choppy gameplay on radeon hd2600

[soustruh]

Hi,
I play WA 3.6.28.0 and I experience problems with choppy screen motion when I enable all the details (clouds, horizon etc.) What's strange is that the game ran smoothly on my previos integrated graphics (Radeon X1250, part of the AMD 690G chipset). The rest of my computer should also cope with such simple game as WA is - I have Athlon X2 4000+ and 2 GB RAM :)

Any ideas where the problem could be? Is it possible to enhance the performance of WA by some "tweaks" from the tweaks folder? Thx

[KRD]

Is it possible to enhance the performance of WA by some "tweaks" from the tweaks folder? Thx

Not the in-game performance, no. Just the menus, but you aren't having any problems with those, are you?

What you should do is make sure your graphics card's drivers have been updated to the latest version. Only after that's been done, people can start coming up with real solutions. If the problem is still there. :p

[soustruh]

No, I'm not having problems with menus, they are blazing fast :) and I of course use the latest Catalyst (8.3)...

To understand why I try to solve this - I don't care about clouds and horizon, but with my previous IGP I could record smooth videos with sound in Fraps in 1024x768 and now even in 640x480 the video is choppy too :(

[franpa]

check your power supply is sufficient for your video card. (the +12 volt rails)

[soustruh]

Oh my Gog, the card works perfectly in Quake 3 & 4, but has problems in WA. There is nothing wrong with the hardware, everything works perfectly in 3D, so the problem seems to be somewhere between the card drivers, DirectDraw and WA (if WA uses DD) :)

[CyberShadow]

Try the TimerWorkaround_On.reg tweak.

[soustruh]

Well, I think it may be a bit better, but it's probably only a kind of placebo :-( but thx for advice :-)

[franpa]

In the ATI control panel (afaik) you can adjust the power settings for your video card. set it to use maximum power and turn off all the power saving settings.

[CyberShadow]

You did try updating your drivers, right?

[soustruh]

Yep, I have the latest Catalyst, but I can't find any 2D performance-related settings in the Control Center :(

EDIT: OK, no problem, you can kill me if you want to, sorry for a useless thread. I just ran some JavaScript benchmark to compare FF3 Beta 5 on my old Sempron 2200+ and new Athlon X2 4000+. I was surprised, that the old one passed all the tests in 9,2 s in average while my dual-core managed to do the same in 10,5 s. After a few attempts, it came to my mind that I have Cool 'n Quiet enabled, a feature that slows down CPU when it's not fully loaded. I disabled it, scored 5,2 secs and so I tried running WA and recording a video. As expected, nothing is choppy right now, the game itself is smooth and the video too.

I remember, that when I had only the IGP, the CnQ feature locked the CPU at a higher frequency in some cases - that's probably the reason why with IGP everything was fine and the problem occured after I put in a discrete card (because at the same time the CnQ lock problem disappeared) :)

Sorry for this thread, thx for attempts to help me...

[soustruh]

Well, I think my "solution" was also a kind a placebo, as the problem still persists - when I enable all objects (cloud, wind particles etc.), the game is choppy :-( Is there anyone with the same card and the same problem? I have the latest Catalyst indeed...

[lookias]

if you mean that the game flickers by dropping frames, i have that also. with a phenom 9850, geforce 8600gt and 8 gigs of ram. but this only happens when i run a film beside the game.
but no other game shows this behaviour, not even newer games like yuris revenge on 1280x1024, and a dvd running on same resolution.
i remember that on windows xp this happens alot while running other programms beside WA, like an instant messanger. you could try closing everything what is not needed, also watch at the deamons there might be some which waste your cpu for nothing.

.

[soustruh]

Well, I just did a simple test:
- I re-enabled my IGP in BIOS and installed the latest drivers, so both IGP (Radeon X1200) and discrete Radeon HD2600 are using the same version 8.6
- I set the IGP as primary adapter, played, enabled full details and the gameplay was nice and smooth :cool:
- I then switched back to the discrete graphics, started the game and it was choppy again :(

To revise a bit:
- When the IGP is completely disabled in BIOS, the problem is still there.
- Disabling Cool n Quiet helped a little...

[Muzer]

Disabling Cool n Quiet has been known to help, but you've done that. Does it only happen in online games or what?

[soustruh]

Not only in online games, the IGP vs. discrete test I did today was on a hot-seat game...

[franpa]

update your drivers, I believe 8.7 drivers are out now. Do you have a fast hard drive? the constant change in the game display would result in a pretty large amount of data being recorded to the hard drive since a much larger portion of the screen will be changing per second.

[soustruh]

Well, I am glad you try to help me, but please try to think before posting a reply - in case I had a slow hard drive (which I have not, I use standard SATA2 7200 rpm Seagate), then using integrated graphics wouldn't help me, don't you think?

I'll try newer Catalyst Suite, but I don't believe in it very much... Is there some hidden 2D performance setting that I can't find?

[franpa]

Thanks, wasn't thinking rightly at the time ;) and er, I don't use ATI cards.

[robowurmz]

Look for tweaking programs for ATi cards; you may be able to find a workaround.

[soustruh]

Finally I probably found the cause of my problem - it should be lowering the GPU clock too much in idle/2D (look here: http://www.avforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=696428 ;) I'll try to do stg. with it and let you know...