V5-5500 video stuttering

[eagl]

I went to a lot of trouble ensuring that none of my cards are sharing IRQs.  I disabled a com port, swapped around my sound and network card, downloaded a bios update, and finally also had to manually set my network card's irq in bios, but I finally convinced win98 to quit sharing IRQ's for no reason.

I kill all programs running in the background before running AH, still get the stuttering.  I messed around with the color depth trying to force the card into the 24 bit color mode, but even with the card at 16 bit I still get stuttering.



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eagl <squealing Pigs> BYA
Oink Oink To War!!!

[bloom25]

Yes I have been there Gospel, great place to visit.  

You guys seem to have the issue possibly nailed down, though I thought I'd add something here.

Make sure you didn't put a soundcard or NIC card in the PCI slot nearest to the AGP slot.

Barring IRQ conflicts, I'd actually suspect a driver issue.



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bloom25
THUNDERBIRDS

[Eagler]

As the Voodoo is CPU dependent, I'm not sure what bearing the fact you have a Celeron processor has. You may want to scour the newsgroups for post concerning that combination. The fact you don't have a math co processor can't help. I've heard AH is heavy on the math co executions.

Also have you tried pulling all your cards (sound also) except the video card and running it offline for comparison sake?

gl

Eagler

[Zigrat]

the problem with stuttering in v5-5500 is two fold

1)if you have a soundblaster live, make sure you turn off all that crap in the toolbarr in bottom right corner

2)get latsest drives

I had stuttering *BAD* but it was becaus eof some dumb soundblaster flashing icon thing in the lower right toolbar. I deleted that and stuttering disappeared.

[bloom25]

Eagler, what's this about the math co-processor???  Have you fallen for Intel's marketing attempts to make the Celeron seem inferior to the PIII?

The Celeron and the PIII are made on the same assembly lines and are virtually identical.  The difference between them is:
A. In the making of a Celeron, 1/2 of the cache memory is disabled.

B.  Celerons are set to run at 66Mhz FSB.
    (Overclocking fixes this problem.)

That's IT, there are no other differences.

Also, older Voodoo's often did the stuttering thing for dial up connections because of the little flashing modem icon on the taskbar.  If you have it, you might try removing that.



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bloom25
THUNDERBIRDS

[eagl]

There are other differences between the celeron and P2/P3.  From the celeron 400 on down (P2 core), the L2 cache is 128k instead of 256k.  When the celeron switched to using the P3 core, Intel further crippled the chip by cutting the cache speed as well as it's size.  With a P2 and P2-based celeron, if you ran a program that fit inside the 128k L2 cache, the cpus had nearly identical speeds.  With the latest celerons, a celeron at 800mhz (regardless of FSB speed) is noticeably slower than a P3 at 800mhz.  The chips are identical, but Intel really buttered up the cache.  The cache association setup and bandwidth are both crippled in addition to the cache size being smaller.

There is a special place in hell for the Intel marketroid who thought this scheme up, and just below that is where the hardware designer who made it possible will rot for all eternity  

It's the same as if HTC came up with a special version of AH that had the same features and gameplay, but had a hard-coded 20% framerate reduction and cost 50% less.



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eagl <squealing Pigs> BYA
Oink Oink To War!!!

[Staga]

Naaaahhh...  too easy  

[gospel]

Problems solved  

By turning off "Z-buffer in the Aces High setup, my frame rates dramatically increased, from avg of about 28 to avg of about 37   .

The online stuttering is gone   I finally figured out how to get the modem icon thingy out of the tool bar!  Duh, I've tried to do this for a long time, but never could figure how, until I followed instructions someone posted in another topic.  I've tried many times before to get rid of that icon, but I guess I just don't know how to follow instructions :0

Thanks Eagl, Lephturn, Bloom & others for all the sugestions!

gospel
332nd flying mongrels
RAF 249 Africa Corps

[qts]

Sean,

I've seen a lot of problems with stuttering in a lot of sims (not only personally, but mainly from others) caused by Creative's sound card drivers.

[eagl]

I have an Aureal Vortex2 card, but since I used to have a soundblaster I'll make sure all those drivers are gone.


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eagl <squealing Pigs> BYA
Oink Oink To War!!!

[SKurj]

Just a tiny addition...

I get frame stutters in AH when Zonealarm is running, both on and offline.  I think the ZA icon in the task bar is the problem)


SKurj

[PapaFox]

Eagl,

Pardon the obvious, but is your AGP running at 66mhz? Your motherboard should have settings for full and 2/3 speed for the AGP.

I am running a 5500 with a PIII 650 @866. This yields 133mhz and when reduced by two thirds, I still have an AGP speed of 88.6. Things run pretty smoothly most of the time. However, once in a while when I really load up the graphics (1280x1024, 32 bit), attacking a buf at close range with guns blazing, my display will freeze for about 3 seconds and then return to normal (if I am still alive). I'm working on troubleshooting this problem, and one of the steps will be to bump my CPU speed down a bit so that my AGP is closer to 66 mhz. You might try this test just to see if it helps.

[eagl]

My mobo speed is 100 and AGP is set at 2/3 for an in-spec speed of 66mhz.  I have tried over and under clocking the vid card itself with no change, other than when the card is overclocked I get windows desktop problems (the minimize/expand/close buttons go whacko) so I set it back to defaults.

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eagl <squealing Pigs> BYA
Oink Oink To War!!!

[Dowding]

I get a slight video stuttering, with a voodoo 3000, even at a frame rate of 50 FPS, and with no other programs running but AH. It is an intermittent problem though, and I've never been able to pin it down to one thing.

[This message has been edited by Dowding (edited 11-03-2000).]