Hey people, long time!

I have some troubles lately(probably forever but didnt notice earlier) on my main machine with opengl applications (this is not bound to my own code but to every application i tried so far).

My rig:
core2duo 2.66ghz
4gb ram
nvidia gforce 7900gs
win7x64

So what happens is, opengl has periodical hickups, around every second.
Some googling proposed a lot of different solutions but neither did work for me.

The ones i tried include:
Update to latest nvidia driver
Downgrade to version 186
Install Omega drivers for nvidia
Disable threaded optimization in the driver settings
Use rivatuner to set backbuffer flipping mode to blocktransfer (whatever that does, but sure doesnt fix it )
Enable/Disable Vsync
For someone on linux, it helped to kill conky, but since im not on linux, i can't try that.

I'm pretty much clueless, tho i would assume its some driver/opengl setting. A friend suffers the same problem, and he is using an nvidia graphics card aswell.

sdw suggested running a profiler to look for bottle necks, i will try that next.

On a side note: the stuttering applications work flawless on my notebook, which is considerably less able in terms of processing:
core2duo 1.66ghz
2gb ram
intel gsm 945 mobile - BUT a driver that supports opengl, it was a hell of a ride to find one, especially with auto driver updates enabled......
win7x64

Also: Frames per second are well in the 60's, and it processes a whooping several thousand Updates per second, so performance shouldnt be a problem (i am using a quite simple scene to test).

Thanks for your support

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Long pork is people!

wzl's burrow

Do you have an Antivirus/Anti-Spyware product running? Could that be hogging/blocking the CPU?

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10 PRINT "Bad Monkey ";
20 GOTO 10

nope, nothing like that....

edit: all drivers seem to be correctly installed aswell. i can try updating chipset drivers etc...

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Long pork is people!

wzl's burrow

Hey weezl, long time no see!

I'm not sure what could be going on. Is this system home-made, or did you get a retail machine? You could try the chipset driver update, as it sounds like it may be something related to that, as the video drivers seem to be working and up-to-date. If you bought your system prefab, you might Google your make/model to see if there are any problems reported with that setup.

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What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

It is custom built indeed.

the think i find most interesting is, that it happens for a friends machine Aswell (hes living far so i cant 100% confirm its the exact same problem) but the symptoms appear to be the same.

So, an interesting survey would be: Do you have an nvidia card?
Yes:
test either this or any opengl application. The symptom is experienced at best in rapid animation/transition.

AWSD/LMB/RMB to move around.

No:
well, thanks for caring


Side node: might this be related to the opengl version used in the application?

Edit: Sound and Chipsetdriver update didn't help either

_________________
Long pork is people!

wzl's burrow

Strange. It could be nVidia, indeed (I hear they've been having issues with driver development lately). Must have started taking lessons from Intel.

I am looking into getting a computer with an nVidia ION. If/when I get it, I'll give it a shot (though I'll be running Ubuntu Linux - does your game work on that OS?).

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What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

its written in c#, so if you have mono installed it could be fine... however it is possible that i use some functions in .net that arent available on mono.

drop me a message if you run into problems. i'd like to have it cross platform eventually anyways

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Long pork is people!

wzl's burrow

Mono might be a problem for me. Still on that poky-old phone Internet.

I can't wait until Obama takes over the Internet and sends a big fat Webpipe over my way.

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What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

Theres news! Not good ones though:

I realized i didnt cleanse all the nvidia files and reg settings before installing the omegadrivers the other time, so i gave it another shot.

Now this time around, when using driver sweeper in safemode i launched my project out of curiousity, and, what do you think, it ran perfectly well. It was a bit slower on the framerate obviously, but no stutter whatsoever.

So when i booted back into normal mode, i tried, prior to installing drivers, to run the .exe again. It was smooth. So i can safely assume that, whatever would be causing the hickup, wasnt just not loaded in safe mode.

