Resistance and stutter

[Hellfire12 0]

Has anything been done to alleviate the stutter problems in the release of Resistance.

I have come accross some posts about FADE. Is stutter part of fade because sometimes the stutter becomes so bad (every five seconds) I can't play.

I have a dual processor machine and I have set affinity to one cpu and went real time on that cpu for OFP but no change. I have gone through 2 diff sound drivers and 3 diff video drivers and nothing seems to work.

I have a tyan dual, amd mp1700's turtle beach santa cruz, ati 8500.

[theavonlady 2]

Search The FAQ for "stutter" and see if anything in the 2 matching FAQ items helps.

[Placebo 28]

Moving to TS.

[suma 8]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (Hellfire12 @ June 24 2002,19:32)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">I have come accross some posts about FADE. Is stutter part of fade because sometimes the stutter becomes so bad (every five seconds) I can't play.

I have a dual processor machine and I have set affinity to one cpu and went real time on that cpu for OFP but no change. I have gone through 2 diff sound drivers and 3 diff video drivers and nothing seems to work.

I have a tyan dual, amd mp1700's turtle beach santa cruz, ati 8500.<span id='postcolor'>

I think it has nothing to do with fade. There are several problems than can cause periodic pausing of the game (I assume this is what you call stutter), most common being:

Joystick present in Gaming devices while no joystick is connected.

[ale2999 0]

I dont have a stutter, but from some days ago, I realised that certain sounds are almost inaudible. They were fine a week ago, but this week I try turning on sound hardware acceleration to see what it was. For example, the m16 sound would be normal in single shot mode, and really quiet in burst mode, or when I'd be driving the chopper I would sometine not hear the sound of the chopper at all. The wierd thing is that at moment I can hear sounds probably and at other momnet not. The volume is good both in game and in system. I tried taking the Hardware acceleration off, but I was in game thats why maaybe it didnt make a difference. Could my installation be corrupted by now? Could it be some addon. that I have? (I dont have any sound addon installed @ the moment) Ty alot.

[LBGS_Stewart 0]

when i have experenced studder i had ICQ on but shutting icq down stoped the studering but i was poundering why it studdered when ICQ was on i was running fraps dispite the studer about every 5 sec or so the FPS where 32 according to fraps when icq was on but why did it studer every 5 secents when the frame rate was at 32 frams per sec.

i also run a dual processing computer

two P3 1ghz each

512 ECC SDIMM ram

Radeon 64mb ddr VIVO

5.1 soundblaster live + MP3

60gig hard drive 7,200 RPM

I am shure OFP dose not use the Multi processing support. but i am courious about this in order for it to work for Multi processer computers would you have to change the whole coding of the game or just parts of it?

[Mister Frag 0]

You don't have to do anything special in order to use more than one processor on a SMP system, all you have to do is create more than one thread within the process.

The scheduler in Windows will dynamically allocate the threads to the least-utilized processor based on the process and thread priority class and CPU affinity masks.

I'm running OFP on a Gigabyte GA-6BXD dual-processor system under Windows XP Professional, by the way.

[LBGS_Stewart 0]

i am running it on Win 2000 and when playing MP it never uses the 2nd processer. infact none of the games use more then one processer. but it dose make it great for multi tasking

[Mister Frag 0]

OFP creates multiple threads, and unless you mess with the processor affinity mask for the process or individual threads, the process scheduler can and will move them around as the utilization of the processors changes.

Sitting at the main menu, I see 6 threads in OFP. While hosting "Capture the Flag (2-8T)" using the non-dedicated server, I see 36 threads. Additional threads in other processes and services are utilized by the game for sound, network, and input management.

Granted, not all of these threads are necessarily very CPU intensive, and may be idle while waiting for an I/O completion port or some other event, but when they are running, they can be executed on any of the processors in your system.

[LBGS_Stewart 0]

well on the SP battle feilds mission i lags in that one i havent messed with any settings in my computer that i dont know about, i have never seen anything that says processer affinity mask. this is a Abit VP6 motherboad. so i think it is only using one processer in OFP or just the equivelent of one processer in OFP just my opion becuase when alt tabing in that migh also to the task mannager its only at 50 % of total cpu usage of two cpus.

[Hellfire12 0]

Does anyone else experience stutter when running task manager. Obviously you need to be running either 2000 or XP to test this but I get stutter whenever taskmanager polls. I'm just wondering if OFP is overly sensitive or is it an XP thing or my mobo. Seems to me if I give OFP realtime access to one of the cpu's I should not get stutter when TM polls.

Again I have a dual Tyan with dual proc. The procs are... I can't remember XP or MP, it's the one that is NOT designed to be multiproc. ready, XP I think. Although they are not designed to be mp ready they still run in the Tyan in a mp configuration. Or do they? Thats the question.

