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Problems with stutter


Cougar_DK
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I hope you didn't disable AGP!!! I said AGP Fast Writes!

If you can't turn off on-board audio, then try running the game without soundfx or music (in OPTIONS) and see how it performs.

Then try deleting the UCCONFIG.INI file and let the game create a new one. See how it performs with the default settings (with/without sound/music) etc

Defrag your HDD. I can't stress this ENOUGH

Also, you need explain what stuttering means.

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Right. This is why I didnÔÇÖt feel comfortable venturing into the BIOS. IÔÇÖm at a bit of a disadvantage here. IÔÇÖm not a computer guru just a lowly chemist who looks at this machine in front of him as a black box with mysterious powers. I better go and switch the AGP back on. DidnÔÇÖt come across anything in the BIOS labeled as AGP Fast Writes. IÔÇÖve done multiple defrags but will give it a go again. IÔÇÖll also have a go at the audio on/off and deleting the UCCONFIG.INI. Would it matter that the game is installed on itÔÇÖs own FAT partition? Probably a dumb question but IÔÇÖm not a proud man.

By stuttering IÔÇÖm referring to a hesitation or brief pause that occurs ÔÇ£when the game appears to be loading a lot of data, most notably when you get the "hostile target identified" for the first time, and the hostiles show up on radar.ÔÇØ I also get it when scrolling through the targets VID or when IÔÇÖm struck by incoming fire and my shields flare up.

thanks

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quote:


Originally posted by dirt12:

I?m not a computer guru just a lowly chemist who looks at this machine in front of him as a black box with mysterious powers. I better go and switch the AGP back on. Didn?t come across anything in the BIOS labeled as AGP Fast Writes.


No worries. Anyway if you don't see the setting as described, then your board does not support it. So don't worry about it. But please go back and turn AGP back on. Your AGP video card will thank you for it.

quote:


I?ve done multiple defrags but will give it a go again.

Then no need to do it again.

quote:


I?ll also have a go at the audio on/off and deleting the UCCONFIG.INI.

Try the soundfx/music OFF first, monitor the results. Then go the UCCONFIG.INI deletion route. The game will create a new one with defaults, when you start it up next time.

quote:


Would it matter that the game is installed on it?s own FAT partition?

No

quote:


Probably a dumb question but I?m not a proud man.

Oh stop, you're make me blush.

quote:


By stuttering I?m referring to a hesitation or brief pause that occurs ?when the game appears to be loading a lot of data, most notably when you get the "hostile target identified" for the first time, and the hostiles show up on radar.? I also get it when scrolling through the targets VID or when I?m struck by incoming fire and my shields flare up.

OK, THAT you can't solve without (1) a very fast CPU (2) very fast video card with lots of texture memory, e.g. 128MB and higher (3) a fast and defragged HDD. Neither of which your system has.

The issue is that when threats are loaded off the disk, the hard drive has to load the models, then the textures, then shove it all to the system (textures get shoved down the video card's texture memory) etc etc. Thats what causes the initial pausing. Thats not the typical stuttering I thought you were talking about. For me, typical stuttering is when you try to run the game at very high resolutions, with everything turned on etc on a system that barely meets the minimum requirements for the game. And if you turn on the fps counter (CTRL+V), you will see your frame rates tank during heaving battles. The result is that the game will stutter.

Hope this helps

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Ouch! Yea, thanks SC. You think if I just upgrade my vedio card I might get by or would that be meaningless without a faster CPU and HDD. (Just looking in my wallet right now and trying to figure out the which of these I can address without putting my toddler on a diet). When you said you're system was running smoothly did it differ only in the GF4 Ti4600?

thanks again

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dirt, I'm assuming you are talking about IA0115? Thats the IA mission I'm using to try and shake the pause you mention when you get the "hostiles identified" message. For me, its maybe 3-5 seconds and I have pretty decent hardware. Defragging helped somewhat for me, but this might me something we will have to live with. I'm going to try the -preload again since its been awhile since I tried it.

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quote:


Originally posted by Spindoktor:

dirt, I'm assuming you are talking about IA0115? Thats the IA mission I'm using to try and shake the pause you mention when you get the "hostiles identified" message. For me, its maybe 3-5 seconds and I have pretty decent hardware. Defragging helped somewhat for me, but this might me something we will have to live with. I'm going to try the -preload again since its been awhile since I tried it.


