stuttering in-game - cause?

[rh71]

I don't game much but I must have PvZ Garden Warfare 2 working at least in a playable state. Right now upon it dropping me into the world (backyard battleground), it stutters for 30-60 secs before I can move about somewhat smoothly. The audio sometimes also repeats itself 3x (frozen video) so I know it's stuttering.

The game's minimum specs:
WIN7 64-bit
3.20GHz i5 650
4GB RAM
AMD Radeon HD 5750
DirectX 11

Recommended:
WIN10 64-bit
Intel i5 6600
16GB RAM
AMD Radeon R9 290 4GB
DirectX 11.1

My specs:
WIN7 64-bit
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
4GB RAM
AMD Radeon 6850, latest drivers

I have it set to 1280x800 res and pretty much low everything else. Full-screen vs. windowed doesn't seem to matter. Is my video card the culprit? Or is it my RAM (compared to recommended, this may be causing the stuttering).

Will I need to upgrade my GPU too if I want to go a higher res and video settings or will RAM help there too?

 

[AtenRa]

Have you OCed the CPU and GPU ?? Both of them are bellow the minimum specs by the way.

 

[rh71]

I have not tried OC'ing.

I was using this hierarchy to tell I'm above minimum GPU spec: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388.html

I would hate to have to build a new machine (cpu requiring new mobo, etc.) just to play this game. Will the RAM upgrade help at all with the stuttering?

 

[SlowSpyder]

Your CPU is slower than the minimum. 4GB of Ram isn't much today, it might be skipping early on while your HDD loads to ram, and some data in ram has to be shuffled to virtual space. Just a guess.

 

[myocardia]

Your Q6600 is way, way slower than the recommended minimum CPU, assuming you are running it at it's stock speed. You'd need to run it a Q6600 at ~3.6 Ghz to equal a stock-clocked i5-650.

 

[TheELF]

I don't game much but I must have PvZ Garden Warfare 2 working at least in a playable state. Right now upon it dropping me into the world (backyard battleground), it stutters for 30-60 secs before I can move about somewhat smoothly. The audio sometimes also repeats itself 3x (frozen video) so I know it's stuttering.

Could be due to a slow (hdd) drive as well.
What's your FPS while "somewhat smoothly" ?
Try locking your FPS with msiafterburner/rivatuner at a slightly lower FPS than that.

(Same can be achieved by using higher settings and making your GPU bottleneck thus lowering the FPS a bit)

 

[Flapdrol1337]

Your Q6600 is way, way slower than the recommended minimum CPU, assuming you are running it at it's stock speed. You'd need to run it a Q6600 at ~3.6 Ghz to equal a stock-clocked i5-650.

An i5 650 is a dualcore. The Q6600 shouldn't be "way, way" slower, if the game is multithreaded well.

 

[MajinCry]

Nehalem isn't all THAT much better than Core 2 Quad; a Phenom II just needs to be around 500mhz faster to get the same level o' performance. Sans draw calls; Phenoms ain't good at those.


It's going to be the RAM. 4GB is just barely passing Windows 7's barebones RAM usage after updates.

Use VMMap on the game's process. Report back how much it's using.

My guess is that the game is having to thrash your pagefile like no tomorrow, causing this insane stutter; ya really more than 8GB of RAM for Windows 7 and modern games (e.g, Fallout 4 uses no less than 7GB of RAM at any given time, whereas Skyrim uses no less than 1.2GB).

 

[Bacon1]

An i5 650 is a dualcore. The Q6600 shouldn't be "way, way" slower, if the game is multithreaded well.

Well its slower per core, plus the 650 has turbo boost and the Q6600 doesn't. Since its DX11 and he is using AMD card he has higher overhead from drivers already.

OP: OC your CPU if you can. If you have memory in another system try adding 2-4 more gigs and see if that helps.

Your GPU should do decent, but the rest of your system is pretty outdated

 

[frozentundra123456]

Yea, I suspect the problem is the cpu, although Frostbyte is supposed to be well threaded, you still need a decent amount of single threaded speed, and that Q6600 is clocked pretty low. BTW, turning down resolution and settings wont help if your cpu is the problem, all the more reason to suspect the cpu, (or ram or HDD).

After the initial stuttering goes away, does it recur?

