jitter

[Ravenstar]

Just loaded up Powerstrip

When I went through the different adapters the latency was grayed out

[Ravenstar]

It looks like the ECS mainboards won't let you adjust the latency settings

[natha]

Its not surprising, generally, settings like this can cause instability/data loss/corruption because they affect a lot more than the sound card so manufacturers must be carefull.Specially in overclocked systems must be carefully adjusted.

i want to hear what rigs the people who saw an improvement have. Maybe certain motherboards?

I did extensive tests using the "on-the road and coming" test X3TC executable from DevNet and playing with the PCI latency.
I saw no improvement at all at any aspect of the game. While the test executable alone did improve my game at a 15-20 % (depends the situation).

PS. my rig is an opteron 180(3Ghz), DFI nF4 SLI, Ati 4870, audigy 2 ZS, 2 GB DDR500 and a velociraptor hdd.

[BugMeister]

with that rig it's like putting a go-fast stripe on a maserati..

- at best, it's a desperate measure for people whose systems are struggling to cope..

[Aquitaine]

Going from 1.4 to 2.0 (Steam version, no betas here), I haven't had any problems with FPS. The problems I had before would crop up in just about every dogfight - I haven't yet had a big cap ship fight and haven't reached the HUB part so I don't know if all is well, but the game went from unplayable to very smooth on everything I've tried.

No motherboard tweaks or latency settings here; couldn't make any.

Intel Yorkfield Q9450 quad-core 2.66 GHz (at 3.2 GHz)
8G DDR2-1066 RAM w/Vista Ultimate 64
Velociraptor boot drive/caviar black storage (though steam stuff runs on the raptor)
eVGA Geforce 260/216 Superclocked
Onboard sound

[samthunder]

I really think this is where my problem is occuring (win xp sp3, i7 920, ati 4870, 4 gigs Ram). When I start the game as a terran defender I get no lag at high settings but if I choose merchant (in argon space?) it slows to a crawl and stutters through. Unfortunately I can't make the software tool work for me either.

I installed the x86 version and when I double click the exe it locks up my entire computer (have to do a hard reset). I also checked through BIOS with no luck on my EVGA x58. I don't see anything resembling PCI latency timers or otherwise. Are there any alternate programs for changing this setting or another way to do it from the software end? Thanks so much and I'm excited to potentially fix this issue.

[Legionnaire]

@samthunder, you sure you got that RAM amount right? if your using an i7your RAM should be triple channeled so eith 3G or 6G , not 4. if its definately 4 installed in your pc, that might be some of your problems there.

Legionnaire

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[SirMerlin860]

hello there..

i'm still poking around trying to find a solution for the vista systems.
it seems microsoft doesn't support any latency adjusting apps.
however i did find out that the latency settings are introduced through hardware drivers.
which means these settings are stored in the vista hardware portion of the registry, and therefore can be modified.
however vista only uses these settings as a guide, which means whatever settings are in the registry isn't always what vista uses.
on top of that these settings can only be changed with a system reboot.

for those who can get the app to work, by disabling uac and allowing unsigned drivers, congrats.

for those who cannot get the app to work perhaps there is another work around. bear with me here.

the objective is to match the bus speed more closely to that of the pcie devices. the app forces the bus devices to keep priority for longer periods of time to allow each device to perform one complete action before giving up the bus to another device. because the pcie devices have built in processing they don't rely on the cpu for speed and therefore don't have to wait in line like the bus devices.

instead of getting bus devices to change their behavior why not change the behavior of the pcie devices. there are many apps out there to overclock your videocard which can also be used to underclock them as well. for those of you who had the joy of using win95 i'd like to remind you of 'moslo.com' (an app to slow dos games to run on faster systems)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
edit: onboard sound, with jacks on the board, use the pci bus.
those with daughter cards are actually pcie

[samthunder]

I only listed 4gb because I didn't want you guys to point out the fact that I have 6gb on a 32 bit OS I have 6gb installed, but obviously WinXP pro 32bit won't read all of that.

