[Quitch]

I've started to run into an annoying issue, encountered during Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, a sort of "hiccup". Actually, a dropped frame might be more accurate and I used to see it in Half-Life 2 sometimes as well. You'd be running in a straight line but every so often it would seem to skip a frame and ruin the smooth effect.

I'm running a Core 2 Duo 3.33Ghz process, 8GB RAM and an AMD Radeon HD 5870 on Windows 7 64-bit powered by a Zalman ZM1000-HP. I've had this problem with multiple iterations of the 10.x drivers (I don't recall before then whether I had it or not). It seems to be more common than it was, or perhaps it's because I'm in more 1st and 3rd person games right now, though I don't recall experiencing it at the beginning of the year when I was first playing ME and ME2.

Is this a software issue? A GPU issue? A PSU issue?

[IRQ Conflict]

PSU? No. I tend to think it's more hard drive access from your post. Possible memory leak and or driver implementation. Very hard to figure out.

I get great performance in The Witcher. However, if I constantly save/load it will stutter like crazy necessitating a reboot of the game. I have several games that do this.

I'm a PC fanboy so I tend to blame consoles for my woes.

[Tamlin]

Could be many other things also, like harddrive or virus killer (or some other program) kicking in sometimes.

If you are looking for optimal smoothness, i would recommend you try RadeonPro. It gives you easy options to alter frames to render ahead, vsync and much more:
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=322031

edit: I see IRQ Conflict was a bit faster. :P

[homerdog]

Originally Posted by Quitch

I've started to run into an annoying issue, encountered during Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, a sort of "hiccup". Actually, a dropped frame might be more accurate and I used to see it in Half-Life 2 sometimes as well. You'd be running in a straight line but every so often it would seem to skip a frame and ruin the smooth effect.

I'm running a Core 2 Duo 3.33Ghz process, 8GB RAM and an AMD Radeon HD 5870 on Windows 7 64-bit powered by a Zalman ZM1000-HP. I've had this problem with multiple iterations of the 10.x drivers (I don't recall before then whether I had it or not). It seems to be more common than it was, or perhaps it's because I'm in more 1st and 3rd person games right now, though I don't recall experiencing it at the beginning of the year when I was first playing ME and ME2.

Is this a software issue? A GPU issue? A PSU issue?

I assume you are using vsync?

At least for the Mass Effects you can set an FPS cap in the config file. Set it to be a bit lower than your monitor's refresh rate and this may solve your problem.

[digitalwanderer]

Have your computer stand on its head and drink from the far side of a glass of water.

[Davros]

since you have 8gb try creating a 1 or 2 gig ram drive and putting your swap file on it

of course if you had 20gb you could run the whole game from one

[flynn]

Originally Posted by Davros

since you have 8gb try creating a 1 or 2 gig ram drive and putting your swap file on it

What kind of prehistoric VM subsystem does Windows have that makes that useful/necessary?

[homerdog]

I think I know what he's talking about, and it's not caused by HDD accessing. I don't know what it's caused by, but I've experienced it in a few games and the only way to fix it other than disabling vsync is to set a FPS cap below the refresh rate.

[Davros]

windows will always use the swap file no matter how much ram is available and why not, do many programs use more than 6gb ram

[Chris123234]

If it's what I think it is, its a random stutter that occurs when it simply shouldn't be. Even on a game you know should be easy for the system. Used to drive me nuts and distract the hell out of me when I just wanted to be immersed, but luckily hasn't happened in a while. I've also had problems with .mkv files getting super artifact ridden during playback. Pretty sure my hardware is just cursed.