- May 5, 2011
- 665
- 0
- 18,990
SLI Micro Stuttering Fix
Alright, I finally went SLI a few months ago for the first time, and I had terrible microstuttering in some of my games.
Mostly, Far Cry 2, C.O.D. Black Ops, Mafia II, Gta IV.
It was so bad it made the games "unplayable".
Black Ops was the worst, as on some levels, it was stuttering so bad it was almost a slide show.
My first thought was to look on the internet and try and see what solutions other people found. First thing is
there is tons of people who have had this problem, and a lot of idea's on how to fix it.
I tried many fix's, none which worked, including:
1. Clean driver install
2. running one monitor
3. update motherboard bios
4. Remove overclocking on cpu
5. Fresh install windows
6. registry hacks
7. force Vsync
8. Run monitor at higher or lower refresh rates
9. Disable anti-virus and all programs
10. switch SLI bridge
11. buy new SLI bridge
12. Make other Graphics card primary
13. Switch PCIE slots (didn't try this because my system is water cooled)
14. Disable CPU cores or turn of hyperthreading
15. change bios settings, turn off speed step, throttling features
16. Download program to fix it ?? (yes, a couple of forums had links to download a program to fix micro stuttering I tried one but it didn't work.)
17. Lower settings. I only tried this in a couple of games, but it didn't seem like it did anything.
Well, I tried a lot of stuff. Only thing that seemed to work was disabling one gpu. Well, thats great except what is the point of having SLI if you can't use it?
I thought, maybe it is just because I was running different cards from different manufacturers, and the bios on the cards are different. I thought about flashing the bios, but decided against it because I didn't want to end up with a dead card. So, I gave up, and just decided to live with it.
Well, one day I was on newegg, and I was searching the deals, and they had a deal on Corsair Vengeance ram, 2 x 4 gig sticks for $99.00.
Well I thought it was a great deal, so I broke down and bought the ram, not because i thought it would fix the microstuttering,
but because I play Metro 2033, Flight Simulator X, and I do a lot of multi-tasking. I was only running 3 x 1gb Corsair 1333 ram.
So when it finally arrived, I pulled out the old ram and installed the new ram. I was going from 3 x 1gb tri-channel 1333 to 2 x 4gb dual channel 1600.
Anyways, I went and tried all my games again, like I always do when I upgrade. The microstuttering was completely gone!!
I tried all the games and mooth as butter. Not even a hint of microstuttering. Just to be sure, I swapped back the old ram and tried again and it was the ram that was causing it.
Whats funny is I was sure it wasn't the ram because max it utilized max between 60-88% on most games.
Anyways, I was so sure it was a fault with the cards, but I was wrong. It had nothing to do with them. Not sure exactly why the ram made such a drastic difference when it wasn't even being fully utilized, but it did.
As I said before, I did try lowering the settings in a couple of games and it didn't help. But maybe I didn't lower them enough. Maybe it has something to do with my setup, or the fact that the ram is faster or running in dual channel mode. I dunno. But it worked, so I am happy about that.
I put so much time into trying to figure this out, I almost gave up on SLI, thinking it was to blame. But in the end I ran into the solution by coincidence, so I thought I'd post this up for anyone else having the issue. I'm not saying this will fix everyone's microstuttering problem, because they might have other bottlenecks in there system. Should help out a few though who's tried everything else.
At the very least, you shouldn't be so quick to blame the graphics cards or the drivers.
System Specs:
Windows 7 Ultimate x64
Gigabyte EX58 UD3R SLI motherboard
Intel i7 920 @ 3.2ghz (Thermalright Ultra 120 extreme cooler)
2 x Nvidia GTX 480 SLI (water cooled)(driver 266.58 with Evga sli patch)
(MSI N480GTX Hydrogen & Galaxy GTX 480 with Dangerden waterblock)
8 GB Corsair Vengeance (2 x 4gb)
Creative X-Fi Xtreme Music
Hitatchi 1TB 7200rpm hard drive (O.S.)
Seagate 250GB 7200rpm hard drive (for fraps)
Corsair 1200AX PSU
Thermaltake VH6000BWS Armor+ Case
2 Koolance quad radiators
Swiftech MCP655-B pump
Danger Den Rad Reservoir
Alright, I finally went SLI a few months ago for the first time, and I had terrible microstuttering in some of my games.
