10 réponses à ce sujet

[The Soupinator]

I haven't been able to find this particular problem by searching so here goes.  During some dialogues, the game stutters like crazy.  There'll be little skips and pauses that interrupt the character animations and at its worst, characters can jump forward several feet while walking across the screen.  My framerate seems to fluctuate quite a lot during these dialogues as well.

The strangest part is, gameplay is smooth as butter.  I sit at 60 fps 95% of the time with only occasional minor slowdowns.  During dialogue, even in simple scenes, I've seen it drop as low as 20.  I already tried disabling AA and depth of field, but neither of those helped.  Especially problematic areas are the Illusive Man (gives me about 30 fps) and Aria (crazy stuttering, probably low fps as well but I don't have a specific number).

Specs:
Windows 7 Pro 64 bit SP1
Intel Core 2 Quad q9550 (2.83 GHz)
8 GB RAM
nVidia GeForce GTX 260 w/ newest drivers (275.33)

I'm running the Steam version of the game so it's fully updated.  Any help would be appreciated!

[Gorath Alpha]

You'll have to provide a great deal more information, as outlined in the sticky describing the problem reporting information required. Pacifien went to a lot of trouble with that, adding neat illustrations and everything.

[PnXMarcin1PL]

Are you sure you have disabled Windows Aero for MassEffect2.exe ?
If not, go to game installation folder/binaries/MassEffect2.exe right click then properties/compability/disable desktop composition/apply & ok

[squatchmaster5000]

Have you edited your game at all, as in opening up the config files and changing stuff? If so your problem is your shadow resolution, if you change it anything past 512 max shadow resolution you'll get the slowdowns.

[The Soupinator]

Gorath Alpha wrote...

You'll have to provide a great deal more information, as outlined in the sticky describing the problem reporting information required. Pacifien went to a lot of trouble with that, adding neat illustrations and everything.

I followed the guide for reporting problems, I put all the info in it asked for.  I'm not sure what else I could add?

@PnXMarcin1PL: That's an interesting idea, I'll give that a shot.

@squatchmaster5000: It was behaving this way from the moment I installed the game.  I've tried various ini tweaks and have installed DLC since then.  Nothing has changed.

But the thing I really don't understand, why does this only occur during dialogue/in-game cutscenes?  What is different during these portions that would cause the game to slow down so much and stutter?  The only thing I could think of is the depth of field effects, but turning that off didn't help.

Edit:  I guess I did leave out my sound card in the original post.  It's an M-Audio Revolution 5.1 (fairly old, but works flawlessly in every game including every Unreal engine game I have ever played (Mass Effect 1, Bioshock 1 & 2, etc).

Modifié par The Soupinator, 01 juillet 2011 - 08:49 .

[PnXMarcin1PL]

Soundcard is not a problem here.
When you disable Aero in game's .exe properties, every game will run slightly to much faster, because Aero eats your PC's resources. Also your GPU, no matter if it has 196 or 216 unified shaders, is more than enough for this game at full details. Have you also tried enabling maximum efficiency mode for your gpu in nvidia panel ?
right click on desktop>nvidia panel>manage 3d settings>power management mode> full efficiency
Also, if you are using only 1 monitor you should change multi-display/mixed-gpu acceleration from multiple display perf mode to single display perf mode. It is above power management mode.
Tell me how it works out for you.

[The Soupinator]

Ok I did some more testing and I think I've narrowed down the problem.

First, disabling desktop composition and changing the power management mode gave me a small performance boost (<10%) but did not affect my issue. I have 2 monitors so I didn't change the multiple display performance mode.

Now I was monitoring my framerate while doing the testing and I noticed something odd. I play all games with vsync+triple buffering to eliminate screen tearing. This works normally while playing (free floating framerate, no tearing, smooth motion), but when engaging in a dialogue, the game engine seems to be artificially limiting the framerate to make it act like triple buffering is off. So at 60 Hz, when my framerate starts the drop, the engine will drop it all the way to 30. Likewise, if I set my monitor to 75 Hz then when it starts to drop, the engine drops it to 37.5. I tried all combinations of settings to try to stop it from doing this, but the behavior persists unless I completely disable vsync. Unfortunately this does not seem to affect the jerky animations I'm experiencing during dialogue. They seem to be perfectly repeatable, no matter what settings and tweaks I've tried.

[Bogsnot1]

NVidia arent exactly reliable when it comes to continued support for older games when they release new drivers.
I would suggest rolling back your drivers to a previous release. Mid-2010 seem to be the newest drivers to work reliably with ME2 on most platforms.
http://www.nvidia.co...hql-driver.html

[PnXMarcin1PL]

When vsync is enabled, you will not be able to see any screen tearing. It only happens when you have vsync disabled (which i always disable in fps games in mp mode). So when vsync is enabled your GPU becomes a "slave" of your monitor and it's refresh rate. Tripple buffering makes GPU work 100% as it would normally without vsync enabled, but the difference is tthat you have vsync enabled. It also requires some extra RAM on your GPU. Always use your monitor's native resolution & refresh rate in games.
When have you cleaned your system lately ? You know, clean up junk and garbage, clean registry, scan for viruses and malware, defrag.

Modifié par PnXMarcin1PL, 02 juillet 2011 - 01:14 .

[The Soupinator]

Yes I know how vsync works. I am very knowledgeable about this sort of thing. I always keep it on even in multiplayer games because the screen tearing/stuttering effect bothers me a lot more than a 5% drop in framerate and a couple ms of input lag.

I do clean my computer up occasionally, and it defrags automatically. My games are also installed on a separate hard drive to improve performance.

Also so far I've tried driver version 266.58 (I believe this is the one I used to play through ME1) with no change. I'll take a look at the older one next, but from what I've seen so far, I doubt it will help.

[The Soupinator]

Well older drivers didn't affect the game at all unfortunately. I guess I can deal with it for now unless anyone has another idea. Thankfully it only affects dialogue/cutscenes and not combat so I'm not having any trouble playing.