90FPS and it's so jerky

[sly_guy]

Silly point i know, but i had the same problem with Unreal Tournemant ( and others) and my Voodoo3,

I narrowed it down (after ages of trying) to my sblive drivers !!!

There are various little icons that are opened up in the system tray, (at the side of the date and the volume),

If i close these before i open up a game it runs smoothly and doesn't affect the sound, I think the one that causes the most problems is the "live update" or something similar, thats the one that flashes !

Give it a try, go on, Humour me !

[WarFlail]

Ah, the G400 Jerk Factor discussion appears again.

I had the same problem with annoying micro-pauses in 3D games. The only way I could smooth things out was if I shut down every single background application (except for Explorer and Systray, obviously).

However, I never had the patience to work out which specific background app was causing the jerks. I do use a SB Live! however, so this may well have been the cause.

Another thing I did was go into MSCONFIG and disable a whole bunch of useless programs from from the Startup. There were many references to executables that no longer existed on my hard drive. After clearing all of this up, I haven't noticed any jerks even with background apps running... although I'll be damned if I could figure out which executable was the cause of my woes...

-=W=-


------------------
My system specs:
Intel Pentium III 650MHz
Asus P2B motherboard
128MB PC-100 SDRAM
Matrox G400 32MB SH @ 141/188/141MHz (no additional cooling), ParaKnowYa's driver pack v1.5 installed
Creative Sound Blaster Live! Value with latest drivers
Quantum Fireball ST 6.4GB & 4.3GB
I/O Magic 8X DVD-ROM (region-free)
Kenwood 42X TrueX CD-ROM
CTX PR711 17" Monitor, currently running 1152x864x32@85Hz
Microsoft Intellimouse with IntelliEye
Logitech SoundMan X1 speakers and subwoofer
Windows 98 (not SE)
3DMark2000 v1.1 default benchmark score: 3009

[Smiff]

OK thanks people I've tried with EVERYTHING in startup disabled. Just Explorer running. And of course all the behind the scenes driver stuff that I cant see. No good

I posted on the Matrox forum and they wont help with beta OS.

Sooo...

As far as I can see I've got 3 choices:

1) Strip out all non-essential hardware. Try every different card/slot/IRQ combination I can think of (this would take days)

2) Go back to Win98se (which I think had the same problem) (this would take hours/days)

3) Try every combination of G400 and ISDN card drivers (this would take days)

Basically this is shitty situation I'm in If anyone could get my out of it i'd really *really* appreciate it.

I'm considering

4) trying swapping my G400 out for a TNT or something, just to see, but even if that works it's no good 'cos I still don't know if its the graphics card or the ISDN card, and I don't have another ISDN card to try.

5) I could go back to my 33.6 modem, lol, but even if that works, what's the point?! , I lose more than I gain.

Argh

[Nuno]

If you have a joystick instaled try uninstaling it in the control panel. My force feedback wheel if installed in win2k and not powered on will give me direct3d pauses every ~3 seconds (Dx looking for the joystick?)

[Liquid Snake]

Hmm, I'll try the 32-bit Z-Buffering, but I hope it's not too much of a slowdown. But I still want to get TurboGL working in CS (since it runs a little better and doesn't have any of the ICD's problems).

Rags, what do you mean by TGL not being intended for use with 6.x? I got TGL working (sort of), http://forums.murc.ws/ubb/Forum4/HTML/003876.html

Also, I've noticed that if I cap my fps around 45, it's fine, but if I cap it at 100, it feels jerky. Did you try to cap fps?

I have a G400 and SBLive! in my other machine (actually my sister's machine). If I can, I'll try to install HL on it and see if the jerking problem is related to the SBLive!.

BTW, is it possible that ACPI is causing these problems?

Also, looking at your IRQs, it looks like you have an ethernet adapter (?) sharing an IRQ with the ISDN card. Is that a NIC?
Intel(R) PRO/100B PCI Adapter (TX)

[This message has been edited by Liquid Snake (edited 10 July 2000).]

[Liquid Snake]

Hi, its me again. From what I know, the AVM Fritz!Card PCI includes a bunch of ISDN software. Are you sure none of it is running in the background?

[Smiff]

Nuno:

No joystick installed I run HL with -nojoy.


Liquid Snake:

I don't understand this whole "don't run TGL with PD6" thing either, that combination gives me the best performance i've ever seen.

The fps_max cap sounds like a good idea, it defaults to 72 I think, HL has an engine limit of 100 now, i'll try 40-60.

ACPI - good point, i've no idea. If I turn it off in the BIOS will that sh*g windows?