Mostly, Far Cry 2, C.O.D. Black Ops, Mafia II, Gta IV.
It was so bad it made the games "unplayable".
Black Ops was the worst, as on some levels, it was stuttering so bad it was almost a slide show.
My first thought was to look on the internet and try and see what solutions other people found. First thing is
there is tons of people who have had this problem, and a lot of idea's on how to fix it.
I tried many fix's, none which worked, including:
1. Clean driver install
2. running one monitor
3. update motherboard bios
4. Remove overclocking on cpu
5. Fresh install windows
6. registry hacks
7. force Vsync
8. Run monitor at higher or lower refresh rates
9. Disable anti-virus and all programs
10. switch SLI bridge
11. buy new SLI bridge
12. Make other Graphics card primary
13. Switch PCIE slots (didn't try this because my system is water cooled)
14. Disable CPU cores or turn of hyperthreading
15. change bios settings, turn off speed step, throttling features
16. Download program to fix it ?? (yes, a couple of forums had links to download a program to fix micro stuttering I tried one but it didn't work.)
17. Lower settings. I only tried this in a couple of games, but it didn't seem like it did anything.
Well, I tried a lot of stuff. Only thing that seemed to work was disabling one gpu. Well, thats great except what is the point of having SLI if you can't use it?
I thought, maybe it is just because I was running different cards from different manufacturers, and the bios on the cards are different. I thought about flashing the bios, but decided against it because I didn't want to end up with a dead card. So, I gave up, and just decided to live with it.
Well, one day I was on newegg, and I was searching the deals, and they had a deal on Corsair Vengeance ram, 2 x 4 gig sticks for $99.00.
Well I thought it was a great deal, so I broke down and bought the ram, not because i thought it would fix the microstuttering,
but because I play Metro 2033, Flight Simulator X, and I do a lot of multi-tasking. I was only running 3 x 1gb Corsair 1333 ram.
So when it finally arrived, I pulled out the old ram and installed the new ram. I was going from 3 x 1gb tri-channel 1333 to 2 x 4gb dual channel 1600.
Anyways, I went and tried all my games again, like I always do when I upgrade. The microstuttering was completely gone!!
I tried all the games and mooth as butter. Not even a hint of microstuttering. Just to be sure, I swapped back the old ram and tried again and it was the ram that was causing it.
Whats funny is I was sure it wasn't the ram because max it utilized max between 60-88% on most games.
Anyways, I was so sure it was a fault with the cards, but I was wrong. It had nothing to do with them. Not sure exactly why the ram made such a drastic difference when it wasn't even being fully utilized, but it did.
As I said before, I did try lowering the settings in a couple of games and it didn't help. But maybe I didn't lower them enough. Maybe it has something to do with my setup, or the fact that the ram is faster or running in dual channel mode. I dunno. But it worked, so I am happy about that.
I put so much time into trying to figure this out, I almost gave up on SLI, thinking it was to blame. But in the end I ran into the solution by coincidence, so I thought I'd post this up for anyone else having the issue. I'm not saying this will fix everyone's microstuttering problem, because they might have other bottlenecks in there system. Should help out a few though who's tried everything else.
At the very least, you shouldn't be so quick to blame the graphics cards or the drivers.
System Specs:
Windows 7 Ultimate x64
Gigabyte EX58 UD3R SLI motherboard
Intel i7 920 @ 3.2ghz (Thermalright Ultra 120 extreme cooler)
2 x Nvidia GTX 480 SLI (water cooled)(driver 266.58 with Evga sli patch)
(MSI N480GTX Hydrogen & Galaxy GTX 480 with Dangerden waterblock)
8 GB Corsair Vengeance (2 x 4gb)
Creative X-Fi Xtreme Music
Hitatchi 1TB 7200rpm hard drive (O.S.)
Seagate 250GB 7200rpm hard drive (for fraps)
Corsair 1200AX PSU
Thermaltake VH6000BWS Armor+ Case
2 Koolance quad radiators
Swiftech MCP655-B pump
Danger Den Rad Reservoir
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