[1.8.02] recent SVNs : excessive stuttering

[Herculine]

(My video card is an AMD Radeon HD 6700 with driver version 13.6_Beta2 running on Windows 7 Home Premium 64-Bit with an AMD 435 Athlon II x3 2.90 GHz CPU.)

This isn't a report of a crash so I have no 'CrashReport.zip' to offer; this is a matter of a performance issue "bug".

When using the most recent SVN builds (g1.8.1-52-g5e96b11 and g1.8.1-68-gb6cd38c at the time of this posting) I am experiencing excessive video "stuttering" and "jerking"... but GZDoom v1.8.02 runs smoothly with identical display and OpenGL settings. Hopefully this info will be useful.

EDIT: Though not as severe, this stuttering manifests itself with the official 1.8.02 release as well... but when I use the 1-7-01 release (or any SVN builds based upon that release) it seems to run smoothly.

EDIT: After experimenting further with previous versions of GZDoom it is becoming evident that the problem is in my machine and not in the sourceport versions and I'll just have to get it worked out, but still I hope this post will somehow be useful in development.

[Blue Shadow]

EDIT: After experimenting further with previous versions of GZDoom it is becoming evident that the problem is in my machine and not in the sourceport versions and I'll just have to get it worked out...

Could you tell us what the problem was? I'm just curious to know...

[Herculine]

EDIT: After experimenting further with previous versions of GZDoom it is becoming evident that the problem is in my machine and not in the sourceport versions and I'll just have to get it worked out...

Could you tell us what the problem was? I'm just curious to know...

I'll gladly pass along the info as soon as I get it figured out. Right now I'm downloading previous versions of my drivers and will try those. In the meantime, I can try to better describe what's going on. After I play maybe two maps in a row everything starts dragging and stuttering as if all my RAM and my processor are maxed out... yet I've kept an eye on those statistics while the game is running and that does not appear to be the actual problem. At the moment it has me a bit perplexed since I've never had this problem with GZDoom before, thus my initial assumption that it was the newest version (an assumption for which I apologize).

[Blue Shadow]

This reminds me with an issue I had with my old laptop, which had bit the dust now, similar to what you described; I start the game and after a short period has passed, the frame rate starts dropping and eventually it just locks the game and sometimes my whole system. It happened to me when playing using ZDoom and GZDoom.

It turned out that this wasn't just a ZDoom/GZDoom thing. My whole system was unstable; locking arbitrarily and BSOD-ing ("Blue Screen of Death") all over the place.

At the end, it had been established that the laptop had a motherboard issue and should be replaced or something.

Anyways, I hope I didn't worry you with that. Hopefully, what you have is trivial and can be fixed easily.

[Herculine]

Anyways, I hope I didn't worry you with that. Hopefully, what you have is trivial and can be fixed easily.

I was getting quite worried earlier today; I experienced the infamous BSOD a few times myself during the process of trying a few different versions of the drivers for my GPU. Today I may have done more to break my system than I did to fix it.

In the end, however, I'm feeling quite foolish. It seems that my stuttering problem may have had very little to do with the sourceport versions or my driver versions and very much to do with the wad I was trying to play.

Wait! Before anyone starts throwing tomatoes, let me just say that the thought did occur to me before I made my post here and I opened the wad with an editor to check if it was using any crazy textures or other such things that could have produced the problem. The wad, Beyond The Hell, doesn't contain any custom textures whatsoever, just a sky copied from Ultimate Doom. Though I didn't check the individual maps with an editor, as I was playing the ones giving me problems they did not appear to have any unnecessary or excessive detail that could have been bogging things down. I've played larger, more detailed maps than these with no trouble, hence part of the reason why I thought something else might be wrong.

As the problem persisted this evening I decided to try a different wad, Armadosia, which I had played before so I knew it had larger more complex maps than the one giving me the trouble, as well as custom textures. Imagine my surprise when it ran as smoothly as I thought it should. Both Version 1.8.02 and SVN gzdoom-g1.8.1-74-gedd2142 seem to be running it just fine.

So I apologize for "crying wolf" here and wasting space and time with this. Probably wasn't anything after all.

If it's any consolation, I've wasted almost 24 hours on nothing but this.

EDIT: It seems that I can play the Beyond the Hell megawad without the crazy stuttering if I set the game to the lowest resolution known to mankind. Still don't know why this is, though, but since it doesn't seem to be a sourceport bug I'll stop wasting everyone's time with this. Sorry again.