Micro Freezes in so many games.

LordTrund

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Oct 3, 2014
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Hey guys
So i've branched out and started gaming on more stuff than i usually do (I never gamed much outside of Street Fighter 4, Age of Empires 2 HD and League sometimes)
Almost every single game i own on my libary is micro freezing, some worse than others, and it's driving me to the point of insanity!
It's hard to explain, and for the most part i can recreate the problem in each game at certain points, but other times its just seemingly random, its making my gaming life a living hell, i have all these games i wanna play that i cant due to these micro freezes.
They dontusually last longer than .5 of a second, but they are consistent, and thats what distracts me from immersing myself in them.
Some games i managed to make better, sometimes even remove it, others i just cant and some dont have this problem atall.
Take for example Borderlands 2, i had to do a heck of tweaks in the .ini to make it not micro freeze just turning the camera around!
Whilst a game like Sleeping Dogs (Arguably more demanding and a lot more powerful rig needed to run) maxes out 120fps solid with no micro freezes atall!
Dishonoured micro freezes, but it does it in the same places every time, and usually doesnt do it again if i go back through that area, sometimes it will but most of the time it wont.
Half Life 2 does it, not very much, once or twice per map load, i get a .5s freeze, i get this problem in Batman Arkham City a lot more badly, i get it in Mortal Kombat every time i choose a new character and do a special move for the first time, i get it in skyrim just walking around sometimes, i get it in Fallout 3 walking the wastes, DmC every time something spawns or gets killed, Team Fortress 2 randomly. F3AR every time it saves or goes past a checkpoint.
But i get some games that run beautifully at 120 and never stutter, games like Hard Reset, Kane & Lynch 2, Spec Ops The Line, Deus Ex HR, Devil May Cry 4, all of these games are flawless and run beautifully.
I've tried everything in my arsenal to fix this, a fresh install of windows onto an SSD, running the games on an SSD, using an older graphics card, using a new Power supply, everything, i can honestly say i cannot find a fault in my rig, temps are fine, everything flows fine, benchmarks dont stutter/micro freeze, everything runs amazingly, the games in question do this regardless of graphical settings and i have absoloutely no idea what to do anymore.
A friend of mine said that some games just do micro freeze, especially unreal games due to texture streaming, or checkpointing, and that the games i played dont require much of that so i dont notice it and now im branching out i'm experiencing this problem and its putting me off.
Is it normal for games to have micro freezes at certain points? Or for certain things for that matter, or is it my rig, because i have no idea right now.
List of things i have done.
Reinstalled Drivers, reinstalled windows onto an SSD, tried it in only basic stuff loaded, removed indexing, removed virtual memory, ran a 12 hour Memtest, ran harddrive health tests, ran benchmarks, checked temps, run stuff at high priority, everything i can think of.
I believe it must be problems with certain games because of the fact that i was able to drastically reduce it to the point of not happening in Borderlands 2 and Bioshock Infinite, and help reduce it in Dishonoured but not rid it completely (And lets be honest, the game doesnt really require a powerful rig)
My rig is an i7 2600 @3.4ghz, GTX 680 Power Edition 2gb, 8GB Samsung Green RAM, 840 250gb Samsung SSD.
Everything is at clocks, temps on cpu never hit over 60, temps on GPU never hit above 40-50, loads are always good, no CPU spikes, no GPU spikes, nothing i can spot.
Some games i can recreate the problem loading the map then walking past a certain point, others run flawlessly like sleeping dogs, kane and lynch 2, spec ops the line etc
I'm just hoping its me worrying over nothing, but you never know
(Also like to say it happens in l4d2, but not as often, it still happens though, and minecraft is literally unplayable at this point)
I hope i can find a fix and help anyone in the future with this post! If anyone has any suggestions, please, i'm so desperate to get this sorted!
I honestly think its just how some games handle being coded, and that im worrying too much, anyone else got thoughts?
(id like to add, i never micro freeze on desktop, twitch, youtube, apps, flash based games, java based gamese tc.
 
Yeah, that doesn't sound normal, and you have a pretty good rig, so I'm not sure what the problem could be. It does sound like you have a real problem to me. I have never had an issue like you're describing on any of my PC's.

First think I would look for is software interference. Mainly antivirus programs or virus programs. I almost wonder if it's some kind of software you have running in the background. When you reinstalled the OS, did you try gaming before installing all of your other crap?

The second thing I would try is disabling speedstep and any power saving features in your computer. Go into the BIOS and disable all C states and intel speedstep and any energy conserving features you can find. Go into power options in Windows and put everything (especially graphics) on maximum performance and make sure it's never turning off the solid state drive or anything like that. I also think there's some kind of power saving feature for SATA you want to make sure is disabled, but I forget how you access it.

I'm honestly out of ideas for now. I'll post back later if I think of something.
 
I had a similar problem but only when I was using SLI.

I went into Nvidia control panel and then manage 3d settings, I then changed max pre rendered frames to 1, got rid of my freezes. Im not sure if it will work for you because I use SLI but won't hurt to try.
 
