Hi All, Long time lurker hoping for some help from the rF2 community. For the past few months I have been experiencing a micro freeze during online or offline sessions. I experienced it 1st in about October/November last year and was hoping a post-Xmas format would solve the problem. It hasn't. I've tried lowering the resolution in the hope that it would make it go away. It hasn't. I've updated my drivers to the latest as described on this forum (Catalyst 14.2 - D3D 9.14.10.01017). And whilst I've also upgraded to build 494 and have increased my frame rates, I still get the micro freeze. Tonight I ran around ISI Silverstone 1.14. I was online, with only 1 other car on the track. I ranged between 140 and 170fps and about 4 times I experienced the following video: apologies for the poor video, I rushed. But pay attention to the clock in the top left, it remains constant, whereas the car pauses around 11secs. My current (ageing) system: Intel i7 920 @ 2.67 6Gb RAM Win7-64 Radeon 7870 2Gb GFX rF2 running @ 1600 x 900 32bit 60 Hz AA: No Sync: No FXAA: No HDRI: On In My Display settings most options are medium or low (shadow blur, soft particles, wind and crowd motion are off). I've tried old school things like closing down all non-essential programs (closing from the systray), putting Avast onto Silent/Gaming Mode, closing off the Sheilds in Avast, even disconnecting other HDD's. I've download RadeonPro which limited my fps to 60 (which I've sinced removed because it didn't work), but I still experienced the slow down etc., etc. And still I get the problems. As mentioned I've reformatted and re-installed. I've deleted rF2 again and installed from a fresh full version of build 494, not even copying over UserFiles or any such from the old install. The only possibility I haven't tried is installing to another drive/folder with a fresh copy. In conversing with fellow sim racers, some seem to think it's the GFX card, but didn't know if I could run a load test to see if it failed. I do have an old ATI 512Mb card, but it's in storage and I can only get to it on the weekend. I now have a pretty stock standard rF2 install, so any suggestions on any other tweaks would be welcomed. Being an Aussie, I'll be offline shortly, but will check in the morning and answer any other questions/suggestions you may have. Any help is appreciated. And whilst I realise a new machine would be the fix of my problems (or buying a nVidia card), I don't have the cash at this time to purchase said items.
I use Maxframerate=60 in .PLR and "Sync: Video" in settings. Cured 99% of my microstutters. Also, check Spinellis 'Guide' in this thread: http://isiforums.net/f/showthread.php/18087-Experimenting-with-AMD-graphics-card-settings/page2 Disclaimer: I've not been able to watch your video since I'm on mobile.
That don't look like "micro freeze" at all IMHO. The camera continue to follow where the car should be, the game still running, all seems fine, "only" the car was stuck at its position, that's pretty weird. Did you try displaying the green bar you can reach with several CTRL-F key press? AFAIK this show CPU and GPU usage, and you'll see if you reach 100% focusing on CPU.
Ohh.. That sounds more like LAG, nothing to do with graphics then. But how it would happen offline I have no idea...
ctrl C (don't remember the sortcut, you can see bars and the CPU is the purple one) to see if CPU is over happens when too much IA, the CPU is stuck at 100% and doesn't have time to calculate proper IA, you see like cars are jumping?
Only ever seen anything like that when CPU is full OR when the sim drops out of realtime or main Windows focus (background program interruption). If it's not your CPU then I think there's some software affecting you.
I am not 100% sure, but I think, Advanced SystemCare causes that in my case (when I shut it down, next hour or so I didn´t notice similar lag). But I haven´t driven rF2 now for a week and before 494 build, that never happened.
A quick update. I've gone through the Spinelli guide and added those settings as well as disabling HDRA. I took some screenshots in the hope of adding the CPU/GPU scale (from when you press Ctrl+F 3 times in the top left corner) but each time I took an in-game screenshot, only the FPS were shown. I grabbed a windowed version of 1366x768 which is probably the lowest resolution I'd go before everything gets a bit hard to read, and here it is attached: I have noticed that in any screen resolution I'm not getting anything more than 50% of the green slider.
What is your monitor frequency? For lot of different reason I will not let the sim go further to the monitor frequency as it's often useless, can induce overheating of the video card, tearing of the screen, etc. Mine is 60Hz so I cap my fps to this (through the adaptive vsync of my NVidia control panel). Do you have such lag when you cap your fps?
Another update. I ran a few races online tonight and noticed the following - so I got a screen shot of it. Top purple bar is a fair way along and when I had the lag/freeze it was all the way across the top matching the green GPU bar above it. Tonight I ran on 1366x768 and I had 1 freeze in each 20 minute race, luckily 2 of them I was on my own, the 3rd I was able to get out of the way when the 2nd wave hit.
I don't have that software installed on my machine, but seeing it's an anti-virus type of software, it may be AVAST in my case that's playing up. So would that be a case of making rF2 a priority application? How would one go about doing that in Win7? Monitor frequency is 60hz, 50 if I go up to 1920x1080. I did try the fix frame rate in the PLR file, and also downloaded a program that helped me do that called RadeonPro. Both of which kept the FPS to 60, but didn't stop the problem. The only other issue I can perhaps think of is my controller. I'll investigate latest drivers for my G25 (instead of the Win7 drivers (I think that's what it's using)) and see if that solves anything. Thanks for your assistance guys... hoping to get to the bottom of it.
Playing in windowed mode using the smaller game window you can use (800x600?) or a second monitor can allow you to have on your desktop your task manager open on processes list, sorted by CPU usage (bigger usage of CPU on high position). As your "lag" is kind of long IMO you could possibly catch visually which process grab your CPU when those "lag" happen...
