'Stuttering' while playing games... anyone have a fix?

[Nebben]

I've had this problem for some time now, and I don't have a clue what the cause is.

I'll be playing a game, such as Quake, and periodically, maybe once every 5 minutes, my computer will stutter. It'll be a one-second freeze... it seems as if my hard drive is caching or something, but I'm not sure if that's what's happening. It happens regardless of what I'm doing, but it's obviously more noticeable in games because my video totally freezes for a second, and it often gets me killed

I have absolutely nothing running but the bare minimum... just the core WinXP components, Trillian, and whatever game I'm playing. I have 200+ MB of RAM free, so it's not an issue with lack of RAM free.

I'm running SP2, but this has happened when I was running SP1 as well.

I do remember a time during my WinXP days that this was NOT occurring, but I'm not sure when it started.

I've heard of this happening with many others, but nobody really knows the cause. One common 'fix' is to set the Logitech mouse drivers to Realtime priority in task manager, but that doesn't seem to fix it for me.

 

[Chaotic42]

Can you run the game in a window and bring up Task Manager to watch your CPU usage?

Just a thought.

 

[Nebben]

I could, but what would be the purpose, exactly?

It's virtually impossible that my processor can't handle the load... I'm playing games that run flawlessly on a Pentium 2 in Win98... this has to be some kind of XP-related problem.

Unless you have something else in mind... ?

 

[Chaotic42]

Originally posted by: Nebben
I could, but what would be the purpose, exactly?

It's virtually impossible that my processor can't handle the load... I'm playing games that run flawlessly on a Pentium 2 in Win98... this has to be some kind of XP-related problem.

Unless you have something else in mind... ?

I was thinking you could watch your page file usage and memory stats, and see if your CPU spikes at those points.

 

[Nebben]

I just took a wild guess and changed one setting, and I believe I found the problem.

In System Properties -> Advanced -> Performance (Settings),

The setting "Processor Scheduling: Adjust for best performance of [ ] Programs or [ ] Background Services"

I had it set to Programs, as it would seem that this would give better performance for gaming, but it appears that it was the direct cause of my problem. Setting it to background services fixed the problem, and if you use the "?" feature on 'Background Services' it actually says "Specifies that ALL PROGRAMS receive EQUAL amounts of processor resources"

I've got a feeling many other gaming-minded users have used this 'tweak' as well, and it is actually detrimental to performance in many cases, because it robs XP of the proper processor resources needed to keep on chuggin' in the background.