Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Hardware and Software => Topic started by: eagl on October 21, 2000, 08:49:00 PM
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I'm getting a lot of video stuttering both online and offline with my new video card. I remember some stuttering with my old setup (voodoo2 SLI) but nothing like this. Even with framerates in the mid-20s and higher, whenever I roll or have a high pitch or yaw rate, the video starts stuttering badly enough that it's like having double vision. The faster I roll, the worse the stuttering and double vision.
I get this at all resolutions, color depths, and with FSAA turned on and off. I have eliminated all shared IRQs (that only took 3 days) and I still have the problem.
In addition to the stuttering, the roll rate seems to be inconsistent depending on how much stuttering is present and how many objects are in view. For example, if I look away from the field and roll, I'll see some stuttering and the roll will appear "normal", but as soon as the airfield rotates into view, the stuttering will increase and the roll rate will change slightly. This also happens when the view transitions from looking at the sky to looking at the terrain while rolling.
I am using the current "latest" drivers off of the 3dfx web site. I am using a Celeron 300A at 450mhz. I have also tried changing refresh rates with no effect.
Any help would be appreciated.
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eagl <squealing Pigs> BYA
Oink Oink To War!!!
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Maybe Lephturn could help ?
http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/Smileys/default/Forum10/HTML/000438.html (http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/Smileys/default/Forum10/HTML/000438.html)
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Go to www.3dfxgamers.com/boards.asp (http://www.3dfxgamers.com/boards.asp) then to the v4/v5 tech support forum.
This seems to be a huge problem with this card. There is some leaked new drivers that I saw that claim to fix this.
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bloom25
THUNDERBIRDS
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I don't see it as a huge problem, by that I mean that Eagl is the first one I've heard with this problem. I have a V5 that works perfectly, and I know of about 5 others who have no problems.
Eagl and I are in the same squad, so we have been talking about this issue on Pigmail (TM) extensively. (http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/Smileys/default/smile.gif) Basically, there are a few of us with Voodoo 5's now, and Eagl is the only one with this problem. I have not heard of this problem from anybody else.
Eagl has been swapping parts out and trying to be sure his card isn't sharing resources with anything else. Past that, the next trick will be mucking with the AGP settings in BIOS to see if that has any effect.
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Lephturn - Chief Trainer
A member of The Flying Pigs http://www.flyingpigs.com (http://www.flyingpigs.com)
(http://tuweb.ucis.dal.ca/~dconrad/ahf/lepht.gif)
"My P-47 is a pretty good ship, she took a round coming 'cross the Channel last trip.
Just thinking 'bout my baby and lettin' her rip, always got me through so far."
- Steve Earl
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"Basically, there are a few of us with Voodoo 5's now, and Eagl is the only one with this problem. I have not heard of this problem from anybody else."
Time to hear from someone else (http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/Smileys/default/wink.gif)
I have the stuttering problem too. But only online in 32 bit color. Funny thing, i've two isp's that I use, AOL, and a local isp that I use for aces high. AOL does not have the studdering problem, but the other isp does. I've checked the settings on the dial up networking, etc, but have not been able to resolve the problem.
The stuttering problem seems to go away or is reduced if I use 16 bit color.
I also have problems getting the frame rates to increase in 32 bit color, no matter what settings I select, refresh rates, or even overclocking the card or cpu, I am stuck at avg 28 fps. This is not bad, and playable, but i am a tweaker, and want to eek a little more out of the card (http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/Smileys/default/smile.gif) .
I suspect that my monitor is limiting the frame rates, but that is not the cause of the stuttering.
That P300 o/c'd to 450 may be marginal for the VD5500. I've read on the 3dfx bds that a min of P3600 is better.
Besides the few bugs this card has, and only with aces high, it is an impressive card. The 2x FSAA has to be seen to be believed!!!
If you find a solution to the stuttering, please post it.
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Gospel, did you look on that message board link I posted above. There were at least 5+ posts I saw on there in the first 3 pages about this. Many of them had links to newer drivers that supposedly fixed it. (Also improves compatibility with VIA chipsets.)
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bloom25
THUNDERBIRDS
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I'll check out the other webbs. I'll also try using 16 bit color, but that option is really unattractive since one of the major reasons I upgraded was to get away from 16 bit color.
I'm not too keen on trying out every set of beta drivers that comes out either, but I suppose I'll do what I have to do. I'm currently using the "latest" release drivers, the ones that cause the text fuzziness near the top and bottom of the screen.
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eagl <squealing Pigs> BYA
Oink Oink To War!!!
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Guys, what AGP settings are you using. What is your AGP apature set to and how much RAM do you have?
Maybe it's nothing, but I can compare what you guys have to what I have and see if we can find any problems.
