Weird problem with 7800gtx while gaming

[IamTHEsnake]

Ok so i love this card but recently while playing games for an extended period of time, the games seem to jerk or lurk forward. As if someone was flicking the fast forward switch on/off . It progresses slowly from the beginning of the problem and procedes to become much more apparent and distracting.

Now here's what I think

A) Crappy drivers (unlikely, have used 3 diff types)
B) Overheat (unlikely, temp monitor reports 58 C max)
C) Somekind of thermal throttling
D) Fluctuating clockspeed

Anyone have any idea? I'm still trying to optimize my new comp.

 

[Soccerman06]

PSU might be going, another problem might be your car is overheating (the temps arent always right), could be throttling yes, could be the screen dying. My thoughts

 

[Cookie Monster]

Ok, i got good news and Bad news for ya.

The good news is that its not the graphics card. Most defitenly not according to your points.

However the bad news is that it could be the AMD dual core processor.
Apparently, people with AMD X2 has suffered the same fate, WHEN playing for a very long time. Like the game slows down, stutters etc. I dont know what the problem is, probably something that AMD should work on.

 

[Cookie Monster]

The different core speeds according to riva tuner etc, is the 3 different cores at work. The geometry core increases by 40 mhz when using 3d apps on a 7800GTX.

The latest rivatuner 15.7 shows you 3 core clocks in the graph, its really amazing. Just need to find out how to overclock the shader clocks, and the ROPclocks, then the peformance gain would be siginifcant theoratically, though.

Could be you CPU over heating?, your mobo?

 

[IamTHEsnake]

The CPU (41C while gaming) is not overheating, nor is the Motherboard(38C while gaming). Although this AMD software/hardware glitch could make sense, however unfortunate it may be. But I still think that's a longshot. If anything I think it's somekind of throttling that is screwing with the video card's clockspeeds.

Does anyone know how to disable the throttling on the 7800gtx or have any other ideas please?

 

[xtknight]

Originally posted by: IamTHEsnake
The CPU (41C while gaming) is not overheating, nor is the Motherboard(38C while gaming). Although this AMD software/hardware glitch could make sense, however unfortunate it may be. But I still think that's a longshot. If anything I think it's somekind of throttling that is screwing with the video card's clockspeeds.

Does anyone know how to disable the throttling on the 7800gtx or have any other ideas please?

Well it's almost certainly the X2. Use a program like RunFirst (freeware) to run your games. They won't be benefiting from the dual-core if they are stuttering anyway, which shows they are not SMP-capable. The threads are colliding and staying out of sync. If that's the case, there is no bad news here, except for the fact that your games aren't multithreaded.

 

[IamTHEsnake]

And by using RunFirst... the stuttering should technically stop?

I guess this is what I get for becoming a *beta* tester of dual core.

 

[Ronin]

What bios are you running on your DFI?

 

[IamTHEsnake]

The latest 6-23 I think.

EDIT: I also forgot to mention that when playing BF2, at odd times the game makes it seem like I have a problemed internet connection. The game seems to start lagging, even though my ping is 50 -90 ms. The game then deicdes to kick me from the server... how nice. I think this is another example of the problem in action.

 

[Ronin]

Try something else instead.

Modify your boot.ini by adding /usepmtimer at the end of your OS line, so it looks like this:

[boot loader]
timeout=3
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=AlwaysOff /usepmtimer

See if that helps at all.

 

[XBoxLPU]

Its not the X2

 

[IamTHEsnake]

Ronin, so far it seems to have helped but I have only been playing for 45 minutes.

I searched up my problem on google and I came across a topic similar to this with soemone having issues with the 4600+. The people in the forum also recommended the solution you stated but to erase that parameter and disable cool n' quiet.

Anywho I will try NFSU 2 in a little while, that's usually where it shows itself the quickest.

 

[Aldoria]

I have encountered the same problem before while playing Warcraft 3 for an extended period of time. I had Cool N' Quiet enabled which throttles your cpu clock speed depending on workload and for some reason, if I enter and exit WC3 a few times, the cpu never ramps up appropriately and causing it to stutter and lag (some reason, was stuck at 994MHz). So I just went ahead and turned off Cool N' Quiet and it has never happened ever since.

Btw, I have a 4400+ X2 and a 7800GTX as well.

Ald

 

[Ronin]

Originally posted by: IamTHEsnake
Ronin, so far it seems to have helped but I have only been playing for 45 minutes.

I searched up my problem on google and I came across a topic similar to this with soemone having issues with the 4600+. The people in the forum also recommended the solution you stated but to erase that parameter and disable cool n' quiet.

Anywho I will try NFSU 2 in a little while, that's usually where it shows itself the quickest.

I always recommend disabling CnQ...I personally find it worthless (but I DC, so CnQ would never come into play anyway, but I'd rather not have it inadvertently interfering with my crunching).

 

[IamTHEsnake]

Excellent thanks, I'll see how it runs during NFSU 2 and if it stutters i'll open CPU-Z. Hopefully I'll be able to pin-point the problem.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: IamTHEsnake
The latest 6-23 I think.

EDIT: I also forgot to mention that when playing BF2, at odd times the game makes it seem like I have a problemed internet connection. The game seems to start lagging, even though my ping is 50 -90 ms. The game then deicdes to kick me from the server... how nice. I think this is another example of the problem in action.

Thats just the game, its a POS, hopefully patches are coming.

 

[IamTHEsnake]

I love the game but I do agree, it does screw up a LOT!

 

[Intelia]

Ronin my husband says you play Black hawk down any trueth to that

 

[Redox]

I have had this same problem since getting my new system (AMD64 X2 4400 with eVGA 7800 GTX) and was going crazy trying to figure out why I was getting this "jerking" motion in games like Half Life, Far Cry etc.

It turned out that temporarily disabling the one of the dual core processors while running the game has completely cured the problem for me (thanks to the leads obtained in this discussion thread). You can do this by calling up the task manager in game, right clicking on the game .exe file under processes and using the "set affinity" command to disable one of the cores temporarily.

However, a much easier way is to use the RunFirst file mentioned in this thread by adding it to the shorcut for the game (ahead of the game .exe file) and putting a copy of the runfirst file in the same directory as the .exe file for the game. This invokes single core operation for the specific game and returns to dual core upon exiting.

I'm not sure if there is an easier way of using this command but this is working for me on a game by game basis. I have had no problems with any games since. If anyone knows of an easy way to globally disable/enable the second core, I would be interested in knowing about it.

The file is freeware and can be obtained at http://www.activeplus.com/us/freeware/runfirst/

Hope this helps a few other gamers with dual core processors out.