Originally posted by: akshayt
All these things were tried at stock settings with orignal gecube supplied drivers. If I use Vsyn then stutters almost vanish but then the motion of the card becomes uneven and also it looses its pace which makes it pointless in a game like NFS, in a way it makes me not feel like racing at all.
So I can't actually use that, however it corrects the stutters. Without it I again get that constant stuttering. Also, if in increase settings from 800x600 low to 12x9 maxed out 4x AA, I do loose on smoothness and performance especially if I use Vsyn as well.
The screen refreshes itself at a constant rate (i.e. 60fps) regardless of how fast your game is running. Enabling VSync locks the framerate to your monitor's refresh rate: 15/30/60 on an LCD. So, if your computer can render a certain section of the game at 47fps, it will only render at 30fps when VSync is on. This sudden drop in fps is what most people on this board call "stuttering."
Why enable VSync if it decreases performance? Without VSync, the video card will update the image to be displayed on the screen while the screen is busy refreshing itself (i.e. drawing from top to bottom). So, if the video card is drawing one frame while the screen is busy drawing the previous one, the top portion of the screen will have the old frame and the bottom half will have the new frame. This is what you mean by "stuttering," but it's really called "tearing."
Having watched your video, I can see nothing different from my experience with the game. In fact, it looks perfectly playable. Note that the tearing caused by turning off VSync will NOT show up in a Fraps video because the video only records the contents of the video card before it is sent out to the screen.
(Also, for others who watch the video, I found that Windows Media Player stuttered horribly the first time the video played, but the second time it played smoothly. So you should let it play through once on its own and only judge performance based on the second play though.)
There are four ways to get VSync running with acceptable performance:
1) Buy a better single video card, or get Crossfire/SLI.
2) Use DXTweaker to hack the game to support triple buffering.*
3) Lower your resolution/quality settings and your expectations.
4) Overclock your video card and/or tweak the game for more fps.
* I do not recommend triple buffering for action games because it increases input lag; that is, the time between using an input device and the change showing up on the screen.
As far as NFS:MW is concerned, I would combine 3) and 4). Spend a half hour playing with the advanced video settings to see which options most affect the performance of your video card without decreasing quality too much. Believe me, I know how annoying it is to lose a race because the fps suddenly dropped while going around a tight corner.