Still stutters after upgrading from Radeon 5870 to GTX770

[bengo]

Hi,

like the title says, still seeing a little stutter every 3 seconds, when flying low with the Shark. The upgrade did bring up my fps to about 50-60, but every 3 seconds I see it dip to somewhere between 10 and 20, and that momentarily freezes the screen. Quite annoying.

Specs are in the sig. I've got win7-64bit on a HDD and DCS on an SSD.

What can I do to find out what is causing that stutter/drop in fps ?

 

B

[sobek]

Run the resource monitor in the background and look for any spikes that correlate with your freezes. That could give you a starting point.

[Night]

As Sobek says, probably something hogging CPU resources.

[bengo]

Thank you guys.

I tried switching off vsync in game, and that made the fps go up into the 70s and the stutters seem to have disappeared too. Now, passed experience has tought me to keep my fingers crossed and keep an eye on this for the next few days.

[Pilotasso]

Switch off any monitoring apps like temp apps and system resources monitoring apps. They read the system every few seconds and cause small pauses.

[xracer]

Problem with vsync off could lead to tearing, but its not sure you get it, but if you do try and keep vsync off and change MaxFps= 30-35. I have mine at 40, but either way don't go above what you system can do as a genreal minimum in a fairly complex mission. But as the guys said above get rid of any app hogging you CPU. If you dont really find it, kill everything which is not needed to run DCSW.

[Hunden Ynk]

You could try to force Adaptive V-sync mode in the drivers, since it is designed to limit tearing, while not reducing fps. As I understand, it will basically enable v-sync while your fps is greater than 60 and disable it otherwise. Hence your fps will not be cut to 30 if your system is unable to deliver 60fps.

 

Are you happy with the upgrade otherwise, I have a very similar system (even the same memory) but with a 560ti. Which should be kind of similar to your old card, a bit faster perhaps, and I was having one of those angel/devil things about the 770 ;)

[mmtaraval]

Those running asus boards, do you use the asus suite to control fan speed, or would you recommend another method to cut down on CPU usage?

[Hunden Ynk]

That asus suite is one piece of bloatware, I would refuse to run something like that even with 100 cores and 1tb ram, old habits die hard. I do that kind of tweaking in the bios, a bit limited compared to the program, but still OK (Asus here too). But seriously, I think the difference will be minimal. The tread-scheduler seems robust enough to not distribute background work to loaded cores, if idle ones are available, and DCS will in its present state only use 2.

[bengo]

Run the resource monitor in the background and look for any spikes that correlate with your freezes. That could give you a starting point.

 

Just like I feared, turning Vsync off did not fix my problem. So I took Sobek's advice on the resource monitorand that showed me my HDD was seeing a lot of activity (remember : SSD gas DCS, HDD has Win7)

I googled for a little bit and decided to shut down the "Windows Search"-service.

Stutters are almost gone now, down to 4 or 5 during 5 minutes of flying low level with the Shark.

Still, not gonna shout : "It's fixed." Let's see what it does in the next few days.

[Hadwell]

if your getting good fps, but still have studdering, its either a slow hdd, too big of a page file, or not enough/too slow ram...

 

have you tried completely disconnecting ur HDD and trying dcs with only the SSD plugged in?

 

I have a 2600k on a p8z68-v mobo with a gtx780, 8gb gskill 7-8-7-24 ram, and a 256gb OCZ agility 3 ssd

 

and i get the feeling of those three things, its a bit of the first two...

Edited August 27, 2013 by Hadwell

[bengo]

You could try to force Adaptive V-sync mode in the drivers, since it is designed to limit tearing, while not reducing fps. As I understand, it will basically enable v-sync while your fps is greater than 60 and disable it otherwise. Hence your fps will not be cut to 30 if your system is unable to deliver 60fps.

 

Are you happy with the upgrade otherwise, I have a very similar system (even the same memory) but with a 560ti. Which should be kind of similar to your old card, a bit faster perhaps, and I was having one of those angel/devil things about the 770 ;)

 

Before the upgrade is was struggling around 30fps. Now I easily get between 70 and 90 fps, not having changed anything n Nvidia settings yet, and with everything on high in dcs except water on medium. Sure makes a difference.