So here is the test., all you 2000/XP multiproc users do this simple test. Load taskmanager then start OFP and just watch the main menu movie. Does the screen stutter or what I prefer to call lunging, the screen seems to jump forward as if it literally missed 30 frames. This lunging seems to be a little different than what I would consider stutter. With stutter Fraps actually shows a dramatic drop in frames then races back to normal were as with lunging Fraps doesn't seem to miss a beat.

[Hellfire12 0]

I forgot, in all the time I have spent trying to figure out what the problem is I have noticed a couple of other anomolies.

There has always been a horizontal line on the main menu screen between Multiplayer and Options. Well it's gone now, this seemed to coincide with my change to video settings for the Direct3D. The ATI driver has the option to "Application Preference" for both anistropic filtering and Smoothvision. If I left either one of these set to AP then I would get lunging. They are both set at 4x now.

Other thing is the windows mouse pointer shows up when I start OFP. I have to alt-tab to DT and then back again to get it to go away. After alt-tabbing to DT when I come back in I have to go to the gamma slider and move it slightly to get the gamma I had before I alt-tabbed.

Whats up with that? Mouse and gamma?

Should I bother calling support? Past experience has shown this a waste of time.

[theavonlady 2]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (Hellfire12 @ June 25 2002,19:27)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">Whats up with that? Mouse and gamma?

Should I bother calling support? Past experience has shown this a waste of time.<span id='postcolor'>

Search The FAQ for "double cursor" and for "gamma".

[Mister Frag 0]

I always have Task Manager running on my dual-PIII Windows XP Professional system because I run it minimized from the Startup group, and I don't notice any periodic slowdowns or stuttering. I didn't change the processor affinity or base priority class of the OFP process.

Regarding the extra mouse cursor, I can reproduce the problem even with the DirectX diagnostics when running the video tests -- the mouse cursor remains on the screen most of the time, but not always.

There are actually two solutions that consistently work for me: one is to Alt-Tab to the desktop and back, and the other is to play OFP in a resolution or color depth that is different from that of the Windows Desktop. Lately I've been playing OFP at 1600x1200x32, while my Desktop resolution is 1024x768. The mode switch (either from the Video Options menu or through a previously configured resolution choice) always eliminates the second cursor on my system.

[Hellfire12 0]

FAQ fixed both.

Curser wiggle in top left corner works for me on the "double cursor" issue.

The gamma problem is resolved by adjusting the "Game Gamma" sliders in the ATI properties located under the Color tab.

Thanks AVONLADY.

Earlier in this thread you posted to look in the FAQ for stutter which I had done awhile back but there was nothing there that worked for me. I currently have no joystick connected and the joystick option in OFP is not enabled.

The sound debug slider was already to the left.

I have ATI so Nvidia stuff does not apply altough I have been searching for parallels.

[Hellfire12 0]

Can I get some framerate numbers from some folks while at the main menu?

I'm currently getting 42

[Hellfire12 0]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (Mister Frag @ June 25 2002,12:15)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">I always have Task Manager running on my dual-PIII Windows XP Professional system because I run it minimized from the Startup group, and I don't notice any periodic slowdowns or stuttering. I didn't change the processor affinity or base priority class of the OFP process.<span id='postcolor'>

Same here TM runs minimized from Startup folder. Except now it's not doing it and I am running anywere between 50-80 frames at the main menu. No stutter or lunge/lag.

Stay tuned I've got my fangs and claws out for this today.

[Mister Frag 0]

It really depends on the video settings I use, I keep changing them alot. Sometimes I use 1600x1200 w/o FSAA, sometimes w/FSAA, sometimes I use 1024x768 w/FSAA, I keep changing the anisotropy setting and FSAA modes etc., but I always maximize visual quality and minimize the target framerate in OFP because I find the resulting graphics to be much more realistic.

Regardless, I can usually get between 30 and 40 FPS with just about anything on the screen. Looking up at the sky or the ground gets me near 80 FPS. I use a GeForce3 Ti200 that is running at 220/440 instead of the stock 175/400.

[Hellfire12 0]

Well I have tried everything I can think of and it's got to be a OFP thing because I don't have this problem in any other directx game.

It's really going to suck if I buy Resistance and it doesn't fix the problem. I really don't think it's a graphics problem at this point. At least now my graphics settings are tweaked for this game. Before I started this the worst frame I would get would be around 15 when looking at forest. Now its 25-35.

Thanks Mister Frag I think the biggest boost came when I set frame slider in ofp to far left and video quality to the far right. Go figure. Actually changing to HWTL bumped it up also. Very nice when it's running.