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Stuttering

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Philco3

Stuttering

Post by Philco3 »

Hi,
I am getting a lot of stuttering, I would love to hear from any one who could help me.
I am running FS2004 on XP my computer is:
Motherboard: Gigabyte Z68X-UD4-B3.
CPU:Intel i7 2600K SandyBridge 3.40Ghz.
Hard Drive: Samsung 1TB 32Mb Cache.
Graphics Card: NVidia GTX 580 DDR5 153Mb.
Memory: Corsair 8Gb Vengeance 1600Mhz.
Sound Card: On-Board.

Your help would be just great,
many thanks,

Phil J.
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Greg
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Re: Stuttering

Post by Greg »

I have the same setup (except sound card and more RAM but that doesn't matter) and no stuttering at all so I don't think it's related to your hardware. Sounds more like a missing texture or effect.
Philco3

Re: Stuttering

Post by Philco3 »

Thanks Greg, I am a retired aircraft engineer I can aircraft in the sky,"but" computers I am not very good, how would I find out which file is giving me the trouble.
Thanks for your help,
Phil J.
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Greg
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Re: Stuttering

Post by Greg »

Are you getting the problem everywhere, in a certain region or at a certain airport? I'd start disabling certain scenery depending on the answer and see if that helps. If you always load with the same user aircraft, try selecting a different one. Turn AI traffic off and back on. Things like that may help you identify what is really cousing the problem because you should be able to display FS2004 fluently at 60 fps with that hardware.
Philco3

Re: Stuttering

Post by Philco3 »

Hi Greg,
Many thanks I will give it a go, sorry for the delay in answering but I am in and out of hospital a lot.
All the best,
Phil J.
phantomfreak
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Re: Stuttering

Post by phantomfreak »

Is it possible that traffic files could cause an issue with stuttering?
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Firebird
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Re: Stuttering

Post by Firebird »

It could be, depending upon their content. If you are at a location and there is no stuttering, with all traffic disabled, and then there is stuttering with traffic enabled.
The normal cause of stuttering caused by the traffic files is that you are close to a location that suddenly spawns a lot of traffic or a lot of traffic is being updated.
Steve
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John Young
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Re: Stuttering

Post by John Young »

The other reason for stuttering is the sudden loading of a lot of full size texture files without mipmaps.

I placed 24 PAI Tornados in a scenery a little while ago, 12 at each of two shelter sites. As I flew a low level tight turn test flight around the airfield perimeter, I would get an almighty stutter as each set of the groups of 12 aircraft came into view.

As soon as the textures were converted with mips, the stuttering ceased.

John
Philco3

Re: Stuttering

Post by Philco3 »

Hi John,
That sounds great but how do you convert the textures to mips, sorry mate but I am still learning.

Phil J. :D
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John Young
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Re: Stuttering

Post by John Young »

Hi Phil,

I use DxtBmp.exe by Martin Wright at MW Graphics:

http://www.mwgfx.co.uk/

This is a useful tool for converting normal .bmp files to the flightsim extended.bmp, compressed, formats. In the right hand panel of the DxtBmp screen you will see some check boxes to include mips when saving. You only need to check them before saving in the required format, nothing more is required.

Ideally you would convert the original 24bit (RGB) master texture to a flightsim format if you have it. If you have to open a texture already in an extended FS Format and convert it again to add the mips, you will be compressing the texture for a second time and that will degrade the quality a tad.

Don't forget to download the generic .dlls that are needed to run this program and other graphics applications by Martin. The download icon is top left in the row above the one with DxtBmp in it.

Some people use ImageTool from Microsoft, which is included as part of the SDK I think. That may be just as good, it's just that I've used DxtBmp for several years and I'm happy with it.

John
Philco3

Re: Stuttering

Post by Philco3 »

Many thanks John,

Phil J.
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clickclickdoh
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Re: Stuttering

Post by clickclickdoh »

Stuttering could also be caused by the particular aircraft you've chosen to fly. Some Aerosoft and Captain Sim models are pretty bad about it. Try switching to a default aircraft and see if it helps.
phantomfreak
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Re: Stuttering

Post by phantomfreak »

Is there a utility to check each texture as a whole vice checking each file individually?
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John Young
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Re: Stuttering

Post by John Young »

Just to clarify the question - is there a way to bulk check a whole aircraft or a whole scenery area for the presence of mips in the textures, ie a whole texture folder, rather than an individual texture?

I'm not aware of any program to do that, but that's not to say that there isn't one. I think probably a process of divide and conquer might be useful.

I would start with a check of the user aircraft - substituting a default aircraft as suggested.

If that's not the problem, I would then turn off all AI traffic and see if the stuttering persists. If it doesn't then you have narrowed the problem to one or more AI aircraft.

If the stuttering persists, then the next investigation would be the scenery area you are flying in. Turn it off temporarily and see what happens.

I used a similar technique to solve the stuttering I experienced a while back.

John
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Re: Stuttering

Post by phantomfreak »

Bulk check whole aircraft.
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bismarck
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Re: Stuttering

Post by bismarck »

Bulk check:
Use explorer, go to the directory of your aircraft and search for name of your texture.bmp (i.e. NBAI_typhoon_f2_t.bmp). If all the texture are 1.366 Kb, they have mipsmap. Usually MAIW aircraft have a 1.024 x 1.024 texture. If it hasn't mipsmap they are 1.025 Kb.

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SeanG
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Re: Stuttering

Post by SeanG »

(IT Support hat on for a moment)

Another leading culprit for stuttering in FS9 is related to other processes running in the background. On my laptop FS9 runs smooth as silk, but if Skype, Google Chrome, and Outlook are running I can experience significant stuttering (sometimes). Other things to check are video drivers, go to the source; nvidia's website, and get the latest *stable* version. While you're playing with video, get nvidia inspector, and load the fs9 defaults which come with it.

Looking at your machine spec... why are you running XP? A lot of recent components have poor driver support for XP, and even if they do have support, performance is not as good as you would expect. I built 2 machines, using the same base components, one with XP, the other with win7x64, and the performance difference was staggering.

At work we are running FS9 on win7x64 machines, with 3 spanned HD projectors (on lower spec vidseo cards), getting 30+ FPS and smoooooooth as silk....

Hope some of that helps :)

SeanG
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Philco3

Re: Stuttering

Post by Philco3 »

Many thanks to you all, I will try all your suggestion's.

Phil J.
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