PCTech Forums

Guys,

I'm having issues with certain games (Battlefield 2 and Vampire:Bloodlines so far) where the game seems to freeze for a second with the sound stuttering then 'jerks' to where I would have been without the freezing. It does this at random intervals and basically ruins both of these games for me. I have a suspicion it might be to do with my crappy sound- either us an SB16 PCI card (stop laughing) or the Realtek AC 97 onboard sound.

My other thought is that it might be my cheapo generic memory or my hard drive (swap file) but no other games do this (so far), including Far Cry and Doom 3. The frame rate on Vampire and BF2 is also very smooth when it's not doing my head in with the stuttering!

My rig is:

P4 2.4 Ghz (oc'd to 2.8)
512MB PC3200 DDR
XP SP2
6600GT 128MB (oc'd slightly to 575Mhz core, 1075Mhz memory)

I've ran the games with standard and oc'd settings and it doesn't make a difference. I've did the usual (disk cleanup, defrag etc) and have about 8 gig free space so it's not the swap file size.

Any help would be much appreciated.

My first thought is a background application is causing an interference. You might (if you havent already) closing anything you dont need and see if it helps. I dont think the sound card(s) are relevent (sorry, still laughing), at worse you would just have crappy sound quality. Its quite a difficult diagnosis knowing that you can run far cry and doom 3 with no probs, both of those are graphic intense.



Welcome to PCTech

It seems like Battlefield2 uses X-fi sound. Here is a link to some info on it:



Looks like the programs intensive audio can overwhelm a regular sound card.

The symptoms you are describing reminds me of the dread 6800+Nforce3 setup,
Which causes games to stutter every 5 secs in the game and then return back to
Normal.
I had the same problem you are describing my first thought was vid drivers, but
wasn’t , then I thought it was a heat issue so I modded an old AMD XP heatsink
I drilled holes on the heatsink and screwed it on my vid card with a modded 120mm
Fan. My mod worked I got 43C Idle and 53C load, but it solved some my stutters.
Then I used Rivatuner to lock 2D/3D Clock speeds to be the same.
My final step I used to cure my stutters was to disable fast writes in the BIOS, either
Disable or enable to see what works.
I recommend to enable Vsync in game it also cures stutters.
This steps worked for me running all games at 1024x768 with 2XAA with no stutters.

Specs
Thermaltake Tsunami Black/side window
AMD Athlon 64 3000+
GagaByte GA-K8NS Nforce 3
1GIG PC 3200 corsair
Geforce 6800 GT AGP
HDD 1 WDC 80 GIG serial ATA
HDD 2 WDC 80 GIG PATA
Sound Blaster Audgy 2 ZS
NEC DVD/RW
Aopen DVD/CDRW
RossWill RP550 chrome Black blue LED
one Blue cathode light