Graphics issue [Marvel Heroes]; Possible PC issue

[Vespian]

You can fiddle with your cpu temps all you want but that will make no difference. The problem is a mixture of your HDD loading assets which is causing the random "mini-freeze" stuttering and your CPU, that you said was a Phenom, which is causing your low fps in high-action scenes (multiple players, npcs, etc..); the phenom line was released in 2007, it is now 7 years old.

Any real ITer would never exclude anything like that. Yeah I agree, overheating on the CPU normally causes shutdowns/reboots rather than performance issues, but his core temperature is still too high (even though AMD is known for their higher temps, it's still too high). There's no reason to let that go unchecked.

Odds are that it will not improve his game performance, but nonetheless is will prolong the life of his PC.

That said; Obviously, old hardware will cause issues. But from the word "Phenom" nothing else could be derived. That conclusion would be false solely based on that information. My core is an i7 2600K, which happens to perform about twice as well as an AMD 4130 and that runs MH just fine. The Phenoms are higher up the ladder. We have no specifics on the exact core we're dealing with, so please refrain from just trashing on the whole "Phenom" thing.

The HDD is not per definition the answer either and since the whole world uses mostly 7200rpm disks, even with the SSD becoming more and more common, and I myself use normal 7200rpm disks and have absolutely no issues, you can't even start assuming that he's using 5Krpm disks before you've asked that question.

Your performance is the sum of its parts.
- It could be the CPU:
CPU throttling kicks in if there's overheating taking place, which will directly affect performance on any machine and could lead to complete lock-ups. Your CPU performance would look like this: http://foto1.inbox.lv/davizzz/viskas/wtf.png

- It could be the HDD. Technically a possibility, but since the large majority of the client base of MH and most of the world still runs on 7200RPM, it's less certain that this is a problem.

- It could be RAM. Particles and objects that persist, need to be loaded in memory. A lack of memory (and MH still has a memory leak for now, so DERP) could lead to the mentioned performance issues.

[Deleted]

Alright, my specs are following:

AMD Phenom II x4 955 3,20GHz
4GB RAM 1333MHz
GTX 650 Ti Boost 2GB
WDC 7200rpm
PSU 650W

Now, the thing is I know that this is enough to handle MH because I get better overall performance on maximum than on minimum settings. Which is pretty weird, but nonetheless, something else is the problem here. I tested some more yesterday, and after 10-15 minutes of play it smooths out, after things are loaded. Though in Midtown and similar areas, everything is too random and there's always new things to load, so yeah.

Also, still didn't manage to get thermal paste, I hope it will be today or tomorrow and I'll let you know how it went.

[Vespian]

Alright, my specs are following:

AMD Phenom II x4 955 3,20GHz
4GB RAM 1333MHz
GTX 650 Ti Boost 2GB
WDC 7200rpm
PSU 650W

Now, the thing is I know that this is enough to handle MH because I get better overall performance on maximum than on minimum settings. Which is pretty weird, but nonetheless, something else is the problem here. I tested some more yesterday, and after 10-15 minutes of play it smooths out, after things are loaded. Though in Midtown and similar areas, everything is too random and there's always new things to load, so yeah.

Also, still didn't manage to get thermal paste, I hope it will be today or tomorrow and I'll let you know how it went.

Right, I did a search on 2013 Benchmarks on Tom's Hardware:
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/c...d%5B5803%5D=on

That's mine and yours in comparison. Yours doesn't even perform all that badly and the AMD Phenom II X4 955 is at max 5 years old. Just saying. It should easily be capable of running the game and that's why I hate this *comes in, yells some random terms that seem impressive* mentality that people like Jordonus display. It's their lack of selfreflection (aka, NOT knowing it all) that gets many other people in trouble.

[Deleted]

Right, I did a search on 2013 Benchmarks on Tom's Hardware:
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/c...d%5B5803%5D=on

That's mine and yours in comparison. Yours doesn't even perform all that badly and the AMD Phenom II X4 955 is at max 5 years old. Just saying. It should easily be capable of running the game and that's why I hate this *comes in, yells some random terms that seem impressive* mentality that people like Jordonus display. It's their lack of selfreflection (aka, NOT knowing it all) that gets many other people in trouble.

Yes, it definitely should. And since I monitored activity, I saw that only CPU has these spikes during gameplay, HDD is smooth which means I was probably wrong at first. I tried downloading CoreParking Manager and set all my cores at 100% all the time, didn't help at all. So I'm not sure what else to try besides thermal paste... Maybe I should get some different Motherboard drivers or something, but it's weird that I have these problems only in MH, everything else runs fine.