 

[tweakboy]

COre 2 Quadro is a POS unless all you do isy

 

[rh71]

I'm running on an SSD btw, the game is on the C drive. Maybe that's how it's even running at all. I'll either do the more RAM or OC the CPU once this thread has run through. Looks like another $53 to get it to 8GB total (16GB total would be $150+)

After the initial stuttering goes away, does it recur?

It does every time I finish a game and get dropped back to the backyard. I suppose it's because it's a big "world" there that it has to load. It's playable but if this is an "easy" fix, I would like to pursue it, hence the thread.

Use VMMap on the game's process. Report back how much it's using.

8.5GB free? Not sure what that means. Nothing else is in GB.

The game crashed with a DX11 error after a few mins.

 

[LTC8K6]

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/53?vs=144

Anandbench of the two processors.

 

[MajinCry]

8.5GB free? Not sure what that means. Nothing else is in GB.

The game crashed with a DX11 error after a few mins.

Yeah, this is sounding like you're simply starved for RAM.

I'm not too savvy with VMMap, but I do believe that the value to take note of, is the "Total" value under "Size"; the game uses around 250MB of RAM.

I don't know if that takes the pagefile into consideration, though.

 

[Fallen Kell]

Yeah, it is really hard to say. Your CPU is between 10-20% slower than minimum requirements. If you have an aftermarket heatsink on that Q6600, you can easily get a 10% overclock, and if it is a decent heatsink, a 20-35% overclock isn't unheard of for the Q6600 on air cooling.

Here is a decent guide on the Q6600:
http://www.overclock.net/t/289573/my-experience-overclocking-the-q6600-a-basic-guide-walkthrough

I would try starting there and see if an overclock helps.


As for the "free" in the VMMap, that is RAM+pagefile, but if it crashed, you really don't have good data to show what it is using at the point in time it was stuttering (which is when you need to get some snapshots).


Please also remember, minimum means just that. The game will not run very well, but it should run once you turn everything down to the minimum settings.

 

[tweakboy]

Your RAM is being choked... gl

 

[tweakboy]

Try another driver version,, a lower one maybe.. gl

 

[TheRyuu]

Yeah, this is sounding like you're simply starved for RAM.

I'm not too savvy with VMMap, but I do believe that the value to take note of, is the "Total" value under "Size"; the game uses around 250MB of RAM.

I don't know if that takes the pagefile into consideration, though.

You want to look at the commit size total (minus mapped files), or actually just look at the private usage, that's probably what shows up in task manager anyway. That's the only value that matters for actual RAM usage. VMMap should have no awareness of the pagefile. It's only looking at how the process memory is mapped.

As for the "free" in the VMMap, that is RAM+pagefile.

I thought the free value was total virtual memory free for a process. In the screenshot it's showing 8TB of memory free, not 8.5GB. This makes sense sine the maximum size of addressable memory for a process is 16TB in the Windows version shown (split 8TB/8TB between OS and user space respectively). More modern versions of windows raise this to 256TB (split evenly in half again as well). Feel free to read about this change here[1].

A better way to look at memory usage is probably just to use task manager or process hacker[2] or something like that. I'm not really sure what VMMap is going to tell you that the others won't other than simply being way more complicated to understand. If you want to see how overall ram usage is mapped there is also RAMMap[3] which is also from the sysinternals suite but again I'm not sure why you would need to use that. Task manager is probably good enough.

Yeah, this is sounding like you're simply starved for RAM.

Pretty sure we can't tell jack from this screenshot. It's only use what, ~40MB of actual RAM based on that? Maybe ~150MB?

[1] http://www.alex-ionescu.com/?p=246
[2] http://processhacker.sourceforge.net/
[3] https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/rammap.aspx

 

[MajinCry]

You want to look at the commit size total (minus mapped files), or actually just look at the private usage, that's probably what shows up in task manager anyway. That's the only value that matters for actual RAM usage. VMMap should have no awareness of the pagefile. It's only looking at how the process memory is mapped.

I'm going to side with Boris Vorontsov on this matter; contrary to Fallout 4's RAM usage in task manager (~2GB), the game reports ~7.2GB in VMMap.

And here's what he had ta say on the matter:

13 november 2015

Just want to mention few important tips for Fallout 4. Official game RAM requirements is incorrect, it need at least 8.5 Gb of available memory, so installed RAM size must be more than 10 Gb for OS and other processes. If you don't have enough RAM, the swap file will be used and quickly kill ssd drive if located in there and of course expect huge performance drops.