[DeadlyDarkness]

I noticed a significant improvement with my ASUS mobo, with integrated SoundMax audio chip. It used to randomly stutter and the music looped for up to a minute before it corrected itself, and this happened semi frequently in any kind of battle, enough to be annoying. Not noticed it happen at all since I applied the fix.

[BugMeister]

- another explanation of the PCI latency thing..
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/PCI_Latency

- just so you know what you're dealing with..

[Malakie]

Good god, spent an hour trying to figure out why I could not find the same on my system.....

answer: My system does not have a single PCI slot! Only PCIe slots. There must be a major difference in the clock settings?

I am on a new machine, the Gateway FX6800 series and it has NO IDE ports, NO PCI ports, only SATA, e-SATA, PCIe, USB, Firewire and network. Is there a way to work with the PCIe clocks though? Or is that set in stone?

This new system I got runs the Intel i7-920 processor (4 cores, 8 threads), 9 gig ram and ATI HD4850 and two built in SATA plug & play front loading hard drive with the cradles included. They CAN be configured in RAID configuration as well as others. Motherboard has built in 7.1 sound using Creative XFi technology but for some stupid reason it seems to have no memory dedicated to it so like all main boards, the audio really cuts into FPS. Upgraded to the XFi Titanium Fatality PRO.. What a difference in FPS now.

BTW, X3 screams on this system.... I went from my old Intel 920 D dual core at 2.8 ghz with the XFi Platinum, ATI HD 3870 which gave respectable FPS to this new system and it makes that older one look like it is a IBM PC 8088 machine. I honestly did not expect such a dramatic change to be honest but holy **** it is BIG time.

BTW, I do recommend the machine especially because it is priced around $1000 depending on where you buy it. BUT you will want to upgrade memory, power supply etc.

[SirMerlin860]

I am on a new machine, the Gateway FX6800 series and it has NO IDE ports, NO PCI ports, only SATA, e-SATA, PCIe, USB, Firewire and network. Is there a way to work with the PCIe clocks though? Or is that set in stone?

actually your SATA, e-SATA, USB, Firewire and network are all on a pci bus.

the only way to really change the pci-e clocks is to change the speed of your pci-e devices (oc and under clock). the way these devices access the pci bus is trivial at best and can be discribed as bragging. "i've finished 300 cycles! haha". pci-e devices don't care if anything keeps up with them.

[leppardb]

I have a Vista system, Asus mobo, pci-e vid card, and the bundled asus FX sound card. Couldn't get the latency tool to work, caused a hard system hang. No bios latency setting options either. HOWEVER...

Since this seemed to be sound related I uninstalled a sound codec package that I had downloaded and X3TC is way better! The really bad stutter is gone.

FPS still goes down in very busy sectors and still get the occasional pause but it is now playable. Before I would avoid certain sectors, now I don't.

[Puckster]

I noticed a significant improvement with my ASUS mobo, with integrated SoundMax audio chip. It used to randomly stutter and the music looped for up to a minute before it corrected itself, and this happened semi frequently in any kind of battle, enough to be annoying. Not noticed it happen at all since I applied the fix.

I had this same problem crop up with version 2.0. i7-920, 12GB RAM, Asus P6T, Soundmax ADI 2000. All I did was update to the most recent BIOS, and so far so good. All those little jitters and freezes have gone.

[softweir]

Since this seemed to be sound related I uninstalled a sound codec package that I had downloaded and X3TC is way better! The really bad stutter is gone.

Out of interest, which codec pack was it?

[leppardb]

It was the package offered up by shark007.net. A recommended download at majorgeeks.com. I had an older version so I don't know if an update would have helped. I will have to do some experimenting because I still need some codecs not included with vista.

http://shark007.net/vistacodecpackage.html