FarCry is jumpy on 6800 Ultra OC w/ 1 gigs of ram.

[dababus]

I am running farcry v1.3 hdr enabled on a 6800 ultra oc and with 1 gigs of ram. Far cry gets jumpy on loading scenes. Gameplay is smooth but sometimes it pauses in between. It sounds like the system has crashed but then game recovers after 10 seconds on being hung up.

Am using 66.81 drivers. my proc is at 2.4 ghz and the psu is 500 watts. Also am running the game off a 160 gig 7200 ide drive. fast write is disabled. agp aperture was set at 256 megs.

The system runs doom3 at ultra settings fine with 1 gigs of ram.

Any ideas about the cause of this problem.

Thanks for your input.

 

[jpeyton]

HDR enabled, but at what resolution?

 

[Marsumane]

Turn off fastwrites

 

[otispunkmeyer]

actually u may want fast writes on...its ATI cards that dont really like them all the time....i believe nv is ok with fast writes.
turn off hdr.....such a pile of w@nk, yeah it looks good, but if u dont like watching a stuttering stanley of a game turn it off an jus play the game it still looks the muts nuts

i have had this 10 second pause thing a few times too.....not sure its coz the drivers are beta or this idiotic SP2, but i would jus use the latest official drivers for now

 

[BFG10K]

Use the official 61.77 drivers and flash the card's BIOS to nVidia's latest reference version.

 

[dababus]

Originally posted by: BFG10K
Use the official 61.77 drivers and flash the card's BIOS to nVidia's latest reference version.

where can I get the bios. BTW, if I flash the card with the latest nvidia's bios, wouldn't it underclock the card from 425 mhz for core to 400 mhz for the core.

 

[JoburgJigalow]

It's just bad code, it's a very busy engine... I imagine your system goes very well in Doom 3? Dababus What vendor 6800 ultra card have you got? (Asus, Gainward or nVidia OEM)?

 

[otispunkmeyer]

Originally posted by: JoburgJigalow
It's just bad code, it's a very busy engine... I imagine your system goes very well in Doom 3? Dababus What vendor 6800 ultra card have you got? (Asus, Gainward or nVidia OEM)?

he has a BFG

6800 OC and he reports his clock speed as 425mhz

 

[dababus]

System runs great in doom3, consistent 60 fps in 1280x1024 res. Timedemo yields average of 111.0 fps every time I run it.

But far cry is a different story. Don't know why.

All my components are brand new.

The worst part is farcry had those brief pauses even at these specs.

Seems like nothing satisfies farcry's thirst for top of the line hardware.

 

[sbuckler]

My system plays farcry 1.3 hdr completely smoothly, no freezes or even low framerates. I play at 1280*1024, 8 af, all settings very high, hdr mode 4 with parameters tweaked (hdr 7 works too, I have just altered it because that's too bright). I have a p43.2c, 1 gig mem, 6800GT at 400/1100 clocks (athough it's only 10% slower at standard clocks 370/1000). I use 66.81 drivers, aa disabled, af application controlled, performance quality setting. Frame rates are in the 30's and 40's with occasional drop to high 20's (feels smooth to play). I haven't disabled anything like fast writes, agp apperture 256mb.

I never had the freezes but first time I tried it I had some funny problem with a low frame rate, not sure if I had aa on or something. Frame rate was basically in high teens. Went back to windows, fiddled with graphics settings, loaded it up again, frame rate now in the high 30's?

I don't think you are alone in your problems, but all I can say is it works fine for me.

 

[JoburgJigalow]

sorry sbuckler,

Are you sure, when you are near the end of the carrier mission on top of that rusty ship fighting those guys on the deck, Does it run smoothly there for you? I can't see that being possible... What graphic settings have you got running?

 

[murban135]

Hardocp.com had problems with some hiccups after installing the 1.3 patch.

 

[jiffylube1024]

Originally posted by: murban135
Hardocp.com had problems with some hiccups after installing the 1.3 patch.

True, but then there's an editor's note saying that the editor had no problems (using a 6800 series card, as well) with 1.3, so it only occurs in some situations with 6800 series cards, apparently.

 

[Vallybally]

So after many many long months of waiting for a patch, they put out kind of a gimpy one?

 

[nOObBooB]

Originally posted by: dababus
I am running farcry v1.3 hdr enabled on a 6800 ultra oc and with 1.5 gigs of ram. Far cry gets jumpy on loading scenes. Gameplay is smooth but sometimes it pauses in between. It sounds like the system has crashed but then game recovers after 10 seconds on being hung up.

Am using 66.81 drivers. my proc is at 2.4 ghz and the psu is 500 watts. Also am running the game off a 160 gig 7200 ide drive. fast write is disabled. agp aperture was set at 256 megs.

The system runs doom3 at ultra settings fine with 1.5 gigs of ram.

Any ideas about the cause of this problem.

Thanks for your input.