Even if you have 16 Gb of RAM, do not disable swap file and set it at least to 1 Gb, otherwise game will not work properly. Users with less than 8 Gb must use very big swap file size to avoid crashes and every other fancy features of Bethesda games. For future mods with hi-res texture packs i recommend to buy at least 16 Gb RAM (but bigger is better with ENBoost).

Source: http://enbdev.com/newsarch_en.html

Used VMMap and debugging ta arrive at that conclusion. Gonna side with the guy that's been buggering with games for years, and has been fighting Bethesda's renderer like a champ.


And the described situation in his quote sounds an awful lot like what the OP is getting.

 

[TheRyuu]

I'm going to side with Boris Vorontsov on this matter; contrary to Fallout 4's RAM usage in task manager (~2GB), the game reports ~7.2GB in VMMap.

Committed memory != virtual memory usage. You can overcommit memory, just because it says 7.2GB doesn't mean the actual amount of RAM the process is using is 7.2GB. I'd have to see how it looks in VMMap to be able to draw any conclusions.

Now I'm not saying that Fallout 4 doesn't actually want (or need) 8+GB of RAM for it to run smooth. I'm simply stating how it's using it as displayed by VMMap is unambiguous.

Used VMMap and debugging ta arrive at that conclusion. Gonna side with the guy that's been buggering with games for years, and has been fighting Bethesda's renderer like a champ.

And the described situation in his quote sounds an awful lot like what the OP is getting.

Which is why I didn't draw any conclusions in my post. I was simply correcting and expanding on how to interpret the numbers. What you say may very well be true but that VMMap screenshot does not actually display what we need to know to draw that conclusion. It doesn't tell us how much free RAM there actually is in the entire system or if the process is hitting swap/page file.

 

[rh71]

*update*

So I installed an additional 4GB RAM bringing it up to 8GB and it didn't do anything noticeable to the stutter - no big deal since it was only $23. What seems to help more (stutters for less time) is disabling Avast. I haven't OC'd the CPU yet but I will do so as a last resort (not critical right now).

I am getting some yellow artifacting (squares and other shapes) flashing about the screen which I didn't mention before but it was there - I assume this is GPU heat-related?

The game is also sometimes DirectX crashing to desktop. I assume nothing can be done about that since I'm on the latest drivers for this card? WIN7 and WIN10 appear to use the same drivers for this 6850(?), so nothing can be done about that unless I get a new card? Could this crashing be related to the artifacting?

 

[Udgnim]

*update*

So I installed an additional 4GB RAM bringing it up to 8GB and it didn't do anything noticeable to the stutter - no big deal since it was only $23. What seems to help more (stutters for less time) is disabling Avast. I haven't OC'd the CPU yet but I will do so as a last resort (not critical right now).

I am getting some yellow artifacting (squares and other shapes) flashing about the screen which I didn't mention before but it was there - I assume this is GPU heat-related?

The game is also sometimes DirectX crashing to desktop. I assume nothing can be done about that since I'm on the latest drivers for this card? WIN7 and WIN10 appear to use the same drivers for this 6850(?), so nothing can be done about that unless I get a new card? Could this crashing be related to the artifacting?

if you are at stock clocks and temperatures look ok, then artifacts = your GPU or VRAM is dieing

 

[rh71]

if you are at stock clocks and temperatures look ok, then artifacts = your GPU or VRAM is dieing

Same reason for the directX errors or is that purely drivers?

 

[sm625]

The memory bandwidth on a Q6600 is pretty atrocious. i5-650 may not be a terribly fast CPU by today's standards, but it is a huge step above Q6600 in both single threaded IPC and memory bandwidth. The Q6600 also has a FSB which is relatively bad at context switching. Back when the Q6600 was new this wasnt much of an issue but today, the OS does like 4 times the amount of context switching compared to back then. There are a LOT more threads running on the average machine today compared to 8-9 years ago. That is why even at 3.8GHz, the Q6600 is going to run like a dog, much slower than even a low clocked first gen i5. You can literally take a modern i3, clock it at 1200MHz, and it will run smoother than a Q6600 @ 3.6GHz. I have tested my G3258 clocked at 800MHz and it "feels" faster than my Q6600 @ 3.2GHz. It is only when you run benchmarks that the lack of speed really shows.

 

[tweakboy]

CPU is too week to drive other stuff