A stutter every 2 seconds

[Flightwaves]

This one is driving me absolutely nuts.

I've got a Voodoo 3000 running in an 1.8 Ghz Athlon. On SOME 3D games, SOMETIMES there is a stutter about every 2 seconds. It's regular, and has nothing to do with how much activity is going on onscreen. Sometimes, changing the bit-depth from 32 to 16 fixes it...sometimes not. I've tried removing all extra applications from the system tray. Sometimes works...sometimes not.

It's driving me absolutely crazy. I have tried every bit of trouble-shooting I know how to do, but there seems to be no consistent fix.

Has anyone run up against anything like that before?

Bob

 

[Skipper007]

By modern standard the Voodoo 3 3000 is a rather outdated video card, especially since it only has 16MB RAM. I didn't even think it supported 32 bit colour.

If you are willing to upgrade your video card, I'd say go for a 128MB Radeon 8500 or a Radeon 9500 Pro, both excellent cards. Most cards will provide you with a big speed boost but those two both have good support for current games and the 9500 looks to do well in upcoming games despite not being incredibly expensive.

You might want to wait a few weeks for the Radeon 9600 as well. The one thing I should mention is that some games, such as early Unreal engined games, were designed for a 3Dfx board and therefor don't get much of a speed boost from newer boards, but most of these will run well on a Voodoo 3 as well and therefor it likely wouldn't be your video card causing the problem...

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Skipper007 on 03/06/03 06:47 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[davepermen]

what os? if win2000 or so, possibly some service is running in the background.. don't watch on the system tray

"take a look around" - limp bizkit

www.google.com

 

[Flightwaves]

Actually, I am running 2000, and I looked through all the services yesterday. Granted I'm no expert, but I shut down everything I could find that didn't HAVE to be running. Still, the answer COULD lie there, but it's a service that must come on intermittently, or under certain conditions.

For example, why would it SOMETIMES work to switch from 32-bit color to 16-bit color. What service would be affected by that...but not all the time?

These are rhetorical questions for the most part, because I think the answer is something so bizarre that it's unlikely it's going to be uncovered.

Now, if I put the GeForce card in that machine and it STILL does it, I'm going to be really ticked....

Bob

 

[Rubberbband]

I'd also look at upgrading. I've owned a Voodoo 3 3000 but that was a while ago. It was a great card but don't expect too much out of it with tody's OS's and games. It wasn't designed to run with them.


The aim of military training is not just to prepare men for battle, but to make them long for it. <A HREF="http://forums.btvillarin.com/index.php?act=ST&f=41&t=327&s" target="_new"><b>MY SYSTEM</b></A>

 

[jankphil]

as i remember, the voodoo 3's didn't support 32bit color, your acually looking at i think 24 bit color....no biggie. I remember hearing a lot of ppl complaining about it too...anyway it's definatly time for an upgrade, also try updating your bios, i believe nVidia still does that.

"What kind of idiot are you?"
"I don't know, what kinds are there?"

 

[phsstpok]

Probably grasping at straws, but when I had a Duron I once played with every BIOS setting, one by one, just to see which would change benchmark scores. That didn't really payoff but I discovered one setting that caused stuttering, about once every two seconds.

It was Video RAM Caching. When its enabled I got stuttering. When it was disabled, no stuttering.

Doesn't happen on my Tbird system but I can still make it happen on my nephew's Duron system.

<b>99% is great, unless you are talking about system stability</b>