Stutter when looking long range.

[Siinji]

Just tried to get back into the game. Runs fine at all tutorals, but now that I'm starting to get into the bigger scenarios, I ran into some heavy stuttering. Playing the Bad Hersfield scenario where my company needs to advance through a valley and some villages. Fulda Gap. When I get an overview of the valley and get some long range view, the game stutters in the TIS view.

I have a Mac Pro with a GTX285 running Windows 7 on bootcamp. I've run this game and scenario on a much lesser PC, 4 years ago, and everything has always been running smoothly.

No stuttering when viewing normal view, but there's not that much visibility, except when in TIS, and that's when the stuttering happens. Especially in WIDE view.

I bet it's just a box that needs to be ticked somewhere. Anyone have a clue?

[Gibsonm]

What are your "Terrain details" set at in "options"?

Is the GTX285, 512Mb or 1Gb?

[Mogwa]

Also check what the visibility is set to. If its set pretty high it can cause stuttering. Remember that TIS visual range is about 3 times what is seen normally, so if visibility is set to 6 Km, it = 18 Km TIS visual range. That may be a little too much for your machine to smoothly render at all times.

HTH,

Mog

[Sean]

Try another graphics driver version.

[Ssnake]

Forceware versions 275.33 and 285.65 have been reported as "good", the versions in between are to be avoided, no news about newer driver versions however.

[SeanPatrick]

Could the amount of RAM be an issue?

[Ssnake]

Unlikely.

[SeanPatrick]

Oh, I was hoping getting more would help me with the same problem.

[Ssnake]

More RAM usually isn't a bad idea if you can see (and hear) your harddisk constantly paging memory. And it's not THAT expensive to add, so if you're looking for an excuse to do it, by all means go ahead. I'm just saying that it's most likely not going to affect this specific issue. A driver change is much more likely to help with the situation.

[Siinji]

Thanx guys. I updated Directx and Nvidia, and everything works fine now.

[SeanPatrick]

Well, I went ahead and installed another 4GB of RAM. It may be my imagination, but both SB and DCS seem to be running much smoother. (I couldn't even enjoy Black Shark 2 before because the low frame rate made it unplayable.) I went from 4GB down to 2GB (two sticks fried) then up to 6GB.

Could it have anything to do with the fact that it appears I have a rather slow main HD? (500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10) I don't usually hear the HD doing much, but then my rig is pretty quiet. And it's in a spot where I can't reallly observe the activity light.

In any case, it's running smooth as silk now. :yltype:

[Ssnake]

Any harddisk is extremely slow in comparison to RAM, and RAM is rather slow in comparison to cache memory. Whether one harddisk is a tiny bit less extremely slow than some other model hardly matters. As soon as you have to page memory you're in difficult waters with any real-time computer game.

But it may well be that the lack of free RAM, or maybe the lack of a contiguous RAM area of a certain size has been the bottleneck of your old system. Can happen.