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Lephturn - Chief Trainer
A member of The Flying Pigs http://www.flyingpigs.com (http://www.flyingpigs.com)
(http://tuweb.ucis.dal.ca/~dconrad/ahf/lepht.gif)
"My P-47 is a pretty good ship, she took a round coming 'cross the Channel last trip.
Just thinking 'bout my baby and lettin' her rip, always got me through so far."
- Steve Earl
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Eagl, did you try downloading the overclocking utility and setting your refresh rate to 85 mhz? This helped for me. I also completely removed the old drivers and started over with a fresh install.
Bloom, thx for the link to 3dfxgamers.com. I read through the board. The leaked drivers might help as I have a Asus P3VX4 mobd &via chip. but I think I will wait for a while. I don't want to mess with my pc until after africa corps is done (http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/Smileys/default/smile.gif) . And by then, those drivers may be officially released by 3dfx.
BTW, where the heck is Veneta?
Oh, just read your post Lepht., I am using agp2x, 64 or 128 meg apature, tried both, and have 256 meg of ram, PIII 600 EB, Asus P3VX4 mobd. Princeton grahpics ultra 75 17" monitor. Frame rates usually stay at 28 but temp. go into high 40's or 50, and low 20's when it gets busy. The fps are not too bad, just the stuttering.
Thanks, again.
gospel
[This message has been edited by gospel (edited 10-23-2000).]
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I have not tried the clock utility.
I changed the 3dfx tool AGP setting from "auto" to AGP2X. My AGP aperture is set to 64 meg and I have 128 meg total.
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eagl <squealing Pigs> BYA
Oink Oink To War!!!
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Veneta is W of Eugene out Hwy 126. (I actually live in a little town called Crow a couple miles from Veneta.)
Why do you ask, do you live in Oregon?
There are quite a few people that I know of that live here. Mars, Tom24, paintMAW, AKDejaVu, Milenko, SOB, and a few more.
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bloom25
THUNDERBIRDS
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Hiya Eagl,
I just thought I'd mention this, though you probably already know...it may be a background app running while playing, it happened to me, and I disabled 'FastFind' along with a couple other programs, no stuttering now.
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My v5500 works very well. Here are my specs:
AH running 32 bit 1280 x 1024, I do not have "Z buffer" or "disable triple buffer" checked.
Refresh rate is the default,haven't tried overclocking.
FSAA set to 2x never 4x, sometimes off. Can't really tell much diff btwn 2x and off (fastest). Both have great looking graphics to my old eyes (http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/Smileys/default/smile.gif)
My card and monitor are set up for 100Mhz resolution. (19" Micron/Sony Trinitron)
Abit BE6 (the first one)
500Mhz P3 CPU
128 meg of ram with AGP port set to 128 in BIOS (don't know what that really does)
I have Road Runner Cable modem for ISP.
Frame rates from 20 to >100 fps depending on scene/activity.
Be sure to verify your graphics card is not sharing an IRQ. I've had issues with IRQ conflicts ranging from sound card to NIC to ATA66 controller to USB controller. Assigning an individual IRQ to all the above helped me. (Had to disable both comm ports to get enough IRQ's to do that)
Good Luck
Eagler
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Hmm, I will look to see if my vid card is sharing an icq. Would another way be to uninstall all hardware, do a reinstall of win98, and then add the hardware, modem, sound card, etc. bac in one by one? Or would that still possibly cause sharing of an icq?
Bloom, I asked because I live in portland, and never heard of Veneta (http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/Smileys/default/smile.gif) . Ever been to the air museum in Tillamook? One of my favorite places to visit (http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/Smileys/default/smile.gif) .
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gospel
The Abit BIOS allows you to assign IRQ's. I was able to give my sound card IRQ5 through the BIOS and tell it to assign an interrupt for the USB. Freeing up my comm port irq's helped as my SCSI controller needed one and the ATA66 controller needed one. Look under system in control panel and see if anything is sharing the same irq and try to switch them around. The abit board describes in the manual how slot 4 & 5 (PCI) will share an irq while slot 3 shares with the ATA66 controller. Knowing your motherboard will help, check its manual.
good luck
Eagler
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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!!!
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Yes I have been there Gospel, great place to visit. (http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/Smileys/default/smile.gif)
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
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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
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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.
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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
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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 (http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/Smileys/default/frown.gif)
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!!!
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Naaaahhh... too easy (http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/Smileys/default/biggrin.gif)
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Problems solved (http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/Smileys/default/smile.gif)
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 (http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/Smileys/default/smile.gif) .
The online stuttering is gone (http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/Smileys/default/smile.gif) 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
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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.
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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!!!
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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
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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.
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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!!!
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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).]