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Strange video stutter on Visual Pinball

C

Chrispy

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Jan 10, 2016
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Hi Folks.
This is my first post here so please go easy on me if I don't exactly know all the jargon etc.

My PC specs are core i5 750, 8 gig 1333Mhz Ram and 2 GB GTX650 Card.

I have in a issue with a three monitor set-up I have running in a video pinball cab.

The software in question is Visual Pinball 10. I've tried various settings in the software itself, and also in the Nvidia control panel. I can get the game to play very smoothly and get about 100 fps with vsync off and it clamps at 60 with it on. The problem is that every so often the frame rate drops to maybe 30 for no apparent reason and the ball stutters horribly on the screen.
From the GPU-Z screen shot you can see that the load on the GPU went DOWN during the period of stutter as did the memory controller and bus interface load. They're circled in the image. I would have expected the load to go up and max the card out, leading to it not being able to generate the frames quick enough.

GPZ-U.jpg


If somebody could explain to me if this is what normally happens during a loss of FPS or not I'd be very happy to here from them.

Obviously if anybody has any suggestions about how I can try and sort the issue of the stutter out that would be a great help as well.

Thanks in advance.
 
Check your CPU usage when these stutters happen. I don't think it's your card since the clocks seem to be staying in 3D mode.
 
Hi Erocker and thanks for replying.
I've checked the CPU usage doesn't really change during these incidents.
Basically Visual pinball is using about 18-20% of the system resources and the idle process around 75-80% and this doesn't change during the problem. There is virtually nothing else using the CPU as I've disabled everything can think of.
What I find really puzzling is that the GPU load is going down as the performance goes down. Something must be interfering with the GPU and stopping it doing it's job (That's my thought but I might be wrong)
Is there something else I could check?
 
The graph you posted is consistent with something running in the background and slowing down your game. It does not look like something is wrong with the GPU. This is all I can say with the information provided.

You could try running another game (or a benchmark) and look for similar periods of lowered performance. If you do this extra testing and post results here, someone may be able to figure out what is wrong.
 
Yes I thought the same. The PC is built into a pinball cab so it is very difficult to run anything else!
I'm out of ideas but I can say nothing is running above 50-60% and most cores down around 20 all the time

EDIT I just watched the CPU% as I ran the game and noticed that one or two cores seem to be doing all the work but it changes around as I play the game. Sometimes core one then core 4 etc. Each time it changes I notice a small stutter. Can I lock the game to a CPU in anyway?


Thanks for looking
 
Last edited:
Chrispy said:
Yes I thought the same. The PC is built into a pinball cab so it is very difficult to run anything else!
I'm out of ideas but I can say nothing is running above 50-60% and most cores down around 20 all the time

EDIT I just watched the CPU% as I ran the game and noticed that one or two cores seem to be doing all the work but it changes around as I play the game. Sometimes core one then core 4 etc. Each time it changes I notice a small stutter. Can I lock the game to a CPU in anyway?


Thanks for looking
Click to expand...
Yes in Task Manager, Details, right click on the visual pinball.exe -> set affinity, then select the cores you want to be utilized.
 
Kanan said:
Yes in Task Manager, Details, right click on the visual pinball.exe -> set affinity, then select the cores you want to be utilized.
Click to expand...


Hi.
I have a bit more info. I've changed the driver on my board on the advice of Nvidia and it has helped a lot but still not perfect.
I set the affinity and ran VP on vores 0 & 1 only and that helped as well.
Then for a while it went really crazy. Frame rate dropped to 4 and the GPU nearly shut off. Core three was loaded to the max and I'm not sure why. Can anybody suggest a good way to monitor what process might be causing this?
Please see attached files to see what is happening.
cpu's.jpg
GPZ-U.gif
 
this sounds like core parking.

Google how to disable it as there are a few methods, but when it plays up symptoms like this can occur.
 
Thanks for all the help guys. I used your advice and that of others and managed to get a pretty usable system now :)
 
Hey Chrispy,
I'm getting quite a bit of ball stuttering as well using visual pinball 10. I have no issues running vp9 or physmod5 versions, but can't seem to get vp10 to run smoothly. Would you mind letting me know how you were able to fix the stuttering issue?

Here are my PC specs:

AMD A10-7850K Kaveri 12 Compute Cores (4 CPU + 8 GPU) 3.7GHz
GIGABYTE GA-F2A88XM-D3H FM2+ / FM2 AMD A88X
SAPPHIRE DUAL-X 100373L Radeon R9 280
8GB RAM
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-Bit

It seems a lot of people using visual pinball are running Intel chips and Nvidia cards. Unfortunately, I'm running an AMD/ATI setup. Even so, I have been told by others that my system specs should be more than enough to run vp10 smoothly.

I've changed settings inside the ATI Catalyst control center as well as in Windows 7 and visual pinball 10 video settings. Nothing I do seems to remove the ball stuttering.

Any help you can provide is very much appreciated!
 
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