I'm having a wierd issue with my new PC (specs in profile) After much running of RF1 and CARS it would appear that my G25 or the profiler is causing some FPS issues. I am getting up to 330 FPS in RF1, everything maxed, yet i am experiencing occasional brief screen/sound lock for anything up to 4 full seconds at a time, usually more brief though. The FPS (Ctrl+F) in the corner doesnt register this as a loss and will still be about 200-300FPS during this. It can often appear as though some frames werent drawn and ive 'jumped' a couple of feet down the road. I have now noticed messing about in CARS that sometimes changing settings in the profiler is having a similar affect - some settings the frame rate stays 100% constant, yet other times i change settings in the profiler and i have a periodic (lets say every 15 second) marginal frame drop from 70FPS to 10-15 FPS. Changing the profiler sometimes causes this to stop in CARS, but there isnt any change that will either FOR SURE fix or cause the issue. BUT, the only thing i am ever changing are these settings, so co-incidence seems unlikely. I also had an issue in CARS for a while where hitting something would FOR SURE cause a frame drop. It seemed to be a FFB issue, not anything else. I have: - uninstalled, reinstalled, updated Logitech Profiler to the latest version (was always the same anyway) - tried 3 different USB ports So, help? Is it likely/possible the logitech profiler is causing this issue?
I doubt the profiler would be causing the issue. Isn't CARS still pre-alpha? If so I wouldn't use them as a benchmark for anything.
Well, the issue seems to be the same in both games. It's annoying me in RF1 and i cant figure out whats causing it. I cant see any other connection between the freezes/frame loss except something to do with the input device or its drivers. I'm updated to the latest Catalyst drivers aswell..
I'd suggest with starting with the basics. Do a disc degrag. De dust/ vacuum out your computer. Virus check. What else do you have running at the same time? Steam? etc.... Could be a RAM issue or video card. Clean out your comp. Pull out the video card and give it a good vacuum.
When i suffered of freezes as you are describing i was not able to understand the reason of such issue. At the end i ran a VRAM stress test http://majorgeeks.com/Video_Memory_Stress_Test__d5896.html and found many errors (i ran the same test months before without errors). I changed the graphics card and the issue disappeared.
I'm still testing.. Max, thanks - ive run that (took a while) no errors in VRAM. I've shut off Steam, no difference. One thing i HAVE noticed, is that when i have task manager open on a 2nd monitor, is that when these freezes and slowdowns happen, the core RF1 is using drops from 99/100 to a very low percentage, sometimes zero, for the duration of the freeze/slowdown. I cant figure out why this is happening, but is as close to pinpointing the error as i can get. Thanks for the help so far guys, its driving me nuts and i hope its not a problem in RF2 at least
When the slowdowns occur, do you see a lot of disk activity? Sounds a bit like if you're low on RAM, or that something else running on high priority is doing heavy disk accessing, like firewall/anti-virus or similar. How many processes besides rfactor.exe are running, and how much of your RAM is used? Also, do you use the "+fullproc" command line switch?
Hmm, havent thought to check the disk activity. It's a WD Caviar Blue drive, have 4GB of Corsair XMS 1600 of which about 1.3 is used when im running RF. I'll fire up rF again and check this out. I'm not familiar with "+fullproc" , how do i enable this?
Right click on desktop shortcut. Click on properties. In the "target" you add "+fullproc +highprio". But make space first(push the space button) before add "+fullproc +highprio". An then dont forget click apply. Thats all.
Thanks kimikaze; a quick test is showing a minimum of 10% FPS increase and the CPU load is now much more spread across all 4 cores; perhaps my problem was related to just one core maxing out so i will see what happens now with some testing.
I'll tell you what, CARS made changes to my G25 too, so much that I couldn't get it back to normal without reinstalling the driver. The effects had carried over when in rFactor. F'CARS.
You also can try this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pl3u9eiskM4 (not only for rfactor) or this: http://www.rfactorcentral.com/detail.cfm?ID=Nvidia FPS Fix (it can work with ati/amd graphic to, don't work with tv styles plugin, read the instruction first, may cause some problem(mainly flickering). I use similar fix to "Nvidia FPS Fix 0.30" but is not the same, is from different author(author state is, that this fix cause less flickering problem than "Nvidia FPS Fix 0.30", but anyway i see some flickering time to time, but nothing dramatic). Problem is, i don't remember the name of this fps fix (is just dll file you must paste it to root folder of rfactor, like dll file from "Nvidia FPS Fix 0.30"). But if you give me an email, i can send you this dll file i have it in my rfactor directory, if you wish. Oh and i use amd graphic card.
Well, Jorgen was right on the money; after two hours testing RF1, i had 3 instances of freezes, all with high disk activity at the same time. It's nothing obvious (some system services) but at least i know what the issue is now!
Cool, thanks for reporting back! I hope you can pinpoint what is accessing the disk. Sysinternals (Microsoft nowadays) has a good tool called Process Monitor which can be filtered to show only disk accesses. Sometimes it reveals quite interesting stuff that goes on. It's found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645
I took 3 screenshots of the Task manager disk monitoring tool while the freezes were happening, and it lists about 6 processes accessing the disk at that time. It doesnt show which process was doing the big write, but one which appears all 3 times is 'svchost' or something like that, which isnt clear what was going on. Might be a few more days until i have more time to dig deeper, but i have a starting point anyway
