIE devices (that fix was mainly used in the AGP days), but you could give it a try. There is a program called PCI Latency Tool that lets you set them in Windows.

[Davros]

here:
http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/PCI_Latency_Tool/1105467085/1

to problem in lockon is actually to do with sound one of the devs descibed it something like this
"the game asked the soundcard to do something and it only has a certain number of clock ticks to do it, on a slower cpu
the clock ticks are longer but on a faster cpu they are too short to do the task + something buggers up increasing latency on the sound card
means the sound card has more time to do its task"

[Tyrian]

I've got a similar problem, but it's because my D3D version was corrupted when I attempted to download and install the 9.0c version.  Is there a way to reinstall DirectX without reinstalling XP?

[Herra Tohtori]

I've got a similar problem, but it's because my D3D version was corrupted when I attempted to download and install the 9.0c version.  Is there a way to reinstall DirectX without reinstalling XP?

Well... try to download and install DirectX9.0c April 2007 from Microsoft. Because, just to apply Microsoft logic in everything, DirectX 9.0c and DirectX 9.0c are not necessarily the same...

If you're lucky, that'll fix it. Or not. It can't hurt however.

Also, IIRC there are some unofficial DirectX uninstallation tools but they require that you have Windows XP install CD(s) so that the utility can replace the corrupt install with original DX 8.1 from them or somesuch.