Should Quake 4 "lurch" on this system?

[CZroe]

Originally posted by: sodcha0s
You are complaining about the "real-time intro sequence" as you call it. How does the game itself play? If THE GAME ITSELF is choppy, then you have something else borked with your rig.... your hardware is more than adaquete to run that game at 1024x768 on high settings. NOT ULTRA HIGH..... As far as the intro scene goes, others with an x2 reported the same thing as you in this thread so perhaps it's just a bug.

Yes, I'm coming to that conslusion. I will be installing it on a 3.2GHz Hyperthreaded Northwood w/ 6600GT today to see. I'll check before and after the SMP patch to see if SMP/dual-core could be the deciding factor though it will hardly be conclusive (Hyperthreading != Dual-core).

Originally posted by: Pens1566
Nice to see that when OP gets the help he asked for he treats the posters that responded like ****. BTW, 2Gb of ram will make a difference. In load times and gameplay. Why the hell would you spend $600 on video, and $70 on ram???

Well, I actually got a steal on the video cards and didn't spend nearly $600 but it's mostly because I'm taking it one step at a time. I bought a gig because I only had two addresses to get rebates sent to (2x512MB Corsair for $60 total after rebates). If there was a similar deal for up to 2GB I would have bit! I tried my best to get the 2GB Corsair on Boxing day but Fry's was out. Also, "a difference" doesn't mean I need it. "A difference" usually just means a few percentage points at most in a benchmark although that's not always the case. For instance, I needed 2GB for F.E.A.R. to stop momentarily freezing every time it needed to load something during gameplay. I could have turned down the settings but the settings I had and could do "needed" 2GB. Though it may make a measureable difference, nothing in Quake 4 "needs" it.

BTW, who did I snap on? I'm very grateful for the suggestions and reports. I was only critical of memory manufacturers though I did disagree with incorrect info. Load times will not improve with more memory if it is not paging or hitting the cache. It's just like when Men's Health 18 said that the XBOX would load faster than the Gamecube "because it has a much faster 733MHz processor" vs. the Gamecube's 485MHz. As if load speeds from mechanical storage were bottlenecked by CPU speed. As it stands, the GCN loads faster than all current gen consoles including the XBOX360. I've never even seen a loading screen except on direct ports from other consoles where they didn't bother removing them though I did notice that Metroid Prime's doors will delay opening for a fraction of a second if the next room was not done loading.

 

[Pens1566]

Extra Ram does decrease load times. Most obviously in BF2.

 

[Lasthitlarry]

First guess is Windows 64.

Second guess is the lack of 2GB RAM.

haha, you got SLI

 

[CZroe]

Originally posted by: Pens1566
Extra Ram does decrease load times. Most obviously in BF2.

Well, yeah. Because Battlefield 2 will hit your paging file with somewhat less than 1.5GB RAM but more than 1GB (Loading unused portions of the OS and game into virtual memory) so 1+GB makes sense for that game. Also, "Extra" RAM doesn't increase loading times, but "enough" will. 3GB is no better than 2GB when it comes to Battlefield.

Originally posted by: Lasthitlarry
First guess is Windows 64.

Second guess is the lack of 2GB RAM.

haha, you got SLI

I wasn't aware of any problems with 32-bit software on X64. I was led to believe that there could not be 64-bit specific compatability problems because it ran 32-bit software on a 32-bit core. Now that you mention it though, I dug back in some FarCry readme files and found that the 64-bit patch is not simply a 64-bit version of the program but rather a workaround for a problem that the 32-bit game has on 64-bit processors. So it's like a return to the old days where there were AMD and Intel version of the same program due to incompatabilities (WAY back in the K5/K6 days).

So, with no compelling reason to have a 64-bit OS I am tempted to sell my copy and go back to XP Pro. Sounds good?

Oh yeah, and I wanted any old deal on any old PCI Express card (6600 or 6600GT preferably) but at the time the best deal was on these 7800GT cards. There seemed to be no deals on anything else at the time. My brother and I debated but ultimately he felt that we would be passinig up a major opportunity by not ordering two at the price we had. I didn't let my recent purchase of "only" 1GB of RAM stop me (Who would?). But as stated earlier, we can stop guessing "not enough RAM" because I'm currently operating it with 3GB of borrowed RAM and it has no effect. The lurching still happens.

 

[CZroe]

I'm still working on this! Alright, I found a lot of info about Quake 4 dual core and 64-bit issues here. I found the MS patch here and I couldn't install it. Perhaps because I disable Cool'nQuiet? That's a valid work-around anyway so I was still able to determine that this was not the issue.

I installed the dual-core driver and XP dual-core patch also. I followed that up with a 400MHz overclock to 2400MHz and did the ForceWare registry fix (Which I couldn't confirm was for SLI). I then tested everything from low to Ultra settings with and without SMP enabled and the judder effect is still there (though it seems much faster now... at least three to four times a second). I just figured out how to set CPU affinity in the Task Manager so I'm going to have to run the gamut of tests again to see if that solves it.

 

[TheRyuu]

I play my Quake 4 on High with everything cranked up with 4xAA and it plays fine.

Hell, I even use vsync becasue I can't stand the tearing in the game.

Rig is in sig. Also make sure to use the command "set r_useSMP 1" (with out the "") so that dual core support is always on every time you start the game. Also, I have found that the game eats up a little more than 50% of my RAM and I have 2 gigs (so 50% would be 1 gig), but maby thats just me.

EDIT: I can also play on Ultra High with just a little slowdown but not that bad.

7800GT's in SLI FTW!!!!!!!!

EDIT: Also, go to XP (32bit). 64bit drivers might be to blame??