Yep. Think about this. Each character model has about 100 animations each. (go to the models folder and then in the animate subfolder of any character). Just think what happens when five different marine types, gets loaded. The base model gets loaded - then 100+ animations for each one. With four different types of marines, thats about 400+ .3D files all be loaded right there and then, when those threats are created.

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Hi derek..

I'm a noob and scared to post this..

Im having the same issue but I freeze completly with reboot only option. This only occurs when I ALT-E to jump out of my craft. Space or planetside, and it happens iregularly.

Before I get slapped (j/k) i know my system is near bottom and I know its me, my question:

My HD like to goto sleep after a period of time, so just opening explorer to look at a file causes a stall while the HD spins up. Could this need to spin up cause my game to freeze? (it doesnt always need to spin up everytime)

Thanks..

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quote:


Originally posted by PTBlues:

Hi derek..

I'm a noob and scared to post this..

Im having the same issue but I freeze completly with reboot only option. This only occurs when I ALT-E to jump out of my craft. Space or planetside, and it happens iregularly.

Before I get slapped (j/k) i know my system is near bottom and I know its me, my question:

My HD like to goto sleep after a period of time, so just opening explorer to look at a file causes a stall while the HD spins up. Could this need to spin up cause my game to freeze? (it doesnt always need to spin up everytime)

Thanks..


Your video card (GF4 MX) does NOT have a vertex shader. Its that simple. And if you try to exit the craft, it will try to use it.

And the ONLY reason the game even runs, is because you are using VERY VERY OLD drivers in which nVidia was hacking the use of VS 1.1, in software. Its crap. And thats why the recent drivers don't do it.

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Hi,

quick comment on squeezing some performance from your PC rig. USB devices can burn CPU cycles even when not in use. USB host chips are kinda of like telephones that ring and hangup every once in a while because they want to make sure your still home...:-)

Here is an example: if you look at my system information and then tag onto it a USB External HD, USB Wireless Adaptor, USB Joystick, USB Toshiba PocketPC cradle, and a USB CD-ROM drive you can imagine that the processor can burn some time just handling housekeeping requests from the USB host chips that are attached to these devices. I experimented by removing these devices one and a time and found that in-order I picked up performance by:

1) USB CDROM -> IDE CDROM (even if you don't use the CD for the game

2) USB Wirless Adaptor -> Wireless Ethernet bridge

3) Unplug the USB HD (just for storing media files)

I noticed about a 5 to 7 % performance increase performance from a general benchmarking program. I got about an extra 10 fps playing Jedi Academey.

Anyway unplug your unneccessary USB devices and replace your USB CDROM with an IDE one and you should pick up some performance for UC or whatever.

Hope this is slightly interesting....

-M

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A few things you guys can buy...

Systemsuite 5

system mechanic

these 2 apps are the best I've found

the first one allows you to defragment the hard drive according to when the file was last accessed. So it put's recent files close to the center of the hardrive thus allowing for some outrageously quick load times. In this case dramaticaly reduceing the stuttering when the game loads something new.

The other one allows you to defragment, and recover your ram. it's AWSOME it will recover about 100-200mb after the computer starts up. that means you will have that much more space to store models and other crap UC loves to load. and it will also recover the ram from a crashed program (like UC) so you don't have to reboot to get your performance back.

they also have some other nice features but these are the most used for me. like systemsuite 5 also has an antivirus app, but the best part is no subscription fees, free upgrades. also the other one has a registry defragmenter/cleaner, and some other things to optimize speed.

you can buy them from wall-mart and best buy, they are quite common.

another good app (and it's free) is the CPU moniter from sysinternals. you can see EVERYTHING that your cpu is doing, loading registers, etc... you can find out just what UC want's from the CPU, and see if you can do anything to help. their file and registry moniter is good too. UC doesn't do to much with the registry but it does have it's way with a bunch of files. you can use this in conjunction with system suite 5's defragmenting. another handy tool is a file date setter. again for the defragmenter. you can find that as freeware just about anywhere on the net, just google it.

sorry for plugging those apps but they helped me TREMENDOUSLY, for UC's stuttering. and thought I'd share. if you only have money for one I would get systemsuite 5 for it's defragmenter. it's like a night and day difference. then if you use the filemoniter and date setter you can fine tune your hardrive even more.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Previously posted over at this cesspool

quote:


I have posted this so many times, its not even funny. It is even documented over
here
but most people just find it fit to keep yelling about the same thing over and over and over. Hopefully, maybe if they screamed it out loud long enough, the problem on their end, would be automagically fixed.