Yes your quite right the Intel(R) PRO/100B PCI Adapter (TX) IS an NIC, and it IS sharing with the ISDN card for the simple reason that I can't avoid some sharing, and any other combination = death. I'm using all PCI slots and there doesn't seem to be any way of avoiding sharing on the BE6-2, even with the Highpoint UDMA66 disabled (which I did of course).

I am running ISDN via NDISWAN. I could try CAPI I suppose. I can't have any less software installed or i won't be able to connect to the Net! Could try older drivers I guess. What fun. not


My plan right now is to install Windows 2000. Why? That's the only way for sure-ish that i'll know whether this is a hardware or software problem, I think. Let's see how those Win2k drivers have come on - or knowing Matrox, more likely how they haven't

Thanks alot guys I can see you are really trying to help me and I appreciate that alot. I might 'phone Matrox today, wish me luck!

[Liquid Snake]

I don't know too much about ACPI, ask around, maybe someone else can help.

Is it possible to get rid of the NIC? What exactly are you using it for now?

[Smiff]

AAAAAAARRRRGGGGHHHHH!

I've got Win2k up, installed the 5.10 drivers, started up HL and.....

What the hell?!?!

My screen is covered in thin horizontal lines. I've never seen anything like this. They go from left to right, are one pixel high, about 20 pixels apart, step down from left to right, about 40 of them total, multi-coloured.

I'll try to post some screenshots later.

BUT the jerks seem to be gone! But it doesn't matter 'cos it's so slooooow, about the 1/2 the FPS, and of course unplayable because of all those lines! What am I doing wrong? The framerate is OK only when I'm dead!! Is this some sort of sick joke by Matrox? Crap. This is not my lucky day

[Smiff]

Sorry Snake, I tried to reply and my comp crashed... again! Grrrr.

Blame Canada!!

I use the NIC to access my home network, v. important to me that is! If there was anything I could take out I would.

I'm downloading different Win2k drivers now, I saw someone say the older ICDs were faster, let's hope so... do I just drop them into the game folder e.g. c:\games\half-life\ ? I don't want to install the whole package, If win2k shags itself i'm screwed, it would take hours to back everything up, and I don't know how to remove the Win2k dual boot system. This is all getting far too complicated, life's too short. I don't know what to do (stop buying Matrox products maybe?).

[mugwump]

Smiff,

Seems as if you are trying everything in the book. I notice your system is OC'd. Have you tried running everything at their default or "normal" clock speeds? A couple of weeks ago, I was having all kinds of troubles...major lockups, bizzare error messages, vibrating windows, couldn't install anything...the list goes on. I set the FSB to the default setting for my cpu and everything was fine. Since then, I have installed a different cooling set-up on my cpu and am back in business with my Celeron-2 566 @ 850. In a nutshell, could heat be an issue in your situation? Good luck.

WJC

[Nuno]

Smiff: These horizontal lines are a bug in win2k 5.10 ICD. Add gl_ztrick "1" to opengl.cfg and there you are.
Previous ICD´s didn´t have this bug.

Ps: Don´t drop the ICD file in half-life folder. It won´t work. If you only want to try a diferent ICD replace g400icd.dll in \winnt\system32\

My advice: Use 5.10 with gl_ztrick 1. 5.10 have much better performance in Q2 engine games than older ICD´s.

[This message has been edited by Nuno (edited 11 July 2000).]

[Smiff]

Thanks mugwump, I'll try it

First, sorry about that last post, I was bang out of order. I mustn't take my frustrations out on you good people.

Anyway.............

Major breakthough!!

I've just had my first smooth game of Counter-Strike! YIPPEEE!

And thanks to Windows 2000, apparently. Bizarre!

Now if someone can please tell me how to set the refresh rates in Win2k I'll be happy as can be

Cheers
Smiff

[Smiff]

Massive thanks Nuno! your ztrick tweak worked! I was in such a happy hurry I didn't see your post just now This is SO close to working its.. tantalizing!

But (sigh) there's one big problem with 5.10, see this:

5.01.019 53FPS
5.04.026 53FPS
5.06.031 53FPS
5.10.012 37FPS !!

What the heck went wrong?!

(Half-Life Timedemo (with my own recording on the map cs_assault)
results all at 1152x864 16-bit 75Hz, average fps)

[Smiff]

Nuno,

Changing the G400icd.dll in the \winnt\system32\ has exactly the same effect as putting it in \Half-Life\ - i.e. it doesn't work! (black screen or garbled mess)

Waaaaah I can't play counter-strike now!

/me wants to play
/me thinks about going back to 5.04
/me is a CS addict and needs his fix

Cheers m8