If it helps I can show you a video of when it happens in each game, it honestly just feels like games loading checkpoints but sometimes it feels like it's random, I'll upload a video later.

Also I've checked at viruses and turned off all anti viruses while gaming.
 
I'm thinking it may be RAM related, even after the Memory Test, i noticed if i turn the Paged pool memory to low on L4D2 it makes the specific freezes/micro pauses a lot smaller and less noticable, still there but yea.

Could it be my RAM? I got this RAM to replace a faulty stick a year ago maybe, its 2x4gb Samsung Green RAM.
 
Thanks for the video. I believe I may be able to make an educated guess about the source of your problem (which as you admit yourself is extremely minor, so minor that I cannot see it on video), the reason being because I run a very similar setup. I have two GTX 670 2 GB cards (which are basically the same card as yours, but nerfed slightly) running in SLI. Overall I am very happy with my setup, but the biggest "problem" I have run into, and the reason I often regret not getting Radeon 7970's, is that the video RAM becomes a limitation in a very high end graphics scenario in my setup, even at 1920x1080, with my 2 GB of video RAM.

I created a video for you in Skyrim using Shadowplay. The reason I chose this game is because it is, by far, the game that most easily reaches the limits of what my setup can produce. I was most certainly NOT getting 60 fps during this entire test. The number of texture packs I'm running is absurd, and they are all the highest resolution packs I could find, so when I monitor my system, ENB is actually preloading something like ~10 GB of data (no joke) into my RAM and the actual video RAM usage itself when I'm outdoors will pretty much stay near 2000 MB the whole time. This consistently produces a noticeable stutter when I am entering a new area, or turning towards an object I have not yet "seen" (ie, my GPU has not loaded) and this causes a small stutter. It's been explained to me that the reason for this is that in this situation, the graphics card really only has enough room on the video card to store the textures I'm looking at at the time (because they're so large), hence, when I go to look at new objects, the video card and surrounding systems must quickly offload unneeded textures and load the ones it needs onto the card, and relatively speaking, this is a slow process. That's why even the new GTX 970 comes with a beefy 4 GB of RAM despite only having about the same amount of power as my SLI setup.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8NadqSOi80

When it happens, it feels as if there is a strong "resistance" when I move the mouse. It's annoying, and to be fair, I went overboard with my mods and I plan on changing the whole setup relatively soon as all of my mods are about a year old.

I admit the fact that you're seeing this problem in Street Fighter and HL2 which are relatively low-res non-demanding games is very odd, but still, I hope this helps you confirm somehow that this is related to memory shuffling somehow. To me that would seem to be the case.

One thing I can ask is that you run a benchmark of your 840 in Crystaldiskmark. I also have an 840 and it's a damn solid drive considering how relatively cheap it was at the time it was released. If you aren't pulling somewhere in the vicinity of 500 MBps read, we have a problem. I know since you have sandy bridge you probably have at least two SATA 3 ports. You may have your drive plugged into the wrong storage controller, or there may be something else wrong somewhere.

Have you double checked your Intel storage controller drivers (what chipset are you running)? Did you have the Intel RST (Rapid Storage Technologies) AHCI drivers installed before you switched back to IDE? I would run your drive in AHCI mode, personally, although honestly switching between AHCI and IDE, you have already dodged a bullet (that can kill your Windows installation) IMO and switching back to AHCI would require a full reinstall, again, IMO.

Unrelated question: are you actually running your monitor at 120 Hz? If not, man, cap those frames at 60. All you're doing is using twice as much power as you need to.
 
I wanna thank you so much for making such an extensive video into it, really means a lot that you're willing to help me.
I have indeedily run a test on my SSD, the results are solid, i hit all the marks for read, write, random iops and all that good stuff, so i dont think its anything with that.
I ran another 24 hour Memtest with absoloutely no faults, so we have that going for me.
I wanna add though, past few days ive been applying Ini tweaks to problematic games, and i've significantly reduced the stuttering problem in all these games, mainly Borderlands 2 like i said in the video, it only happens once every like 4 minutes going into new areas in borderlands 2.
I still havent sorted much for Dishonoured but i made it better.

Skyrim actually is a problematic game for me, aswell as New Vegas and Fallout 3. All 3 of those games i had this problem, worse off in New Vegas and 3, however i added some 4gb patches and stutter removers to F3 and NV and it significantly reduced it, still there might i add but reduced it a lot, it only does it randomly now on those games, still looking for tweaks.

I had it bad off in skyrim for a while, i lowered some view distances and disabled the HD pack and it helped, it doesnt do it as much but it still happens, thing is my rig is perfectly capable, i can run these games maxed out and hit 120 all the time.

And yea, my monitor is actually turned onto 120hz, i can see and feel it, i love 120fps on 120hz :) but dont mind 60 if a game needs it.

i'm on AHCI at the moment :)

I'm not actually seeing this problem in Street Fighter, and the only time i see it in HL2 is going between areas so thats not too bad!
 

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