Gameplay stuttering while showing 60fps HELP!

[Ryudo]

Different partitions mean nothing though. It still runs from the same HDD that way.
I assume you mean you tried it on a different HDD entirely which was just labeled as D: instead of just a partition?

A pendrive is even slower than a HDD. Likewise with an external USB HDD. (unless it's a USB 3.0 drive, but I really doubt you have that).

[markyrocks69]

Different partitions mean nothing though. It still runs from the same HDD that way.
I assume you mean you tried it on a different HDD entirely which was just labeled as D: instead of just a partition?

A pendrive is even slower than a HDD. Likewise with an external USB HDD. (unless it's a USB 3.0 drive, but I really doubt you have that).

I'll second that. I assumed he ran it off a different drive as well. 2 partitions on same hdd still use the same total bandwidth. Could still be a hdd bottleneck. USB transfer rate very slow.

[nosisab Ken Keleh]

Can you describe that stuttering more clearly? like it is deeper and less frequent or kind of a micro stuttering the type described to you in the PMs as observed long ago in Oblivion game?

That second case is hardly a performance issue, more like a beating frequency or some hardware generating quick interrupt requests. Try monitoring the memory, processor and peripherals loads observing if there are not spikes (a line graph would help a lot in this).

Edit> meanwhile you could try changing the number of frames to render ahead at Nvidia Control Panel. May want to try disconnecting all USB devices (for testing purposes) always observing for effect changes.

[magnuesgallant001]

Different partitions mean nothing though. It still runs from the same HDD that way.
I assume you mean you tried it on a different HDD entirely which was just labeled as D: instead of just a partition?

A pendrive is even slower than a HDD. Likewise with an external USB HDD. (unless it's a USB 3.0 drive, but I really doubt you have that).

Just for my own education would it really be that much slower if he ran it off an external usb drive even if it were flash memory? Also I was under the impression that USB 3.0 was only practically faster for the purposes of data transfer / copying as opposed to simple access?

Thanks in advance

[belmont1990]

Well I tried only one internal HDD (partitioned to C and D, both formated to ntfs during OS installation) and external pendrive memory.
That actually concerns me - maybe formatting to something else like fat32 or just clean format to ntfs with some good program to do it would get some results?

Another idea - could windows indexing be related to this problem at all?

This so called stuttering is something very much like typical frameskipping option in other emulators - but occuring periodically, for example I can just run straight or pan camera around character and every few seconds it gets choppy for 2-3 sec. and gets smooth again. Over and over again during gamplay all the time. So something like the second option nosisab Ken Keleh mentioned.

I tried setting max pre rendered frames to either 1 or 4 for no change at all, had expecially made pcsx2 profile.
Also tried changing in pcsx2 vu ini "vsyncqueuesize=2" to value like 1 or 3, nothing better.

I'm going to try disconnectiong both w/less logitech gamepad and w/less keyboard+mouse.

[Franpa]

You could try enforcing full 3D clock speeds for your video card if you wanted to see if that affected anything:

Open Nvidia Control Panel and navigate to the Manage 3D Settings section
Click "Program Settings" tab
Add a profile for dwm.exe and explorer.exe (C:\Windows and C:\Windows\System32)
Set them to "Prefer Maximum Performance"

Applying the setting in the Global Profile doesn't truly stop your video card from dynamically downclocking when it thinks it isn't in use, doing the above however will. Nvidia introduced hidden profiles for core Windows files in one of their late 2xx.xxx driver releases with them set to power saving, no clue why they made the profiles hidden. You'll need to do this again should you ever do a clean install of newer drivers.

You can also check your BIOS and disable any power saving features for the CPU and PCI-E slot (Don't disable the TM function for the CPU though).

[markyrocks69]

Look open task manager, click the performance tab, click resource monitor button.

With that open run a game. If your "disk" goes up to 100% and coincides with the stuttering that's the problem. Please just try it and report. If it doesn't do that then you can rule out your hdd bottlenicking

[tsunami2311]

You could try enforcing full 3D clock speeds for your video card if you wanted to see if that affected anything:

Open Nvidia Control Panel and navigate to the Manage 3D Settings section
Click "Program Settings" tab
Add a profile for dwm.exe and explorer.exe (C:\Windows and C:\Windows\System32)
Set them to "Prefer Maximum Performance"

Applying the setting in the Global Profile doesn't truly stop your video card from dynamically downclocking when it thinks it isn't in use, doing the above however will. Nvidia introduced hidden profiles for core Windows files in one of their late 2xx.xxx driver releases with them set to power saving, no clue why they made the profiles hidden. You'll need to do this again should you ever do a clean install of newer drivers.

You can also check your BIOS and disable any power saving features for the CPU and PCI-E slot (Don't disable the TM function for the CPU though).

Why force the dmw to max performance, all he has to do it set PCSX2 to max performance with it own profile.

Vsync is not perfect either it has it issue one them being not everything work smoothly for all programs/apps

[Franpa]

To eliminate power saving functionality as a potential culprit? If you don't do what I said the video card will still downclock while on your desktop. Sure, it MIGHT clock up when playing a game but it might also not and/or fluctuate between clock speeds/voltages.

Nvidia's had this issue in the past.

[Ryudo]

Well I tried only one internal HDD (partitioned to C and D, both formated to ntfs during OS installation) and external pendrive memory.
That actually concerns me - maybe formatting to something else like fat32 or just clean format to ntfs with some good program to do it would get some results?

It doesn't matter what you format it to, pendrives speeds aren't affected by that. And the fact that you're running the game from the same location pcsx2 is stored all adds up to performance loss. As for the regular HDD, if you format it to FAT32 you won't even be able to create partitions larger than 32GB, or store files larger than 4GB, meaning you'll lose access to a lot of PS2 games that are larger than 4GB (FAT32 only supports up to 4096MB per file and 32GB per partition). Windows Indexing could be an issue if the drive is bad or has performance issues. It'd be enough to cause a drop in FPS if it attempts to index stuff.

Just for my own education would it really be that much slower if he ran it off an external usb drive even if it were flash memory? Also I was under the impression that USB 3.0 was only practically faster for the purposes of data transfer / copying as opposed to simple access?

Thanks in advance

Well, in the end it still comes down to read-speeds of a file. The initial access time for a file on a flash drive is faster, but when you're dealing with larger files like PS2 ISOs a mechanical drive (or even a SSD) will always be faster. USB drives are faster with larger amounts of small sized files than a mechanical drive again. (Unless you have a 10000 RPM Raptor HDD ) You also have to keep in mind that a USB flash drive ends up with worse performance eventually as you continue writing to it, much like SSD drives. You can still improve access time of your mechanical HDD too by making sure it's defragged.

If you want the best speed for a drive you'll want a SSD, which actually eliminates the 'cons' of a USB drive. But SSDs are recommended to run the OS on only instead, while leaving the PS2 ISOs on a mechanical drive.

My old setup was a 500GB 7200 RPM HDD for Windows & PCSX2, while the ISOs were on a 1TB 7200 RPM HDD.
Now I have a 120GB SSD for Windows & PCSX2 and the ISOs are still on the other drive.

To eliminate power saving functionality as a potential culprit? If you don't do what I said the video card will still downclock while on your desktop. Sure, it MIGHT clock up when playing a game but it might also not and/or fluctuate between clock speeds/voltages.

Nvidia's had this issue in the past.

Yup, that's true too. Even my old AMD GPU had this issue. (Was an annoying thing in CCC).