[Angarin]

Alright, my specs are following:

AMD Phenom II x4 955 3,20GHz
4GB RAM 1333MHz
GTX 650 Ti Boost 2GB
WDC 7200rpm
PSU 650W

Now, the thing is I know that this is enough to handle MH because I get better overall performance on maximum than on minimum settings. Which is pretty weird, but nonetheless, something else is the problem here. I tested some more yesterday, and after 10-15 minutes of play it smooths out, after things are loaded. Though in Midtown and similar areas, everything is too random and there's always new things to load, so yeah.

Also, still didn't manage to get thermal paste, I hope it will be today or tomorrow and I'll let you know how it went.

This game is poorly optimized, and from how its been running & updates & such to performance. It may never run as good as we hope for another year or two at least.

I can run planetside 2 on better fps than MH at max settings on both. The game also starts hitching after playing for awhile so I need to relog.

Tbh I haven't played the game in a month or so. I just came to the realization that nearly every hero has the same playstyle. At least the decent ones. Waiting for the dodge mechanic to be reworked or buffed somehow.

[Deleted]

I actually managed to find some workaround to all this - I locked my FPS to 30 - and now I can play without stutters. Yeah, it's slower but smoother, and I actually prefer it to those freezes. Now I only get them if I suddenly drop to 15 FPS which happens very, very rarely.

So, the problem is FPS dropping when loading new stuff or something, I imagine if I drop from 60 to 30 in half a second, yeah it'd cause stutter.

Now, I'll test some more when I finally get that thermal paste (hopefully tomorrow) but I don't think it would help much with this particular problem.

[jordonus]

Any real ITer would never exclude anything like that. Yeah I agree, overheating on the CPU normally causes shutdowns/reboots rather than performance issues, but his core temperature is still too high (even though AMD is known for their higher temps, it's still too high). There's no reason to let that go unchecked.

Odds are that it will not improve his game performance, but nonetheless is will prolong the life of his PC.

That said; Obviously, old hardware will cause issues. But from the word "Phenom" nothing else could be derived. That conclusion would be false solely based on that information. My core is an i7 2600K, which happens to perform about twice as well as an AMD 4130 and that runs MH just fine. The Phenoms are higher up the ladder. We have no specifics on the exact core we're dealing with, so please refrain from just trashing on the whole "Phenom" thing.

The HDD is not per definition the answer either and since the whole world uses mostly 7200rpm disks, even with the SSD becoming more and more common, and I myself use normal 7200rpm disks and have absolutely no issues, you can't even start assuming that he's using 5Krpm disks before you've asked that question.

Your performance is the sum of its parts.
- It could be the CPU:
CPU throttling kicks in if there's overheating taking place, which will directly affect performance on any machine and could lead to complete lock-ups. Your CPU performance would look like this: http://foto1.inbox.lv/davizzz/viskas/wtf.png

- It could be the HDD. Technically a possibility, but since the large majority of the client base of MH and most of the world still runs on 7200RPM, it's less certain that this is a problem.

- It could be RAM. Particles and objects that persist, need to be loaded in memory. A lack of memory (and MH still has a memory leak for now, so DERP) could lead to the mentioned performance issues.

Settle down son. I never told him to stop trying to fix his temps, of course it is a problem... but it's not the one causing his performance issues. Any real ITer would know that. Further, I never explicitly said that his processor was 7 years old but rather that the processor line is. He also said that he had a Phenom, not a Phenom II or any other line so I went with the information he gave. Regardless, his processor is a Phenom II x4 955, which was released in 2009 so it is 5 years old already; oops I was off by 2 whole years, oh no!

Wasn't trashing the Phenom line or anything really, just stating that the original Phenom lineup was released 7 years ago; pretty close though.

First of all you can blather on about 7200rpm drives all you want but there are drives with slower rpms and I don't recall him specifying what he had. Further, even if he does have a standard 7200rpm drive, not all are equal. Different brands, different cache size, different access times, etc... Even brand new, many drives fail to hit the mark of their rated speeds. Also when considering physical disks you have to consider fragmentation, physical location on the platters (such as outer rim), and terrible paging times. I never said he needed to replace his disk, I just said that was probably a problem. As any real ITer would know, when you have these stuttering problems in games, it is almost always the HDD; so instead of wasting time trying to check a whole bunch of obscure issues, the best way is to check the HDD first. Also any real ITers, that were born before 1999, know that this type of stuttering was a common problem in games even with great 7200rpm drives, with no fragmentation, and no paging... it was simply a fact of life before SSDs.

that's why I hate this *comes in, yells some random terms that seem impressive* mentality that people like Jordonus display. It's their lack of selfreflection (aka, NOT knowing it all) that gets many other people in trouble.

