Games feel "jerky" or "hanky janky" on my new FX-8350 build (SOLVED)

[Hitman928]

So, a little digging around, I came across someone with the exact same problem with his 7870. His turned out to be a driver issue.

I picked up a 7870 last week too and had a few performance niggles,after running 2 old school 6 year old nvidia cards the difference with the 7870 was immense but it had a slightly bogged down feel to game play.

After checking clock speeds in MSI Afterburner it showed the card fluctuating between 1050mhz and 450mhz on the core during gameplay so the the frames were up and down as was the gpu usage which was mainly around 64%,rarely in the 80's/90's,dipping down to 20% regularly too

I uninstalled the 12.8 drivers and installed just the 12.6 driver (without the CCC and all the other stuff) and bingo! no fluctuating core anymore,once any 3d action is happening it shoots straight up to 1050 mhz and stays there until game over

The GPU usage however still hung around at 60-20% until I increased the 'power limit' slider in Afterburner to +20% and hey presto usage is now in the 80's/90's........performance is night and day compared to how it was,settings are now cranked up and it's fantastic.

I don't know why the power limit was too low on mine but after reading about other 7870's throttling down because of the TDP limit it was worth a shot.

I would try the new 12.11 betas. If that doesn't fix it, report it to AMD and see if they have a fix for it.

 

[Dankk]

So, a little digging around, I came across someone with the exact same problem with his 7870. His turned out to be a driver issue.

I would try the new 12.11 betas. If that doesn't fix it, report it to AMD and see if they have a fix for it.

Hot damn! GPU clocks are completely stable in 12.11. I'm keeping this driver for sure.

Have I ever told you how much I love you guys? I love you guys.

 

[BrightCandle]

How about some more fraps frame times to show the difference? Would love to have the comparison from other people from when they perceive microstutter to when they don't.

 

[Dankk]

How about some more fraps frame times to show the difference? Would love to have the comparison from other people from when they perceive microstutter to when they don't.

Okay. Here's some frametimes from Hitman, using 12.11

Hitman: Absolution Frametimes (High Settings) (12.11 driver)

I should stress that the microstuttering isn't completely eliminated here; it's just drastically reduced. IMO it's no worse than any other game with a small amount of micro-stuttering inherent to the engine. It looks good, but not "buttery smooth".

To me, a good example of a completely "buttery smooth" game is Resident Evil 5. I don't know why, but that game is particularly notable for its distinct lack of any micro-stuttering whatsoever. It's a console port but it's extremely optimized, even when I played it with my older 5770. Really eye-popping. Would love to see it on a 120Hz monitor to see how smooth it is.

 

[Hitman928]

Here's your new Hitman frame times:

http://www.dropbox.com/s/4tua6srvsg6arjm/hitman_frames.png

 

[BrightCandle]

You should probably capture frame times in resident evil then as well to see how it compares. Since its smooth for you it would give you a frame time trace that would give you a lower bound where you are certainly happy with the motion. That is useful to know when reading reviews of new hardware in the future and for understand how and when to drop the settings a bit to improve yoir perception.

 

[BrightCandle]

Just adding the same type of trace for comparison with your new drivers. Still a lot of hitching in this but its clearly better than before.

 

[malavpatel77]

Edit: Turns out, the 12.10 driver has an odd issue with the GPU clocks not being completely stable. 12.11 beta drivers have fixed it. Woohoo!

Original post is below.

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I apologize in advance if my problem sounds vague, but I will try to be as descriptive as possible. I recently built a new machine with an FX-8350, an MSI Twin Frozr 7870 (OC edition), 16GB of DDR3 1600 memory, etc, etc, but I'm a little disappointed right now: Many newer games feel "jerky" on my new PC. Despite getting decent framerates, there is an odd kind of microstuttering going on.

Sleeping Dogs, Hitman: Absolution, and BF3 are currently the most notable offenders I can think of (I have yet to try all my games on the new build). I had another machine with a very similar setup, including a 7870, but it had an i5-2500k instead of an FX-8350. Sleeping dogs ran extremely smooth on my i5-2500k machine, but feels very "jerky" on my FX-8350 machine with the same settings. I don't understand it at all.

Before we go any further: I understand that the i5-2500k beats out the FX-8350 in games by a fair bit. Let's just get that out of the way right now. I don't want to start a CPU debate. However, this should only make a difference in CPU bound games, shouldn't it? Sleeping Dogs is certainly not CPU bound. (correct me if I'm wrong.)

You might say "Well, but BF3 multiplayer is actually CPU-bound." True, but I've joined completely empty BF3 servers with small maps and it makes no difference. The framerate jankyness/microstuttering is still there when running around in an empty level.

Hitman: Absolution is probably the worst. I assure you, the stuttering is not because I'm running Hitman at unreasonable settings; Medium-High with 0xAA is not unreasonable at all for a 7870 at 1080p. I can certainly lower the settings for a better framerate, but it does nothing to fix the "jerkiness". Hitman Absolution is the most hanky janky of all.

Based on the topic title, it sounds like I'm blaming it on the processor; in reality I'm not sure what's causing the stuttering. Rather than putting this in the CPUs forum, I feel it's more appropriate in VC&G because it's completely graphics/gaming related and I've yet to pinpoint the problem.

You can see my build in my signature, but I'll write it down here for the record. This is what I'm using:

AMD FX-8350 Processor
MSI R7870 Twin Frozr 2GD5/OC
G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM
MSI 970A-G46 AM3+ AMD 970 Motherboard
Kingston HyperX 3K SH103S3/120G 2.5" 120GB SSD
SeaSonic M12II 620 Bronze 620W PSU

Things I've done

• Freshly installed and updated Windows 7 x64
• Fresh install of latest stable AMD drivers (12.10)
• Installed the latest AMD chipset drivers from MSI
• Updated the MSI motherboard's BIOS to latest version
• Set memory timings and voltage correctly in BIOS
• Changed PCI Express link state power management in Windows to "off"

That's... all I can think of right now. I wish I could be more descriptive. I'm not as knowledgeable as some of the people here on AT, which is why I'm asking for advice here. What could be causing this annoying "micro-stuttering" I'm getting in my games? It's (kinda) subtle enough that many average gamers wouldn't notice it, but I 100% without a doubt notice the problem, and it definitely didn't exist when I was playing BF3/Sleeping Dogs on my i5-2500k machine.

If need be, I can record an off-screen video showing the problem. I'd have to upload an uncompressed 60fps recording straight from my camera in order to see the effect.

Maybe its an issue with windows because it may be readin it as 4core/8 threads. if so call windows and they will send you a patch

 

[linaaslt]

Lol at those guys saying that it couls been his CPU.... but it's only drivers, what a joke....

 

[stahlhart]

Closing necro thread.
-- stahlhart