Microstutter: The Poll

[Hitman928]

Could you please add units to the vertical axis? One cannot tell how large the micro stuttering and the spikes are otherwise. I think I can see the frame time spikes, but not the micro stuttering tbh, and D looked worst while the others were pretty much the same.

Each grid line on the vertical axis is 5ms.

 

[Hitman928]

Unfortunately the general stuttering we see here isn't really microstutter, probably more down to disk access. Don't suppose you have an alternate drive you could record the video onto that doesn't have the game or pagefile on it?

Already recording to a seperate drive, though in my testing it didn't make much difference. I do an initial run through before recording to make sure there aren't any loading hiccups.

 

[moonbogg]

So, I found myself watching the videos and trying to see which one was the smoothest, etc...and I realized something....life can't possibly be that bad if I'm concerned with crap like this. They all looked fine to me.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Good idea in principle, but I will not vote because:

To watch is one thing, to actually play and feel the feedback and smoothness (or lack thereof) is another altogether, especially when differences are not massive and blatantly obvious. I therefore cannot guarantee that my judgement would be accurate enough and in line with the gameplay experience.

They all looked bad to me, sorry.

These quotes are how I feel. They all seemed to have low fps and weird movements.

 

[Erenhardt]

I watched videos on HD2600 pro, Athlon 64 X2 and old dying RAID0 HDD and I couldn't tell if it was my PC or video... LOL

 

[Hitman928]

Ok, I'll have another set of videos and such ready tomorrow. In the mean time, here's the graphs with the y-axis numbers. I'll also put the corresponding video letter before each pair of graphs.

B-No Vsync

C-Triple Buffered Vsync

A-Normal Vsync

D-Framerate Capped

 

[Deders]

Just wondering what systems you are testing this on?

 

[cmdrdredd]

So no v-sync has some lower frametimes but it moves around more. Is that what I'm seeing?

It would seem that waiting on the monitor smooths it out but it would cause higher frametimes to do so.

Like I said they all looked pretty jittery to me, but you can sometimes feel the difference more than see it because you expect your movement to do X and you don't see the immediate result sometimes.