Hey i have a feeling that your cpu is your bottleneck. I guess places where your ram is dumped and your cpu caches to your ram that is where the pause is at. Becuase i have a 2.8B with 533fsb it was really obivious that my cpu was a bottlenneck. I had to oc to 3.2 at elast to get teh full performance of my 6800GT. So your cpu might be casuing you your problems.

Why you might not have any problems in doom 3 is that certain games are more cpu or ram dependent.

If you have a p4 2.4C that is one of teh best cheap cpus to over clock. I believe it can easily hit 3.2 if you have the ram speeds that can support it.

 

[jiffylube1024]

Originally posted by: nOObBooB

Originally posted by: dababus
I am running farcry v1.3 hdr enabled on a 6800 ultra oc and with 1.5 gigs of ram. Far cry gets jumpy on loading scenes. Gameplay is smooth but sometimes it pauses in between. It sounds like the system has crashed but then game recovers after 10 seconds on being hung up.

Am using 66.81 drivers. my proc is at 2.4 ghz and the psu is 500 watts. Also am running the game off a 160 gig 7200 ide drive. fast write is disabled. agp aperture was set at 256 megs.

The system runs doom3 at ultra settings fine with 1.5 gigs of ram.

Any ideas about the cause of this problem.

Thanks for your input.

Hey i have a feeling that your cpu is your bottleneck. I guess places where your ram is dumped and your cpu caches to your ram that is where the pause is at. Becuase i have a 2.8B with 533fsb it was really obivious that my cpu was a bottlenneck. I had to oc to 3.2 at elast to get teh full performance of my 6800GT. So your cpu might be casuing you your problems.

Why you might not have any problems in doom 3 is that certain games are more cpu or ram dependent.

If you have a p4 2.4C that is one of teh best cheap cpus to over clock. I believe it can easily hit 3.2 if you have the ram speeds that can support it.

He has an Athlon 64 at 2.4 Ghz; that is not the problem as it is about equal to a 3400+ Mhz P4.

Originally posted by: Vallybally
So after many many long months of waiting for a patch, they put out kind of a gimpy one?

It seems to work fine for 95% + of users out there, Nvidia and ATI, and both sets of top-of-the-line cards get a nice boost in performance with this patch.

 

[dababus]

may be i should lower the hdr value to 4 and try again.

 

[GreatBarracuda]

Sometimes my virus scanner slows my system down by targetting wrong processes to scan. Also, make sure you don't have spyware. But then you might say that Doom 3 runs fine, it's just Far Cry. If it is spyware, who knows, you might just get a boost in Doom 3

 

[shimsham]

hdr?

never mind. search is good.

 

[sbuckler]

Originally posted by: JoburgJigalow
sorry sbuckler,

Are you sure, when you are near the end of the carrier mission on top of that rusty ship fighting those guys on the deck, Does it run smoothly there for you? I can't see that being possible... What graphic settings have you got running?

Mid twenties for that bit. Still quite playable but not ideal, however that's the worst case I've come accross.

 

[dababus]

ok, now farcry gets 10 second pause on the opening screen. its hard to tell if the system has crashed or not. don't know why.

i can't seem to resolve this issue.

 

[imported_Harbinger]

Ok , just an idea. How much virtual memory (swap file) you have ? Because windows have a bad habbit of creating a swap file at about 1.5 times the system memory. in your case you would have a +2gig swap which would slow you down considerably when windows would cache stuff in your disk. Set manually swap file to constant 256mbs. Thats more than enough with 1.5gigs of mem.

 

[dababus]

thanks for the input, i downgraded my ram to 1 gig.

what shosuld be the swap file settings.

lmk. thanks.

 

[imported_Harbinger]

My computer -> Right Click -> Properties -> Advanced -> Performance -> Settings -> Advanced -> Virtual Memory -> Change -> Custom Size -> Initial Size : 256MB , Maximum Size : 256MB -> Set

I hope you can follow me here

Windows report that my virtual memory should be 1534MB (no thanks Bill). Thats 1.5 times my memory (1024mbs).

The whole point is, imagine you have 1.5*1.5gig = 2.25gigs virual memory. When you do something that windows have to "cache" in the virtual memory aka your disk and then wants to recover that data it has to physically search 2.25gigs of hard disk space for that data. That could take a long time (compared to reading ram memory), even longer when disk has lots of fragmentation. Unfortunately even if 1.5gig should be enough for everything you do (unless you are into video editing or something ) you cant really totally disable virtual memory. Some programs rely on the existance of virual memory in order to work because they are to stubborn not to solely use psysical ram memory. So a nice amount would be about 256megs. If you feel unsure and really like using many programs the same time (photoshop + 5 internet explorer + + + ) you could increase it to 512. More than that would be trully overkill with more than 1g of ram.

So in your case maybe far cry is caching stuff in your swap file which is too large,so when time comes to recover it, it has to search lotsa space, thus the stuttering/jumpy experience.

P.S. This is just a hypothetic scenario. Even changing swap file size might not solve your problem. Though you should still reduce and set vm at a value of about 256 megs.

 

[Acanthus]

Far Cry will run crappy with HDR enabled at anything over 1024x768. Even with an Ultra OC.