And then the confirmation, after finishing the omega installation, all the hickuping was back.

Additionally, i did some google research and was not too surprised... well, what can i say...

Now i can point my finger at nvidia and tell them how much they ....arent as good as they want to appear. But that doesnt help anyone, does it :/

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Long pork is people!

wzl's burrow

Yeah, that's a shame. :/ I had a feeling that would be the case, as everything else seemed to be in order from what you said...

So, are you doing this in XNA, or just plain-vanilla C#? OpenGL? DirectX?

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What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

Opengl, as mentioned in the first post

Using the opentk framework. It appears to be very solid.

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Long pork is people!

wzl's burrow

I haven't had issues with my nvidia 260 GTX and opengl games (including those I develop). Nvidia has in the past had better opengl support than ATI and I don't think that has changed.
In the past I had some performance issues with opengl under vista and never found out what was happening. The program ran faster on my older macbook with intel gma950 graphics than my desktop with my Ati 4870 which is just odd. Since windows 7 came out I haven't tried running that same program, I wonder if it's any better.

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My Development Blog | My Website | My Current 3d Engine

Darn medication has reduced my memory to nearly zero.

It's hard to believe that an Intel GMA 950 could whip an ATi discrete. I mean, I couldn't get my OpenGL app to render more than 1024 vertices in a single mesh on mine without it griping. Though that was probably more based on my method (i.e. I wasn't doing it right).

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What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

Another smaller update:
http://www.opengl.org/discussion_boards ... 162&page=1

here's someone that suffers exactly the same problems, he got a lot more detailed testing and profiling done, but it seems he ended up buying new hardware... (ATI)

so of course, this is no solution either.... im really wondering.....

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Long pork is people!

wzl's burrow

I've never owned an nvidia card so I can't help with your testing.

But before blaming nvidia for having lousy hardware/driver, it could be windows 7 that is the source of your problems. Do you have an XP partition? Can you try the card there?

If there are no issues with your opengl application in XP, then you would at least know it is not a hardware problem, but either an operating system or driver problem.

Also, what is opentk based on? Is it compiling through .NET? If so, could it be .NET's dialect of opengl that is slightly incompatible with your graphics card?

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I ain't pushing no moon buttons.

Thanks for your input jasmin.

it's true that win7 is a common denominator on the stuttering occurances. another thing i can test out..

the stuttering disappears with disabling hardware acceleration, i guess that could mean its something at fault with the hardware i guess...

opentk is indeed a .net wrapper for opengl. eventhough the stuttering appears in programs written in cpp.

also you're right about blaming nvidia is nonesense.
either, other people simply doesn't notice it (its really not that apparent, especially in very slow or very quick animations) or its just some unlucky fail construction in the hardware...

afterall theres very little resource about this occurance, but the few that are there describe the very same thing to the last detail.

_________________
Long pork is people!

wzl's burrow

Is Aero/Glass enabled? Does it make any difference as per stuttering?

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What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

that a thing i figured yesterday when trying again in software... i tried it while fearing it would work.... it wouldnt.. that would have been too easy

_________________
Long pork is people!

wzl's burrow

thanks for your concern, but posting that you have no idea is rather pointless

however theres an update:

after all this doesn't seem to apply only to opengl after all, i have it in other games and even windows itself.... but it were really hard to notice...

for now i will live with it and blame it on the graphicscard being broken or something.. i have to upgrade anyways, the cheapest pcie card you can buy is better than my current, so it is about time

_________________
Long pork is people!

wzl's burrow

I wonder if it could be some other part of the computer which is causing this.

Some DVD drives for instance can make excessive interrupt requests that steals bandwidth from the memory bus. Suppose your graphics card has some power save feature that suspends processing while its own interrupts are handled by the system. Could a clash of hardware features like this manifest as a choppy frame rate? You could try disconnecting your optical drives and see if the problem is still present.

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I ain't pushing no moon buttons.