Situational frame stutter

[Wiley]

Posting in here reminded me of a small problem my rig has, and I was wondering what to make of it.  I'm not at home to post dxdiag, but my specs are:

Processor : Intel Core i5 2500K
RAM: 4 GB
Video card: ATI 5770 1GB
Onboard sound, can't recall motherboard model.
Resolution: 1680x1050

AA set to full, everything turned up to full and everything checked except smooth shadows and building shadows.

Normal framerates are fine at 60 95% of the time.  It dips very occasionally when there's too much going on, that's expected.

However, something I've noticed repeatedly is if I go to zoom in my view (which I have set on an analog slider on my throttle) it makes my framerate stutter while I'm changing the zoom and quite often, while I'm zoomed in to max.  If I back out the zoom, framerate picks right back up.  It seems to happen pretty independently of what is being displayed on the screen.  It can be a single plane over flat land being shown when I zoom in, FR dips.

Any thoughts, or do I need to provide more info?

Wiley.

[FLS]

Have you tried turning a couple of settings down like ground detail distance or AA down a notch?

[Wiley]

I haven't tinkered with it at all, as it hadn't really bugged me to the point of playing with it.  AA would likely be a good spot to start for me, as while it does make things look better, the stuff it improves isn't that important to me.  I may just try it tonight.

[Tigger29]

I'm still getting a little stuttering sometimes too.  Usually when descending towards a hill.  I can be in a dogfight with a ton of planes and dive to the ground but if I come up on a hill or mountainside then it gets real jumpy.  Turning off AA (I don't run shadows at all) and turning off clutter doesn't seem to make any difference.

I also saw a situation last night while sitting still on the runway where looking forward or up or to the right it was smooth as silk (60FPS) but if I looked down and to the left it would start stuttering severely and drop to 1-2FPS.  I repeated that dozens of times but didn't know how to properly capture it.

None of this happened before the patch.

I think there's still an ground object that's problematic somewhere.

C2D E7400
4GB DDR3 RAM
HD Radeon 5830

I will add that I just manually upgraded my video drivers to 12.1 yesterday but it was doing both and before the driver update.

[Skuzzy]

Anti-aliasing, in conjunction, with bump mapping requires the most resources.  Try turning down anti-aliasing and see what happens.

[Wiley]

Anti-aliasing, in conjunction, with bump mapping requires the most resources.  Try turning down anti-aliasing and see what happens.

Thanks, will do.  One other tidbit of information, this is independent of the update.  It's been doing it since I got the system.

Wiley.

[Wiley]

Of course, when I went looking for it tonight, I couldn't get the stutter to happen.

Something else that might explain it occurred to me though.  I use Teamspeak and have been using the overlay for a long time.  Since the update it's quit working for reasons unknown.  Tonight I turned it off, as I realized whatever it does to inject itself onto the screen might cause a performance hit.  That might account for it.  In any case, if I notice the stutter return I'll try lowering the AA.  Thanks for the suggestions guys.

Wiley.

[DREDIOCK]

Anti-aliasing, in conjunction, with bump mapping requires the most resources.  Try turning down anti-aliasing and see what happens.

Just an added thought on this from my own observations.
I noticed at least on my machine that having bump mapping checked doesnt always make things look better. I always start at the highest settings and then reduce if I need to or dont like the effect.
For my own likes I have discovered that something for me look more pleasing without a couple of the bump maps checked.

I dont remember exactly which ones. But I can use interior shadows for example. I personally dont like the look or feel they produce so rather then run with them on. Just so I can say Im running everything. I turned them off.

I am thankful for the option though

[DREDIOCK]

Of course, when I went looking for it tonight, I couldn't get the stutter to happen.

Something else that might explain it occurred to me though.  I use Teamspeak and have been using the overlay for a long time.  Since the update it's quit working for reasons unknown.  Tonight I turned it off, as I realized whatever it does to inject itself onto the screen might cause a performance hit.  That might account for it.  In any case, if I notice the stutter return I'll try lowering the AA.  Thanks for the suggestions guys.

Wiley.

Is it possible you had a skin downloading during this? One of the changes I notices was that autoskin downloading was changed to on on my machine.
And I would get a stutter while in the middle of a fight or passing over an active field just before being notified that skin XXX was just DLed.

I seem to also remember sometime back that if you have alot of skins DLed that it can cause a hit when the different skinned planes enter an area. Same thing with custom sounds.

I may be wrong though as my memory doesnt seem to be what it used to. LOL

[Skuzzy]

As a side note, with most AMD CPU's you really do not want any auto-downloading to be going on.  It will cause some stutters. Multi-core Intel CPU's should be fine unless resources are tight.

[Wiley]

Well, the issue seems to have vanished for whatever reason.  It was intermittent anyways.

Skuzzy- Not looking for troubleshooting help, but I'm curious.  Did the update include something to stop stuff that displays over top of the game, like Teamspeak Overlay and things of that nature?  Just wondering if that's the case before I start futzing with my stuff.

Wiley.

[Skuzzy]

Well, the issue seems to have vanished for whatever reason.  It was intermittent anyways.

Skuzzy- Not looking for troubleshooting help, but I'm curious.  Did the update include something to stop stuff that displays over top of the game, like Teamspeak Overlay and things of that nature?  Just wondering if that's the case before I start futzing with my stuff.

Wiley.

Nothing intentional, but if "overlays" use any video RAM they could be a problem as the new versionof teh game can easily chew through 1GB of video RAM, depending on the settings being used.