Stutters and occasional crashes

[Subferro]

Hey all, I just recently built a new PC and DCS world was one of the first games I put on it (been out of the sim game for a while and was eager to get back in) right off the bat though I've been having trouble. The game will run perfect for a few seconds, then briefly pause/stutter, then start running smoothly again. On top of that, every now and then it will crash all together. I can't seem to read the error logs, so I really don't know what's going on. I tried the suggestions in this ( http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=68060 ) thread with no luck.

 

Anyone have any ideas? Here's my dxdiag, DCS log, and most recent crash log:

 

Thanks for any help.

DxDiag.txt

logs.rar

[AtaliaA1]

All the info. on His PC specs are in the DXDiag.txt.

 

Nice machine Subferro. It looks like U have mucked with the swap file/Page File ie. Page File: 2224MB used, 14090MB available from ur DX txt file.

 

U need more than that Hence the stutters as the CPU adjusts to the small amount of Page File available to it. Go big on the Mem. setting for the page file to stop the thrashing (Stuttering). Double the size of ur Ram is what most set their swap files to. Some go double plus half.

[Python]

I have no idea about the technical side, but are other games stuttering? I only ask as my DCS world has also been stuttering a bit lately, maybe the problem isn't with your machine and the next patch will help. Unless it is very bad...

[Subferro]

All the info. on His PC specs are in the DXDiag.txt.

 

Nice machine Subferro. It looks like U have mucked with the swap file/Page File ie. Page File: 2224MB used, 14090MB available from ur DX txt file.

 

U need more than that Hence the stutters as the CPU adjusts to the small amount of Page File available to it. Go big on the Mem. setting for the page file to stop the thrashing (Stuttering). Double the size of ur Ram is what most set their swap files to. Some go double plus half.

 

Hey Atalia, thanks for the reply but I'm a little confused. It looks like my total Page File is 16314MB, which is about 2x my RAM (8 gig). Is that not right?

 

For what its worth I went through the Control Panel and manually put in 16000MB for my page file, DX diag then said it was over 20gig, and I still had stutters in DCS. Is there something about swap file size that I'm missing?

 

Thanks

[BitMaster]

The swap file is most likely NOT your issue, it has been large enough before the change and now that you have set it to manual 16GB ( double the RAM if you like, that rule of thumb comes from ancient days with 256MB RAM ). I would say 8 GB fixed upper and lower Page File size all you need, but 16GB is ok if you really want to wait 5min for your drive to swap 16GB back and forth.

 

Any swapfile usage in the game bigger than "1 stroke of the drive" will let you crash DCS, this is what I think. That's why you have to have 8GB these days to fulfill the minimum specs, more is welcome if you play large missions and have other stuff running on your PC as well, recording SW, dev. tools etc.. other than that..8GB should be ok and swapfile not a problem at all if you close ALL software that you don't need before launching dcs. Having Firefox with AddOn Adblocker open with 4 tabs can EASILY suck 2GB out of your mem, just to mention how fast it can go if you don't pay attention.

 

Swapfile is an almost outdated leftover. Whenever you encounter heavy swapping you clearly have too little RAM installed and a bottleneck of the worst kind. Nothing worse than swapping in and out all the time.

 

I have 16GB in all machines and my swapfile is turned OFF. It would also "eat" too much of my valuable SSD space ( 16GB, or even 32GB by this outdated rule by thumb ) that only is 75GB for this gaming Win7 installation on my Mac.

 

SO to speak, if you double your RAM and are a standard user + gaming ( No CAD, VMware etc.. ) you can safely turn it OFF once and forever.

 

 

Your stuttering may have totally different issues. Usually stuttering comes from a throttling CPU working at max cycles.

 

Make a few adjustments and see if that helps:

 

Turn things down like Textures and Scenery ( rather keep textures at medium over Scenery )

Lower resolution of internal display ( 1024-512-256 with and w/o every screen )

No gimmicks...all OFF

 

Now fly and check if it goes away with all that stuff OFF, even go as low as 1200x800 res.

 

At some point, it should fly smoooooooth, then check one by one what causes a sudden drop in fps and stutter and what doesn't. I, for example, have 30+ fps in Ka-50 with Abris at anything but Map and Shkval OFF, as soon as I turn Abris to MAP I drop by 5 fps, when I kick in Shkval I drop another 10 fps, down to 20 and lower sometimes. If you know what causes it you can work around or at least understand and accept things. But lowering GFX even more is also no option so I live with 18-36 fps ups and downs, stutter coming and going depending on what I fly, use and look at. The main bottleneck is any CPU below 4GHz right now, better 4.5-5GHz. The video card is not even that important, at least not when it comes to stuttering and game smoothness.

