Intermittent stuttering (CPU problem?)
#11
imperialarmy

I have a similar problem.

GTA Vice City Stories is a stutter fest for me until I traverse particular area. After then it is mostly smooth, but stutters could still occur. Although GTA is the worst case scenario - other games fare better in this regard but still have micro stutters (even FMVs have them from time to time).

Anyway not so long ago I found out the reason for stutters - my HDD. How I did that? I discovered the program called RAM Disk (http://www.softperfect.com/products/ramdisk/ it's free), which creates a virtual drive in the RAM. As everyone knows, RAM is miles faster than any HDD. I put the GTA ISO there, launched the game and it run butter-smootly.

Unfortunately I couldn't check the other games since their ISO images are more than 4GB and I have only 4GB RAM.

I also found that if I launch the game and then restart, the stutters could go away (almost).
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#12
In the case of GTAVC that makes sense since I believe it streams a lot of data on the fly. At least the PC version did that. As far as your ramdisk, you might try avih's new(still beta) iso compression feature. That could make the ISOs fit in your ram disk. You can check it out here: http://forums.pcsx2.net/Thread-New-ISO-c...lp-testing
[Image: XTe1j6J.png]
Gaming Rig: Intel i7 6700k @ 4.8Ghz | GTX 1070 TI | 32GB RAM | 960GB(480GB+480GB RAID0) SSD | 2x 1TB HDD
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#13
Blyss Sarania

Thanks, I'll try to compress some of my ISOs, but I don't think it can shave off 1.5GB from those images.

Oh, and regarding my stutters. Sound is also affected by hiccups, so I have to use Async Mix.
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#14
Oh wait, I may have misread. What size is your actual ramdisk? I took it to be 4GB, but now I read it again and it looks like you only have 4GB ram total. My bad. Yeah, unless it has dummy files you won't shrink it that much. Prolly 500MB.

I use Async Mix a lot. In my case not because of slowdown, but because I use turbo a lot and don't want the music turboing.
[Image: XTe1j6J.png]
Gaming Rig: Intel i7 6700k @ 4.8Ghz | GTX 1070 TI | 32GB RAM | 960GB(480GB+480GB RAID0) SSD | 2x 1TB HDD
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#15
Blyss Sarania

Yes, only 4GB of RAM, not RAM disk. Even though .gz shaved off 1GB of DMC3 4.2GB ISO, it still doesn't cut it.

I have around 2.7GB available for RAM disk but it depends on memory usage.
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#16
So, an update:

Tried Dant's Ramdisk program (really neat piece of software, by the way), which didn't help.

Actually, that's not true. That (and any fix I tried, really) helped for a little bit, but the stutters would slowly return, eventually increasing in frequency until they were only seconds apart. (And, again, they more or less were contained to battle sequences.)

I tried running some more games, and the results were as follows:

- FFX - no problems (though that's to be expected, considering PCSX2 may as well be called The FFX Emulator)
- Resident Evil 4 - no problems (a few framerate drops, but those were more of the typical general slowdown type, and were quickly/easily fixed)
- MS Gundam: Federation vs Zeon - no problems

So now I'm even more confused than before. If the problem had persisted across all games, I could at least rule PCSX2 out as a source of problems, but as it stands, I'm back to square one. I dialed back the CPU clock to its stock speeds just to be safe, and the problem persisted.

I'm going to do a system-wide driver check, see if that helps. (AMD's Catalyst drivers have been sending voltage spikes to my video card, which causes it to crash the system. This is apparently a rather stupidly common problem with the Catalyst drivers.) Wish me luck, everybody.

EDIT:

While I'm at it, there are two less pressing problems that maybe you guys have insight on:

1.) A small (pixel-wide) border of seeming junk runs across the left and top borders of the game screen on certain games (maybe all? I haven't taken much note of it). I have a feeling this is a video rendering issue.

2.) While testing Onimusha 3, I ran into two bits of strange text in the emulog (which has since been overwritten). The first was something in Japanese and the second was
padman: *** VBLANK OVERLAP ***

These texts only appeared while I was fiddling around with settings, though, and now that I've switched back to my per-game defaults, they no longer appear. Still, I'm curious as to what they're referencing.
CPU - AMD Athlon X4 750K @ 4.6GHz
RAM - 8GB DDR3 1600
GPU - AMD Radeon R7 260X (1GHz, 2GB GDDR5)
OS - Windows 7 64-bit

Base PCSX2 Settings:
PCSX2 Ver. - 1.2.1.r5873
Video Plugin - GSdx 5875 (MSVC 18.00, AVX) 0.1.16
Audio Plugin - SPU2-X r5830 2.0.0
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#17
Try to disable the frame limiter at the scene where you have the issue and watch out for the FPS. If it stays north of 60 fps, then it has nothing to do with performance, but if it dips below, even for a split second, then the stutter is caused by the CPU.

Oh, just occurred to me: maybe it's not a stutter, but a screen tear? Besides a screen tear, it may introduce a judder to the image, resulting in micro stutters. The obvious solution would be turning on the v-sync. Though if pauses are 1 sec long, then it's not a screen tear.

As for borders: I rarely get them and toggling fullscreen (off and then on) helps to eliminate them. I think it has something to do with the way the emu adjusts fullscreen. As far as I know the fullscreen mode is actually a borderless window. But some games may indeed have permanent border, which is a bug.
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