Yelling random terms? Lol. Good joke.

[Deleted]

Chill guys, I really appreciate the information from both of you. Also, what can I do to help with those common HDD problems (besides defragmentation, which I'll do right now)? Increase the paging file maybe?

[jordonus]

Chill guys, I really appreciate the information from both of you. Also, what can I do to help with those common HDD problems (besides defragmentation, which I'll do right now)? Increase the paging file maybe?

You should check your fragmentation.
You should also check your physical RAM usage while playing the game, if it maxes out try adding some more RAM.
Paging file is only good if your physical RAM is maxed out, but even then you don't want the game in it but rather other applications in the background. If it comes to this, get some more physical memory.
If it doesn't, or that doesn't fix your stuttering issue, then you may need a new HDD.
Download a tool to test your drives integrity and speed, if it's not meeting the standard mark then I would try getting a new one.
You can also try putting the game on a second physical drive, separate from the OS and other programs, and see if that fixes your problem.
SSDs are good, but you don't necessarily need them; some games do though because they will have stuttering issues with any physical disk.

The stuttering is almost always because the game needs to load new assets and blocks while waiting for the HDD to respond. A few games get around this by using low-res placeholders for everything and then asynchronously loading in new assets without blocking the game itself, you can see this happening as they do it but I don't think Marvel Heroes does it.

[Deleted]

You should check your fragmentation.
You should also check your physical RAM usage while playing the game, if it maxes out try adding some more RAM.
Paging file is only good if your physical RAM is maxed out, but even then you don't want the game in it but rather other applications in the background. If it comes to this, get some more physical memory.
If it doesn't, or that doesn't fix your stuttering issue, then you may need a new HDD.
Download a tool to test your drives integrity and speed, if it's not meeting the standard mark then I would try getting a new one.
You can also try putting the game on a second physical drive, separate from the OS and other programs, and see if that fixes your problem.
SSDs are good, but you don't necessarily need them; some games do though because they will have stuttering issues with any physical disk.

The stuttering is almost always because the game needs to load new assets and blocks while waiting for the HDD to respond. A few games get around this by using low-res placeholders for everything and then asynchronously loading in new assets without blocking the game itself, you can see this happening as they do it but I don't think Marvel Heroes does it.

Right, I just downloaded PerfectDisk Professional and started defragmantation, since it is a bit fragmented. But, when the program checked the disk itself, both Health and Performance were marked as Excellent. I'll let it finish, then I'll check the RAM thing, although as I've said, I monitored usage while playing and only CPU had spikes.

[Vespian]

Settle down son. I never told him to stop trying to fix his temps, of course it is a problem... but it's not the one causing his performance issues. Any real ITer would know that. Further, I never explicitly said that his processor was 7 years old but rather that the processor line is. He also said that he had a Phenom, not a Phenom II or any other line so I went with the information he gave. Regardless, his processor is a Phenom II x4 955, which was released in 2009 so it is 5 years old already; oops I was off by 2 whole years, oh no!

Wasn't trashing the Phenom line or anything really, just stating that the original Phenom lineup was released 7 years ago; pretty close though.

First of all you can blather on about 7200rpm drives all you want but there are drives with slower rpms and I don't recall him specifying what he had. Further, even if he does have a standard 7200rpm drive, not all are equal. Different brands, different cache size, different access times, etc... Even brand new, many drives fail to hit the mark of their rated speeds. Also when considering physical disks you have to consider fragmentation, physical location on the platters (such as outer rim), and terrible paging times. I never said he needed to replace his disk, I just said that was probably a problem. As any real ITer would know, when you have these stuttering problems in games, it is almost always the HDD; so instead of wasting time trying to check a whole bunch of obscure issues, the best way is to check the HDD first. Also any real ITers, that were born before 1999, know that this type of stuttering was a common problem in games even with great 7200rpm drives, with no fragmentation, and no paging... it was simply a fact of life before SSDs.

7200RPM disks were released when I was approximately 14, that's 15 years ago, hey, damn, that's exactly 1999, go figure. That's 15! years ago. It would not just be unlikely that he had slower disks, it would have been unthinkable. - Edit - Actually I fact checked myself on this one, because unthinkable was an opinion and it seems 5400rpm disks are still being produced and actually provided in some lower end systems. I still think you're better off assuming a person to use 7200rpm, rather than 5400, but I'm wrong on this one.

2 years off on the CPU might seem like a little bit, but that's exactly the period where the hardware started nearing it's maximum performance in terms of MHZ (without OC) and the period where the console market started dictating the the entire market. We can still see that today, with PC ports barely requiring a third of the available processing power do to the lack of power on the consoles. They are slowing the market down. My CPU is 4 years old, one year younger than his Phenom II and I run everything on Ultra.