 

 

If it won't fly without stuttering at any res and setting then you have a GFX driver problem or such, Bios not optimized, bad PCI-E card mixture/placement ( IRQ sharing )...something like that, harder to find out and a lot harder to fix if fixable at all.

 

 

Having another demanding game on that rig that runs full bore without any problem would be a good indicator that your general layout works and is capable of xyz frames in XYZ game, something like that.

 

Bit

Edited September 17, 2014 by BitMaster

[BitMaster]

DANGEROUS !!!

 

Never ever change AHCI mode AFTER installing your Windows OS !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

You freakin' can't boot anymore !

 

AHCI is important for SCSI instructions on S-ATA devices and afaik mandatory for SSD to function properly. Set it before installing any OS, never change once set on any installed OS.

 

 

Bit

[BitMaster]

usually it won't kill anything but your windows will go mad if you try to boot it with a changed value in ATA-Mode.

 

Bit

[Wolf Rider]

Best thing to do, is to leave the Page File at its default setting... tick the box "Automatically manage paging file system for all drives" in the Performance Options tab

 

(resetting it worked with systems up to XP and early Vista)

 

and make sure you have enough physical RAM onboard instead

 

 

What you could look at, which does help; is disabling Core Parking

[AtaliaA1]

Another Demanding game will tell us nothing as this game is DX9 Demanding Games of late are far from DX9. GPU executions and CPU coding are way different instructions used back then are slower and hardly optimized for todays technology. and as per this dated software u will run into trouble without the swap file, as it only knows one method of carrying out the coded instructions. That depend on a "SwapFile" it has no instructions for "If exists Go to" in a system with out it.

[BitMaster]

Too many cooks, too much input = bad soup :)

 

Bit

[Wolf Rider]

so how do you do your soufflé, Bit?

[AtaliaA1]

Just needs a little salt, I think. :)

[Subferro]

Say what you will about too many cooks, but I appreciate this many people helping me out. The only other games I've played on this rig so far are BMS and the original ArmA, both of which run great maxed out, but are obviously older games. I'll definitely try toning down some of the settings and see about picking up something else demanding to rule out my computer just running out of steam on DCS.

 

I'm wondering if sound may be involved. I'm using USB speakers that don't seem to make use of my mobo's integrated sound acceleration. When I switch to the motherboard as my primary sound device (knowing full well that I'll have no sound as I have nothing plugged into those outputs), DCS crashes as soon as it enters 3d mode. Could that be involved?

 

Thanks guys.

[AtaliaA1]

most definitely. DCS has had issues with USB devices in the past.

 

Getting "Something Else Demanding" will tell U little of this software unless it is

a demanding DX9 user also.

[BitMaster]

You have very little to no choice when it comes to embedded Sound Chips and their drivers.

 

Check your vendors page for an updated version, maybe even an older version..you gotta try.

 

Sometimes MS will offer a driver through MS-Updates, I had very little luck with those ever since.

I do not recommend to use those unless you know why and have a reason. On many occasions Asus boards reaching from today to ten years back had trouble with MS drivers and sound, either no sound any more at all, BSOD, startup errors, less features or little to almost no 3D DirectX support compared to the vendors reference driver.

 

If you run a driver issued by MS, that could be the culprit why DCS crashes when you run the motherboard sound chip. If so, dl the newest from your vendor and try again. Then, do a MS update run and look for the again offered sound driver, highlight it and tell Windows to never offer it again for your machine, so you don't accidentally reinstall it with the next "quick" update.

 

 

With too many cooks I meant that we spoiled the soup cause we had no feedback from the OP at that time and I thought we tilted him... I am happy to be wrong ;)

 

 

Bit

[Subferro]

Sorry to go quiet and then revive this old thread, work got busy and I haven't had much time for DCS. Recently I've had more time and bought A-10c on sale to see if it had the same issues. It did. However, as an update, I think I've pinned down the problem. It seems that my stutters all correlate with disk access. This is supported by running resource manager in the background and by the fact that just about every stutter coincides with the disk access led on my case lighting up. As I (think I) said before, I have the game and OS on one 120gb PNY SSD. I've tried turning TRIM on and off with no luck, checked ACHI mode... I'm at a loss on what to do about this

[AtaliaA1]

the video card isn't overclocked is it?

 

no settings in the BIOS have been altered?

 

 

I miss read the "Available Ram" in the txt file, my eyes focused on the 2224mb for some reason. Note how Bit chimed in with more info. without insult. This is a

great place to learn about PCs and Hardware issues.

 

Way to go Bit.

Edited December 1, 2014 by AtaliaA1

[Subferro]

Vid card is not over locked. I've changed a few BIOS settings at the recommendation of other threads here, like disabling CPU Enhanced halt. I'm thinking I might need a driver update though. Some of the intel drivers show 2006 as their date.