Everquest2 stuttering with Visiontek 4870

[kenkickr]

I have a customer here that upgraded from an Nvidia 8600 to a ATI Visiontek 4870. We installed the card and OCZ 500W PSU for him last week. He called us later that day and said Everquest2 was stuttering, not as much, but he would think in the massive upgrade on the card it should play alot better. I though since he went from Nvidia to ATI that there was some nvidia drivers hovering around so I did the work on his system. Uninstalled ATI drivers, booted into safe mode, searched for Nvidia and ATI folders to delete, cleaned reg entries with Driver Sweeper and CCleaner, rebooted back into windows, installed the ATI drivers, and defraged the system. He is here playing everquest 2 to try it out and I see it stutters just with balanced 3d Settings. I did turn Overdrive on and disabled VPU Recover. If anyone plays this with a ATI 4870 let me know how it plays for you.

His system specs:
Intel Core 2 Duo 6550 @ 2.3Ghz
3Gb Corsair XMS @ DDR2 800 4-4-4-15
Asus P5N-VM D0
Hitachi Drive 160Gb IDE on JMicron controller
500W OCZ Performance PSU.

[newconroer]

Hi,

As we've been discussing here : http://forums.techpowerup.com/showth...ight=everquest

EQ is highly CPU intensive. Moving to the 4850 would help; but not much in any of the areas of the game, that are already plagued by memory leaks, or generally bad coding.

Speak with AndrewMC, author of that thread, and he should have a guide from myself that you can look over.

[kenkickr]

Thanks but the link takes me right back to this posting. I did explain to him I do not play games like this but it could be the cpu causing this. He was thinking about upgrading the CPU to maybe a E8400 or going quad so I recommended to him the E8400 or E8500 since I really haven't seen a game take advantage of quad core procs.

[MatTheCat]

Originally Posted by kenkickr

Thanks but the link takes me right back to this posting. I did explain to him I do not play games like this but it could be the cpu causing this. He was thinking about upgrading the CPU to maybe a E8400 or going quad so I recommended to him the E8400 or E8500 since I really haven't seen a game take advantage of quad core procs.

Hello.

I dont play EQ2 but do get lots of stuttering in other games which is not related to Frame Rate issues. i.e. FRAPS will be reading a solid 60FPS but the game will be jumping around like a 10FPS piece of shit.

I am beginning to suspect that maybe the 4870's have a specific fault that rears its ugly head under certain conditions.

Games in which I notice stuttering off-putting enough to make me not want to play it are:

Stalker (when near 'FIRE')
Timeshift
The Witcher

In all of these games I get a solid 60FPS but like I said.....the subjective effect makes it feel like 20FPS or in the Witchers case....like it runs at 60FPS but then misses 20 frames all in one go. This happens every 1.5 seconds and causes a damn infuriating stutter that makes the game totally unplayable.

There are also quite a few other games that tend to stutter in a non FPS related way but generally these other games remain playable...examples are COD4, MASS EFFECT.

All other games I play/own run very well.

Perhaps future ATI drivers will sort these issues but just now their is a very ugly side to these 4870 cards that seems to be just being swept under the carpet.

[magibeg]

We need more information about the guys system, how much ram? what cpu? Even the harddrive size could be helpful in this case.

[polesapart32]

now don't rip me to shreds, but I am running a Visiontek HD 4870 x 2 (2GB) and I had to go out and swap my 500 watt power supply with a 650 watt power supply to make her work. you said your running on a 500 watt.. could this be the problem or are you running the 512 MB version (not sure what PS that version requires)

[Jsk68]

Hi guys, I just registered because I know how to fix it (not sure about EQ2 though) I know it sucks but disabling V-sync will stop the stuttering in most games.
lets hope its fixed in 8.10