Sporadic pauses while playing

This problems nothing new, just wondering if anyone had any suggestions for it...as you can see above I have lots of good enough RAM but while playing games (especially UT2003 engine) like Americas army, ut2003* I get alot sporadic pauses ingame (or micro pauses), for instance when I join I have to shoot the ground and let it the game suddenly hang to load the effect of the bullet or if I go and have a firefight with someone my game will hang and when it stops loading I will probably be dead! These sporadic l pauses make it extremely hard and annoying to play sometimes...I have used Rage3d tweak but it hasnt really got anything helpful.


I am currently using a Crucial Radeon8500LE and I know the memory it uses is a Hynix 6ns, would that explain these sporadic pauses? Thanks for any suggestions

Win98 Second Edition
AthlonXP 2200+ 512 DDR 2700
I have all the latest drivers, on my system and the windows cache is set properly


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typically when you get pauses like this , it's caused by background processes taking up CPU cycles. the UT engine is a pretty beefy engine and requires much of the CPU. Before you play next time.. KILL everything in your task manager that you don't absolutely need. Then try playing your games.

 

Everything? I have 512MB of DDR, shouldnt that be enough to handle it? When you say task manager, do you mean alt+ctrl+delete and go thru all of them except explorer and the critical ones?

oh and if I was on windows XP would this not happen?
this doesnt actually happen on battlefield 1942 which is supposed to be even more cpu intensive?

 

depends on how the game was programmed. An engine is an engine..it's how hard you drive it.
It CAN happen on ANY OS. Memory is not the issue. It's an issue of I/O on the CPU being sucked up by some other process. So yes, CTRL-ALT-DELETE and end task all non-critical programs.

 

Well I tryed all you suggested but the micro pauses are still persisting...its so annoying...! For instance when started ut2003 at the intro screen, as the guy punches out the Nvidia logo the pc will pause for about a second (if I repeat this without restartig that particular pause wont happen again). as well as this sort of thing happening thru out ut2003 and americas army

who can help

 

what sound card do you have? do have the latest version of DirectX installed?

 

I play 2 diferent online games Vietcong & BF1942 and ram does make a difference
I use cacheman
to monitor my memory usage and with 512 MB of pc 2700 I was using approx 460 to run these games. after installing 2x512 of kingston hyper X PC4000 I checked memory usage and it went up to the 800's so if ya can get more I would as it made a difference for me!!!

 

not in the context of what I was explaining.. if CPU cycles are being sucked up by a process, then in this it is not RAM.

 

srry did not mean to step on your post Kodo only adding that the info stored in ram is much faster than the virtual memory that comes from your HD
I also ran cpu tests on these games and even with my specs it was maxed out and that is with shuttin every option down.

 

outside of the context of my CPU post, I agree with you. Especially with games like UT2003 which use INSANE amounts of Virtual memory.

 

I hear that the UT2003 engine is better on windows XP, would this problem disspear if I upgraded to it? I have soundblaster 4.1 digital and even when muted I get the problem (but slightly slightly less pause lengh beecause it isnt loading the sounds I guess) I have Direct X 9.0B. Just a few mins ago I opened up my PC and tryed to place the RAM into another slot, dint work though because it must of been a dodgy slot. I also reset CMOs and flashed with the latest bios, no luck....!

 

Well, my next guess it that it's sound related. Probably out of sync. I can't stand soundblaster cards. They are so damned troublesome. Is there a sound option in UT2003 that allows you to change your sound device type for like DX sound? if so, can you try that and report back?

 

About the soundcard, I never had any trouble with it playing any other engine... I've tryed every sound setting on UT2003 and it doesnt really help, if it is an I/O problem is there anyway I can sort this out? As you can probably understand is what makes this infurating is that my PC is plenty fast enough not to have these sporadic pauses. I have tryed the latest drivers that use WDM opposed to VXD driver type but my whole game fps goes down alot using those drivers so I reverted back to the bundle ones... any more suggestion would be appreciated!

 

Have you tried the basic stuff?
Defrag with O&O
http://www.oo-software.com/en/index.html
has a free one, the link here is to purchase one
http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=809

Check all your sound and vid drivers to be sure Win has not changed them. Win XP used to hijack my AC97 Audio once a week and install faulty drivers on mv Abit AT7 MB.

Set the game to the same settings as your desktop for video.

Turn off all the eye candy. Your vid card might be fine with it all on, but the hard may not.

Put in Sygate Personal Firewall on each computer in your network. You may be spamming or have another computer spamming the network. Windows networking is pretty noisy. If there are any problems Win will dedicate a ton of time to listening to the network.
http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=3356

Check your task manager to see if it has something start automatically. Any automatic update or indexing can mess up gaming.
It may not be on your computer. I get some hesitation on my cable modem if the neighbor is uploading a big file. DSL is more stable for speed, but usually more $$, a bit slower, and less reliable. At least in my area Cable is more reliable.

I know you have probably thought of all the above, just trying to help.

 

I have norton antivirus 2003 professional with auto update enabled, occasionally it causes some lag on the dsl but not alot of cpu use enless its a very big update... you might have a point with the windows hijacking thingy but theres no way to be sure about it in my case, not on any network here either. Its a real pain this problem... btw whatsbetter about that defragging program that isnt in the one win98se comes with? thanks for the suggesions

I really hope someone can help me nail this one