The game has a ton of assets with high poly counts, LOTS of textures etc. A single character model (e.g. an EF marine) has 15+ MB of data, and 256+ K of textures. When that model is loaded for the FIRST time, ALL its data is loaded. And this is because the anim system is target morph based (not skeletal). If you had a scenario in which ALL the different marine types are used, you could end up with close to 100MB of memory shot through the system IMMEDIATELY. Don't take my word for it, go to your MODELS folder, pick a character, then look in the ANIMATE and TEXTURE folders. Do this for all the marine characters and then do the math.

With a slow HDD and low memory (e.g. a 256MB system), Windows HAS to page stuff out in order to make room. And as far as texture memory goes, if you have a bare bones 32MB card, well, that has its own bottleneck because the system will flush older textures to make room.

Thats just characters.

And I'm not even going to begin to talk about the resources required for the terrain, skydome, clouds, weather effects, sound, explosions, vegetation, animals, buildings etc. THATS why there is a pause on the planet when these models first come into scope.

There is no magic involved. In dedicated fps games, they do all this loading between levels in a fire-and-forget fashion. In this game I can't because it is a HUGE game and you would need a system with about 2GB of main memory to store everything and never flush it. Even then, you'd still need a video card with at least 1GB of texture memory to prevent texture flushing.

The HDD comes into play in order to reduce the disk loading of files, which is why you need a fast HDD and fully defragged (which you should do regularly anyway!).

Thats that.


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  • 1 month later...

Not totally sure I agree with that.I have defraged my hard drive on a regular basis ( Once a week) ,and it has no effect on the 'stutter'.

For example, playing Assult Force Marine on a planet in a vehicle,as soon as you point the vehicle to a mission base ,it takes several seconds for the tooltips to come online,causing 'stutter'.Just one example.Check the latest VCF,seems like the SC has made several changes to minimize this type of behavior.

Of course ,as usual,I may be wrong,but hey,just my observation.

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quote:


Originally posted by Cc:

Of course ,as usual,I may be wrong,but hey,just my observation.


You're right about being wrong. As usual.

You're talking about a completely different thing. If you have a slow assed HDD, defragging is only going to go so far.

And you're obviously using a sub-par defrag tool. There is a damn good reason why there are several high end defrag programs on the market. Find one.

Stuttering is not just related to disk thrashing while assets are loading - which is what you are talking about.

The VCF entry has to do with loading character animations and it does minimize thrashing because the character animation models are now loaded in a more efficient manner. Thrashing occuring from loading almost 30MB of character animations (per character model) is a completely different thing from thrashing occuring from a mere few ships (with less than 5MB each) showing up in the region. The game still has to load assets from the HDD regardless - it doesn't store everything in memory or the game would not fit even within a 1GB memory footprint.

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  • 1 month later...

quote:

Originally posted by Supreme Cmdr:

You're talking about a completely different thing. If you have a slow assed HDD, defragging is only going to go so far.

Stuttering is not just related to disk thrashing while assets are loading - which is what you are talking about.

The VCF entry has to do with loading character animations and it does minimize thrashing because the character animation models are now loaded in a more efficient manner. Thrashing occuring from loading almost 30MB of character animations (per character model) is a completely different thing from thrashing occuring from a mere few ships (with less than 5MB each) showing up in the region. The game still has to load assets from the HDD regardless - it doesn't store everything in memory or the game would not fit even within a 1GB memory footprint.

Well, whatever you did in 2.0, intentional or not, made the game playable on my system. In the demo, pre 2.0, the game would frequently pause for a good 15-20 seconds or more mid-flight (especially on planets) whenever something new came into range.

I think it's funny that you say "there's nothing I can do about it" and then you go and do something about it. All in good time.

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quote:


Originally posted by TSCavalier:

I think it's funny that you say "there's nothing I can do about it" and then you go and do something about it. All in good time.


There was nothing that could be done about it at that time.

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