maybe video problem?

[donnybrasco]

ok i run RTW. on the site map for the country's or the battlefield. my game skips... it will be smooth then freeze then move on or something. for example when the dude is giving you orders for the learning battle. half the time he will repeat his words because of the skiping.... i cant say its low fps. its alittle different...

it will run smooth for 2 to 5 seconds then he will repeat for a seconds or two....

i have 9700 pro
3.06 p4
1gig 3200 ram
enough harddrive space....
i dont know if a setting is messed up.? i have latest ati drivers with 9.0c dx

the weird thing about it is.... when i go from all highest to all lowest... there is barely a difference in performance(still the same crappy skipping)

so i dont know whats going on.... i currently am playing sims 2 to.... and it does it every once and awhile not as much as RTW. so im thinking my comp's settings isnt config'ed correctly. is there any program to check or correct my video cards performance?

what should i do?

[Red Harvest]

1st thought is to check sound drivers or configuration. A lot of stutters are caused by the sound card. What do you use for sound? Did you build this or is it a retail build? Sometimes changing the PCI slot of the soundcard will cure issues like this.

[donnybrasco]

i custom build it....

soundblaster audigy 2

i never really encountered that stutter*better term to use* until recently

would the soundcards stutter make the performance skip altogether to?

[donnybrasco]

ok here is a few tricky things.....

when i turn my camera away from that big battle it helps with the choppyness by a good amount... and of course when i move it back... it gets worse.....

but when i press esc its paused....dooh and the menu comes up....well with the camera to nothing it skips alittle the mouse freezes for a second

when i turn the camera back to the armys in the other side of the river its only a little bit more skipping.... but thats where im confused...

even with the game paused and the graphics on lowest on 16bit with all the effects turned off and sound muted the and in the menu the mouse gets moved around and you can still see the freezing cuz the mouse wont move for a second or two...

so its obviously not the game....im thinking maybe its the directx 9.0c thats the only thing i can come up with....i didnt change anything else....

and its not like my computer cant handle the game.... so im stuck if anyone has an idea on what to do... hook it up! heh thnx for help!

[Red Harvest]

Which PCI slot did you put the Audigy 2 in? With most AMD based chipsets (at least VIA based) there are four physical interrupt lines (A,B,C,D). These are shared among devices. I don't know if your Intel based board is the same or not. Anyway, certain slots share with other slots. The one closest to the vid card usually shares with AGP (not the one that can be used in place of AGP, that is Slot 1, this is Slot 2.) Other slots might share with one another, the USB ports, onboard sound (if available), or IDE. So the solution to stutters or crashes is sometimes to change the PCI slot for the soundcard. This happened a lot a few years back, not sure how much it applies anymore. (I got burned by this myself although it was a different PCI device that was sharing, rather than sound. At least it was easy to fix!)

OK, other stuff: uninstall/reinstall sound drivers, ditto for vid drivers. If you have upgraded DX, it is not uncommon to need to reinstall vid drivers. Why? I don't know, but it works sometimes.

You might also try turning sound acceleration down in Windows. This is often used to get Soundblaster stuff to behave.

Some Audigy owners might know what sort of sound config works best. It used to be with Soundblasters that you did a "driver only" install, skip all the controls and what not because they gave trouble. Don't know if that is even possible anymore.

One other thing that I've had trouble with is some of the Windows multi-language support. When I had it installed it made a mess of games if I loaded Internet Explorer before playing (very similar to the pauses you get--and also crashes.) It also made IE really slow to scroll, etc. It was a massively bugged application and would not unload when IE was closed. It also did not have a delete feature, so I hunted down the .exe and deleted it manually. If I didn't run IE first it was fine. Deleting the internat.exe (think that was the name) did the trick permanently. This was on Win98SE, don't know if it ever happens with XP. IE6 has some nasty bugs that screw up Win98SE (effecting Wordpad, IE6, and even large directory deletions.)

You might also have some process running that is polling periodically in the background. I had a problem with a removeable CD Burner years ago that did that every 30 seconds or so. I'm not a Windows XP expert, but there are sites on the web describing how to pick and choose what processes to run.

Good luck!

[donnybrasco]

ok to answer the first question my soundcard is in(i will try to picture it out)

AGP

blank

wireless adapter

USB hub2.0

soundcard

blank

so the 4th slot FROM the vid or AGP slot....

i will try to reinstall my vid drivers;
if doesnt work i will reinstall sound drivers;
if that doesnt work i will try an install driver only on the sound without the mediasource bs;
and if that doesnt work i will change the soundcard slot... but the question is is where do i change it to...what slot... the first one next to AGP or switch with one of the others?

witch slot would be best?...i know i can just try every stinking slot but that will be hell im hoping you or someone would have an idea before i get to that step on where to put it

i dont know much about that multilanguage thing so i cant really comment on that..

my motherboard is soyo dragon ultra PX400 i think the model
3200 corsair 1gig mem
120gig harddrive westurn digital
3.06 P4