Lag Spikes on all Games, worsens over time?

[naachan]

I've been having the same problem with every game I play. I get a nice clean 60 FPS like 99% of the time, and then, bam, it's cut in half for just a second. I've tried everything mentioned in this thread (and a few others), I've turned off Speedstep, set my graphics card to use max performance, I've even gone through and messed with every combination of settings I can think of in the basic emulation settings and the speedhacks. Hell, I even went and tried the most recent dev build to see if that would help, but nothing. It's only somewhat annoying in a game like FFX, where everything is turn based, but when I'm playing a game like Tales of Destiny where the battles are real time, it's extremely problematic. If anyone can find a solution to this, I'd be eternally grateful.

[2enty3]

Hey naachan, what kind of setup are you running?

I'm wondering if this is something to do with minor hardware incompatibilities? whether it be certain drivers or not?

[naachan]

Hey naachan, what kind of setup are you running?

I'm wondering if this is something to do with minor hardware incompatibilities? whether it be certain drivers or not?

I've got a Core i7-3630QM at 2.40 GHz, a GeForce GT 645M, 8 GB of RAM running on Windows 7.

[naachan]

Okay, so I think I found a mostly effective solution. Hopefully it'll work for you as well as it has for me.

You'll need to download ThrottleStop first. Then open it up and check "Set Multiplier". It'll likely have "Turbo" in the box next to it, which will have your CPU run at full Turbo Boost speed constantly. You can leave it like that, or look up what the clock multiplier of your CPU is and set it somewhere between there and the max, depending on your needs. I found that most of the time, setting it at the base clock multiplier was fine, but it was more effective with the multiplier higher. Then just hit the "Turn On" button at the bottom right to get things running. Be warned that the higher the multiplier you set, the hotter you're going to run, so you might want to keep an eye on your core temp.

I've only tested this with the few games I had already been playing, but so far, on Tales of Destiny, the slowdowns are pretty much gone, and on FFX International, while I still get them occasionally, they're far less frequent. Might be worth giving this a shot to see if it fixes things for you, too.

ETA: Oh, almost forgot! For whatever reason, this is much less effective if you leave MTVU on, so you'll want to turn that off in the speedhacks section.

[2enty3]

I assume that throttle stop allows people who have locked bios's to disable intel's speedstep, and overclock as well.

Sadly, My CPU isn't throttling, and neither is my GPU, so this problem still exists for SSX3, tricky and for Dark Cloud 2...

Could it just be those games? Its really most prominent in the SSX games.

[2enty3]

Attached a screenshot of my graphs after playing SSX3 for awhile and I Noticed my gpu usage actually drops during periods of lag. This is with speedhacks disabled. I forgot to move core temp out of the way of cpu-z, but that shows frequency as well.