Experiencing Sudden or Sporadic Lag in Games?

[~Darkseeker~]

I think i may have stumbled upon the answer. Foolishly i overlooked this and was tearing my hair out about why, after a wipe and load of Win7 Pro, i had dropped alot of frames.

Windows 7 has Active State Power Management (ASPM) Turned ON by default. This basically means your GPU is in 'power saver' mode.

You need to set your PC into your preferred Power Plan (i use High Performance) and then select modify plan, advanced settings, and it's under Display.

Got 60fps on WoW on Ultra with 4xMSAA now, woot!

 

[IknowLITTLE]

ive seen alot of your posts and you look to be really knowledgeable and i noticed you play wow, do you think this card can handle ultra at 60fps? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125309

 

[~Darkseeker~]

Same chip as mine there, and mine runs stock just fine. WoW is sort of a 'game for the masses' in as much as it will run (at whatever setting) on almost all computers running Windows or Mac OS with a decent internet connection. Depending on the configuration of the rest of your PC (e.g. Memory speed/amount of and CPU Cores/Threads and clock/multiplier) it should handle WoW at Ultra just fine. You need to use Anisotropic filtering and Multisampling/AA interchangably though, e.g. if you turn up Anisotropic Filtering to 16x, roll back MSAA to x1. If you drop Anisotropic back to Trilinear/2x/4x then you can ramp up MSAA to 4x.

If you get Lag in a specific area (Say Western Plaguelands) there is alot of ground clutter there, turning down quality of ground clutter to High or good can yield results.

All in all, with Ultra/Custom settings and reasonable MSAA, you should be able to run at 60fps with that card nicely. Although, the 6000 series have come down in price a bit now, and you wouldn't pay a whole lot more for a 6000s series card.

In the case of this Sapphire, it's actually less Newegg.com - SAPPHIRE 100327L Radeon HD 6750 1GB GDDR5 PCI Express 2.1 x16 HDCP Ready Video Card

 

[IknowLITTLE]

You need to use Anisotropic filtering and Multisampling/AA interchangably though, e.g. if you turn up Anisotropic Filtering to 16x, roll back MSAA to x1. If you drop Anisotropic back to Trilinear/2x/4x then you can ramp up MSAA to 4x.

you lost me their if you'd explain. im a noob by the way.

 

[~Darkseeker~]

Well MSAA (Multisample anti-aliasing) is the video technology used to smooth out jagged edges, when you look at straight lines in games.

Anisotropic Filters are used to enhance texture quality in games, so the higher you set it, the harder your card has to work.

If you turn MSAA to max, then max Anisotropic filtering, you're pushing your card to the max and will experience lag. Usually, at 2xMSAA the straight lines are smooth enough for the game to be pleasurable to view, and Anisotropic at around 8x is enough. IF you were to increase MSAA to 4x, then you'd want to roll back Anisotropic to x4.

Basically, MSAA and Anisotropic Filtering are the most GPU-heavy technologies in games, so using them properly is the best way to max FPS.

 

[IknowLITTLE]

and the card comes with a program to change all this?

 

[Bubbajj]

I'm having the same problem. My setup should devour Black Ops but it stutters and lags. How, exactly, do I get to the power settings?

I have a Radeon 6800 series card and an AMD Phenom II 1100T with 16 gigs of ram.

 

[~Darkseeker~]

and the card comes with a program to change all this?

AMD Cards come with Catalyst Control Center (CCC) that lets you change minimum and maximum MSAA and Texture Filtering options. But, WoW lets you choose your own internal MSAA and Texture Filter options

ESC + Options

I'm having the same problem. My setup should devour Black Ops but it stutters and lags. How, exactly, do I get to the power settings?

I have a Radeon 6800 series card and an AMD Phenom II 1100T with 16 gigs of ram.

Go into Control Panel and look for the 'Power Options' button, go into it and select the High Performance plan out of the three. Then, go into Change Power Settings -> Change Advanced Power Settings. You'll get a list of minimized categories, find PCI Express in the list. You should get an option that looks like this:

Link State Power Management: On.

Simply change this to off.

While you're in there, you could turn off the 'Turn off Hard Disks' options so that your disk never sleeps, which makes performance times while noodling a little better, but some say it shortens drive life.

 

[Bubbajj]

THAT FIXED IT! Went back in and turned everything up to max on the graphics settings and it ran smooth as butter.

 

[~Darkseeker~]

I think i deserve extremely positive rep?

^_^