Stop, and go in games.

[drexel]

I had to reformat about a week ago. I usually use the same drivers, but I found out they werent allowing frames to go above 68, so I used the newest ones from nvidia after reformatting.I have since put them back in, and nothing has been fixed by doing so.Anyways, I started to get some stop and go freezing in UT2K3, but it wasnt that bad. Just a freeze every minute, or so for a few seconds. So, then I download a bunch of demos tonight, and some are freezing. I tried max payne 2, and it took forever to load the first map, and in game was stop, and go freezing non stop over, and over. Call of duty worked until I got to some action where it started doing it again. Deus Ex worked fine, but I only played it for a couple minutes. I rebooted, and max payne worked fine for the short time I played it, so I switched to call of duty to see if it would work like max payne, and it worked for longer then before, but still eventually started doing the freezing.

My question is. Do large downloaded demos come with problems like these? Like, while downloading something happened with the download, and it downloaded them all buggy?

Also, what is the most common reason for this freezing, video card, etc?

Im thinking the reboot made them work better because it gave my card some time to cool down? Maybe my card has developed some heating problems?

Maybe the new drivers caused the freezing, and putting the old ones back in didnt fix the problem, because there was still some of the new drivers files installed?

 

[JigPu]

The easy stuff first

First, make sure nothing is eating up your CPU time. That would definatly cause what you're seeing. Also make sure that if you have a P4 that it's not thermal throttling.

Next, I would first look to see if your hard drive is fragmented. It shouldn't make a big enough difference for 'stop and go' playing just for loading textures, but it WOULD help explain why it took so long to load levels.


A corrupt download shouldn't install, and if it DOES then the game won't run right at any time (not just stop and go). This is especially true since most demos are zipped up and corrupting an archive corrupts other areas of the archive (since that area is unpacked to several).

JigPu

 

[Noodles]

I get similar symptoms if I leave my antivirus software running during games.

 

[drexel]

It isnt antivirus.
It isnt a non fragmented hard drive, because the demo loaded fine after a reboot.

Dont know what CPU time is, and dont know how to check.

 

[ThePerfectCore]

My question is. Do large downloaded demos come with problems like these? Like, while downloading something happened with the download, and it downloaded them all buggy?

No. If even one byte of the download was different from what it should be, the CRC value wouldn't match up to what it should be, and the installation would fail.

Secondly, to check CPU time for 2000/XP, right-click on the task bar and then go to "Task Manager". Under the Processes tab you'll find a listing of all running programs, how much RAM they're using, and how much CPU power they're sucking up.

 

[drexel]

I forgot. When I installed max payne demo, it said I didnt have AGP acceleration enabled. I guess thats AGP texture acceleration, which is greyed out in dxdiag. Maybe the new drivers I put in screwed this up, or does my card not support it, and this is giving me the freezing?

MSI TI4200 64MB

I noticed with normal textures in Call of Duty the game ran fine. It still froze, but I mean it had good frame rates. With textures turned up, it gets lilke 5 frames, if that. These textures shouldnt make that much of a difference. I could max out other Quake 3 games no problem, like RTCW.

 

[ThePerfectCore]

What drivers did you install? The new FX garbage?

And did you check your CPU usage?

 

[drexel]

When I reformatted about a week ago, I put the brand new drivers from nvidias site on. So, if you go there and go thru the normal way to get drivers they are the ones it gives you. I have the old ones that have never given me problems on now though. 40.72

Task bar says system idle process 99 under cpu. Nothing else has a number. Under performance, cpu usage says 0 then 5 percent.

I turned off a bunch of programs with the xp to windows2k msconfig, and it runs a lot better. I still get an occasional pause for a few seconds, but its probably just some memory switch, or turning them off didnt do anything, and it just happened to run good for a while.