I'm aware of the loading assets story. It was a big thing when Diablo III released and it still hasn't been fixed for the people that suffered from it, nor has there been any official response that it was in fact do to asset loading.

I never exclude any thought patterns from an analysis and that's why I also never directly point at a component and claim that that's it, when there's plenty of chance that it's not. I'm aware that you might know things, but you go about it the wrong way. Fixing PC's is mostly all about going through all the parts one by one. In this case we have a double benefit to check out the CPU first, hence, you should currently focus your attention on the CPU, because fixing one obvious problem with the off-chance that it actually also fixes your other problem, is a lot better than letting the current problem persist, while you go on a wild goose chase among your other components.

CPU throttling is a real thing too, especially when overheating takes place. Maybe look it up.

And as you point out, I think his RAM is on the very low of low side, so yes I would personally also invest in more RAM, as I previously stated in an earlier post.

You can drop the condescending 'son'. Next time I will press that report button, because otherwise I'm going to cross lines and I'll get infracted, which would be worlds upside down.

[Lucetia]

Alright, gonna chime in with a friendly reminder to keep it civil. Let's not go into anymore extensive computer hardware debates please. Don't really want to infract anyone after this post for it so let's leave it out please.

[Deleted]

Since my problems are directly connected to Marvel Heroes performance, I hope I won't get infracted :P

I have one more question. I did some extensive research on all my hardware components yesterday while I was waiting for defragmentation to finish, and found out I actually have 125W processor on a 95W motherboard. So, is it somehow possible this is related to my MH problems?

[Lucetia]

Since my problems are directly connected to Marvel Heroes performance, I hope I won't get infracted :P

I have one more question. I did some extensive research on all my hardware components yesterday while I was waiting for defragmentation to finish, and found out I actually have 125W processor on a 95W motherboard. So, is it somehow possible this is related to my MH problems?

If I remember right that's just how much power each one requires so that would mean your PSU would need to be higher than 220W just to run those two only. So you should be fine.

As for getting infracted my comment is more related to the back and forth about PC specs and the details of. If it's an issue like what you have that's different.

[Deleted]

If I remember right that's just how much power each one requires so that would mean your PSU would need to be higher than 220W just to run those two only. So you should be fine.

As for getting infracted my comment is more related to the back and forth about PC specs and the details of. If it's an issue like what you have that's different.

Sorry, let me rephrase that a bit. I have a 125W processor on a motherboard that supports processors up to 95W. I bought this PC roughly 3 years ago and never had any problems, but I'm still wondering can it be related to the stuttering issue.

[Vespian]

Since my problems are directly connected to Marvel Heroes performance, I hope I won't get infracted :P

Don't worry, whenever I post anything, I'm automatically at risk of being infracted. I have Drones following me around. The last year, It's like I was Matt Damon in Elysium. (Except I can't win).

[Deleted]

Don't worry, whenever I post anything, I'm automatically at risk of being infracted. I have Drones following me around. The last year, It's like I was Matt Damon in Elysium. (Except I can't win).

Haha

Ran some memory tests, they came up clean. And I monitored RAM usage, I never go over 2,70GB (out of 4 that I have) so I doubt that's the problem. Also updated my BIOS and defragmented HDD (it's now 1% fragmented) and nothing. Well, only thing that's left is hoping that CPU throttle is a problem, we'll see in the evening. Oh, and CPU usage never went over 70% while playing.

[Vespian]

Haha

Ran some memory tests, they came up clean. And I monitored RAM usage, I never go over 2,70GB (out of 4 that I have) so I doubt that's the problem. Also updated my BIOS and defragmented HDD (it's now 1% fragmented) and nothing. Well, only thing that's left is hoping that CPU throttle is a problem, we'll see in the evening. Oh, and CPU usage never went over 70% while playing.

There have to be spikes somewhere. The issues you describe basically can't occur without showing a performance issue somewhere. Any monitor should show a spikey graph at either the CPU, the HDD, the GFX card, or the RAM. I can't imagine any other part where performance issues could come from. Some monitor should pick something up :P

[Deleted]

There have to be spikes somewhere. The issues you describe basically can't occur without showing a performance issue somewhere. Any monitor should show a spikey graph at either the CPU, the HDD, the GFX card, or the RAM. I can't imagine any other part where performance issues could come from. Some monitor should pick something up :P

There are CPU spikes, but not over 70%. Could you recommend some good monitor?

[Vespian]

There are CPU spikes, but not over 70%. Could you recommend some good monitor?

I've not had a single monitor in my hands the last 7 years. My work revolves around applications mostly these days, different kind of monitoring tools.