Horizontal motion jerkiness

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pinaklonkar

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I am running Catalyst v10.10 and playing at 1920x1080 resolution (16:9). My system configuration is in my signature.

I have noticed this problem mainly in Fifa 2011, Battlefield Bad Company 2, and Mirror's Edge. Fiddling with vertical sync makes things bit better. But I expect a lot more out of this card for games like Fifa 2011.

To explain the problem in a visual fashion, when the goal keeper kicks the ball to the center of the field, the sideline camera, as it moves away from the goalkeeper to the center of the field shows jerky movement, it's just not very smooth.

For Mirror's Edge game play and Battlefield Bad Company 2's mostly cut scenes, the graphics 'tear' horizontally, if that's the right word. But this tearing does NOT interfere the playability more than by 5%.

I am certain that there is nothing 'wrong' with the graphics card because there are many games e.g. NFS Hot Pursuit 2010, Crysis, Mass Effect 2, Assassin's Creed II, Call of Duty, Far Cry 2, and even Metro 2033 that have very little to no issues at all. I am wondering what kind of setting would fix this issue and make the game play smoother.

Thanks.
 
Solution
Ignoring FIFA as that has it's own issues, tearing is a common problem with all cards and monitors. V-sync is the only fix.

Often times you get more tearing the better your video card is.

The reason tearing occurs is that your card is updating the frame buffer as the video card is displaying it resulting in 2 images being displayed at once. V-sync prevents the card from updating the frame buffer when this occurs, which is called vertical refresh. You'll want to use triple buffing along with v-sync for best FPS. So the card doesn't have to stop updating the image while the monitor is updating your screen, your card will draw to one of the other 3 buffers now availible.

maximusmi2

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I had exactly the same issue with my 4870x2 and Fifa. I found a fix for the stuttering but to be honest it didn't make it completely issue free.
Google Fifa 11 stuttering and they're are a lot of threads around on it.

Here the one I used for the fix:
http://forum.ea.com/uk/posts/list/8811.page

It seems to be quite a widespread issue and I guess it's driver related. In the end I gave up playing it as it gave me a headache! :(

Let me know if it helps :)
 

pinaklonkar

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Sorry, I didn't notice that for some reason my signature went away. My config is right in it now.

I never really noticed that all the problematic titles were actually EA Games/EA Sports/Electronic Arts titles. Good catch. Probably they are just not very well optimized for ATI cards, except for a few like NFS.
 

maximusmi2

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Yeah, it could well be that. I'm suprised that AMD didn't release a hotfix or fix the issue in the latest drivers. Especially as Fifa 11 is one of the biggest games of the year.
 

pinaklonkar

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That fix maximusmi mentioned does not work with full version. It was only meant for DEMO.

But when I carefully looked at the FIFA 11's configuration file, I found that there is a checkbox to minimize stutter for ATI cards. Checking that worsened things.

I am calling this a bad job on EA's part and moving ahead.
 
Ignoring FIFA as that has it's own issues, tearing is a common problem with all cards and monitors. V-sync is the only fix.

Often times you get more tearing the better your video card is.

The reason tearing occurs is that your card is updating the frame buffer as the video card is displaying it resulting in 2 images being displayed at once. V-sync prevents the card from updating the frame buffer when this occurs, which is called vertical refresh. You'll want to use triple buffing along with v-sync for best FPS. So the card doesn't have to stop updating the image while the monitor is updating your screen, your card will draw to one of the other 3 buffers now availible.

 
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