F1 2011 "stuttery", even though FPS seems fine

[gers1978]

I installed F1 2011 on Windows 7 64 bit on a 2011 Mac Mini (natively via Boot Camp). It's a 2.5Ghz i5 with 4GB DDR3 RAM and a Radeon HD 6630M gfx card.

I had the settings at Medium, and the game ran fine, Fraps reporting 50-60fps, but after 1 or 2 laps, the game became "jerky" or "stuttery". Not totally unplayable, but very noticeable and annoying. Thing is, the Fraps reported framerate was still fine.

I dropped the settings to Low, and again Fraps reported a decent frame rate, and the game was fine for a lap or so, then the same thing happened.

Any ideas what's going on?

 

[DM186]

Souds like a over heat problem. Your GPU is heating up and maybe your cpu as well.

If either one heats up they will throttle down causing laging or the stutter. You need to figure out what your temps are.

You can down load MSI afterburner to check your GPU And You can down load the CPU Thermometer 1.2

I don't have a link to that but I do to the MSI Afterburner. So here it is and then find out what your temps are when playing the game. Then repost your findings

http://event.msi.com/vga/afterburner/download.htm

 

[gers1978]

Thanks, but after some Googling I may have found a workaround - there's a hidden folder called C:\ProgramData\Codemasters\F1 2011\<username>\DataCache\Replay. Inside there's a 2GB+ file which contains a file that the game uses to constantly write a real-time replay too.

Apparently if you move this file to a different drive and replace it with a symlink, or make the file read-only, this can help solve the stuttering - it's due to this constant writing to the same drive the game is installed out that causes the stutter. Obviously making the file read-only means you lose the ability to view replays in the game, but that was no big deal for me.

Evidently it was a problem in F1 2010 too.

 

[DM186]

Well good luck I hope that will fix it.