[bengo]

if your getting good fps, but still have studdering, its either a slow hdd, too big of a page file, or not enough/too slow ram...

Somehow something (I suspect Windows Indexing combined with AVG antivirus) floods the HDD since I sometimes see waiting queue lenght peeking (sorry, translated from dutch) at 1 second in resource monitor.

have you tried completely disconnecting ur HDD and trying dcs with only the SSD plugged in?

That is not possible since my OS is on there and DCS needs it to write the trackfile to it.

 

I have a 2600k on a p8z68-v mobo with a gtx780, 8gb gskill 7-8-7-24 ram, and a 256gb OCZ agility 3 ssd

and i get the feeling of those three things, its a bit of the first two...

And are you having problems with that system running DCS ?

[Hadwell]

no, i have no lag at all, i play on 1920x1200 with a solid 60 fps

 

my OS is on my SSD, so is DCS, and you can un-activate ur computer. uhh instructions here http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=90596

Edited August 27, 2013 by Hadwell

[SkateZilla]

Indexing and search functions in Windows Vista+ actually slow down HDD Read/Write Performance on traditional Drives.

 

Those services are only good if you do alot of "File Searches"

[bengo]

I almost never use search, so it would be okay to shut those resource-hoggers down, right ?

Which services exactly are we talking about here ? I know about "Windows Search". Which would be the other one(s) ?

[Hunden Ynk]

To my experience, the indexer will only run when the computer has been idling for some time. But to find out what service is bogging you down, I can recommend playing with Process Explorer http://www.sysinternals.com. It can show disk usage per process (look under View/Select Columns/Process IO). However services will still be lumped together into different svchost.com. But Process Explorer will at least tell you which services are in each (in the hover-tool-tip). Might help you pinpoint your problem.

 

Have you thought about installing Windows on the SSD? I really think that would help, since the problem might be DCS trying to write temp files to the HDD as you pointed out, which could be busy with OS work. Alternatively, make DCS write its temp files to the SSD.

 

Before the upgrade is was struggling around 30fps. Now I easily get between 70 and 90 fps, not having changed anything n Nvidia settings yet, and with everything on high in dcs except water on medium. Sure makes a difference.

 

Thanks, that will not save me money:thumbup:

[bengo]

Alternatively, make DCS write its temp files to the SSD.

 

Good tip. Can you point me to a post about that subject, because didn't bring back anything (yet).

[Hadwell]

i think the main thing is... if you could fit two things and only two things on ur ssd, they would have to be your operating system and page file...

 

i don't understand why you'd get a ssd and not put ur OS on it...

 

it will fix your computers studdering...

 

and that link i posted up there says how to deactivate DCS so u won't lose an activation when u re-install.

Edited August 29, 2013 by Hadwell

[Hunden Ynk]

Good tip. Can you point me to a post about that subject, because didn't bring back anything (yet).

 

I don't know if it's possible to change it within a DCS option, which of course would be best. But there are alternatives. How much tinkerer-fu have you got? Since this it not something I would let my granny do. I would try to Symlink http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_symbolic_link the DCS temp folder (fake edit, I just did). Like this:

 

D:\ mkdir dcstemp
C:\Users\[uSERNAME]\AppData\Local\Temp>mklink /D DCS d:\dcstemp

And there's also that C:\Users\[uSERNAME]\Saved Games\DCS folder, which would need its own link, perhaps more?

 

Nothing terrible happened for me when I tried, and it was easy to revert. Don't know if it will help any, but it might be worth a try, just be a tiny bit cautious, because you know you're not supposed to enter stuff strangers on the net tells you in your console:music_whistling:. Hope it makes any sense.

[Hunden Ynk]

Sorry for being hasty, but I'm just curious if you had any luck with the Symlink trick?

[SkateZilla]

Monitor CPU Stats (Power, Frequency, Temps),

 

Another user had a similar problem and it turned out to be CPU throttling.