Stuttering in games due to Afterburner/Riva Tuner OSD ?

[Shakabutt]

I was suprised yesterday when i accidentally booted BF 3 without them, and i noticed more smoother gameplay.

I enabled the perf overlay and the latency on both the cpu and gpu were booth pretty consistent, where as ussualy i would get weird cpu spikes every few seconds.

The framerate didnt change, but i could feel it was smoother looking arround.

After BF 3 i tried Dota 2 and surelly i didnt notice any choppiness in the animations where chars turn arround for example.

Has anyone experienced this ?

Radeon 7850 with FX 6100 @ 4ghz btw.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Can't say that I have. I run Precision X which uses the same statistics server and was coded by the same person as Afterburner and have no issues with it.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

Do you have HPET on in bios and TCS turned on in OS?

 

[Shakabutt]

Do you have HPET on in bios and TCS turned on in OS?

Don't know what these are , what do they affect ?

 

[VulgarDisplay]

It could be my mind playing tricks on me, but all games run better for me without Afterburner on. BF3 especially.

 

[BrightCandle]

Try and measure it. I suspect you can run fraps and afterburner at the same time, so you can take some frame times and see if there is variation or a reduction in frame rate introduced by using afterburner.

Knowing how these tools work its perfectly possible for them to slow down a game, they intercept calls to DX, manipulate the outgoing commands to the API and call into Windows functions to achieve their aims. I have measured most of what my tool does as miniscule but when I added fraps to confirm my results I did see a slight reduction in performance, but I also saw quite a sizeable increase in the amount of variation in the frame times. Fraps with my limited data looks like it has some performance impact so its perfectly possible that afterburner does as well and that maybe its a lot. Using one tool to measure another should work.

 

[Mushkins]

I used to get this with the Steam overlay enabled on an older rig when I was playing poorly optimized games or games that pushed my hardware. No measurable framerate change, but definitely noticeable stuttering. Turning off the overlay made it go away, and as previously said considering how these overlays work its very possible.

Simple answer is turn them off and try it.

 

[Cadarin]

Is there an alternative to Afterburner for the auto-fan control? I use it because the AMD fan controls pretty much suck, but I don't particularly like Afterburner either.

I already uninstalled the Rivatuner addon. I'm not surprised it was causing the OP's computer to stutter, it looks and behaves like adware.

 

[tweakboy]

How about launch precision and put it at stock speeds and run game.

If games run fine, now go to precision and put your overclock settings and run game, If it stutters or slower its the OC on your card.

 

[BigChickenJim]

All monitoring software causes slight performance drops, but Afterburner is particularly heavy.

What's your hardware polling interval set to in Afterburner? Are you using the overlay? Which info are you tracking in the graphs? Any of these could be digging in to your performance, but it could also just be Afterburner itself.

Edit: Speedfan allows for fan control. Failing that, your BIOS may have some tweaks available for fan speed targets.

Cadarin, why do you say that Rivatuner behaves like adware? I use it frequently for the frame limiter and have never had any issues, but is it doing something sinister that I haven't noticed?

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

I've experienced that kind of stutter before from programs like that. The last I remember was some Asus app, but this was a while back. I use MSI Afterburner on my i7 920 with an evga 760 A1 board and I don't feel the same stutter I was concerned about when I initially gave it a try. Of course all systems are different and yours seems to be still effected by it.

 

[Cadarin]

Cadarin, why do you say that Rivatuner behaves like adware? I use it frequently for the frame limiter and have never had any issues, but is it doing something sinister that I haven't noticed?

Its probably fine. I just didn't appreciate the big ass list of utilities that were suddenly running the first time I rebooted after installation. Afterburner by itself is okay, except that I can't get it to run automatically without Rivatuner installed, which is irritating to say the least.

I guess I'll give Speedfan a try, although I really wish I could just force the CCC to be more aggressive with its auto fan settings.

 

[24601]

Its probably fine. I just didn't appreciate the big ass list of utilities that were suddenly running the first time I rebooted after installation. Afterburner by itself is okay, except that I can't get it to run automatically without Rivatuner installed, which is irritating to say the least.

I guess I'll give Speedfan a try, although I really wish I could just force the CCC to be more aggressive with its auto fan settings.

Afterburner is just a front-end for RivaTuner. The person who developed Afterburner developed RivaTuner. EVGA Precision is exactly the same.

 

[tweakboy]

You fingered it too much,, need clean driver install possibly

 

[BigChickenJim]

Its probably fine. I just didn't appreciate the big ass list of utilities that were suddenly running the first time I rebooted after installation. Afterburner by itself is okay, except that I can't get it to run automatically without Rivatuner installed, which is irritating to say the least.

I guess I'll give Speedfan a try, although I really wish I could just force the CCC to be more aggressive with its auto fan settings.

My general experience with CCC is that it's mostly useless. Half the settings don't function properly or at all, and the options are pretty anemic anyway. I barely trust it to run Crossfire, much less handle custom fan settings.