Micro-stuttering in PC games, why it happens.

[Purple44]

Over at the Ridge Racer Unbounded forum, there a thread talking about the micro-stuttering some players are seeing with RRU:

The graphics in this game suffer from intermittent "micro-stuttering" (now with vid) 

Today Frontman posted a link to an article that show why micro-stuttering happens when running 2 GPUs. Every PC player should give this article a read, you may rethink how you want to do your video hardware on your next computer you get or build:

CrossFire And SLI
Micro-Stuttering And GPU Scaling In CrossFire And SLI 

Closing Thoughts

Frankly, there haven't been any revolutionary developments in the fields of frame rate consistency and micro-stuttering, even though we have seen improvements from Nvidia's drivers. At this point, neither competitors can claim to deliver a 100% stutter-free gaming experience with two GPUs working cooperatively.

Bearing in mind that vendors purposely try to price two mid-range cards similarly to a faster single-GPU board wherever possible (generally, when the competitive landscape allows for it), we’d have to pick the single-GPU card every time. The three-way setup based on a trio of mid-range cards is the pièce de résistance. But AMD and Nvidia also know this, and purposely handicap their less-expensive boards with just one bridge, limiting configurations to two boards. The way around this, PowerColor's Radeon HD 6870 X2 bears its own significant price premium. It's also not a quiet board, and it requires a bit of faith on your part to trust that CrossFire profiles will continue to incorporate support.

We learned one other thing from our experimentation: the faster the linked cards are, the less you see side effects from teaming them up. This precludes using two low-end cards. CrossFire and SLI only make sense from the mid-range and higher, with a slight advantage for SLI. That makes both technologies a lot less interesting for upgraders and bargain hunters. Again, given comparable pricing, we'll take the single-GPU card any day. And even then, not having to worry about micro-stuttering would compel us to pay a little more.

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Frontman suggest enabling vsync if you are seeing micro-stuttering. I normally enable vsync in my PC games and I run with a single GPU. Now if your benchmarking your new video card, then turn off vsync to see what FPS you are getting as you tweak your video settings, trying to get 40 FPS or more.


Here another solution that may work with SLI setups:

For those who have SLI then I would recommend you try Alternate Frame Rendering mode 2; I'm not preaching it as the law but for me this seems to have helped stabilise the game a lot, so I do say you try fiddling with it. If there's a similar thing for Crossfire, then try it also. Bugbear should probably take this on board as it might help them localise/solve this intermittent lagging problem.

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After reading all that, now have another reason to stay away from dual GPUs and just stick with the fastest GPU I can afford to buy ( $200 range ).  Got a ATI 5870 last year for $220.

[estodo]

Cool Pav
Will it have anything to do with GameSpew?