HELP - New system stutters!

[Cee-Jaay 0]

Pleading for help from anyone here...The new system is now up and running and FS9 performance is miles better (was 15-20FPS, usually around 30-40FPS)But every three-or-four seconds there is a split-second pause (the dreaded stutters - Even on the 'select a flight' page, the stock cessna - pauses it's pirouet every few seconds).and it's driving me utterly spare!- I have FS in it's own partition, freshly formatted and rebooted- I have the latest Catalyst ATI drivers (5.4) and DirectX- I deleted the FS9.cfg to ensure it created a default one.How come the system is able to push-out around 70 frames a second (panning round the cessna on the threshold at KSEA) and then every couple of seconds - freezes of a fraction of a second?If it were performance-related (i.e. XP services) I'd have figured the basic frame rate would be affected?Cheers,Chris.K8N Neo2 Platinum - Athlon64 3200Dual (2*)512Mb Corsair 3200XLWD Raptor 74GBSapphire Atlantis 9800Pro (Catalyst 5.4)DirectX 9.0c

[Guest kilo_sierra17]

Have you installed the latest chipset drivers? Is there Norton Anti-virus on your system? Possibly tried some older drivers, your card is not the newest and it is possible the new drivers may not work as well.

[Bert Pieke 7,584]

Are you running any other programs in the background?

[Guest baksteen33]

Hi Chris, apart from what has been mentioned, I'ld recommend sticking everything into one large partition. Using multiple partitions on the same drive causes more HD-head travel and it signifies you're not using the fastest sectors either. Another thing worth looking at is to disable HD-indexing. Hope this adds to thoughts, good luck and kind regards Jaap

[Cee-Jaay 0]

Thanks for the suggestions guys.I do have Norton running in the background - as I (would) usually use the 'download weather function', disabling the AV and Firewall would be a risky step security-wise.I'll try-out a few of the earlier ATI drivers.Chipset-wise, I've so far kept with the Mobo drivers provided by MSI, but would be interested if there were alternatives on NVidia.The only other item I forgot to mention in my first post is that I was running with the onboard (Realtek) sound chip. But I disabled this in the Bios and the pausing remained.Cheers,Chris

[Bert Pieke 7,584]

I would place a bet on the AV program... as a test, disable it and see what happens. I use on-board sound as well and have no problems with it.The reason I suspect the AV program, is that you report regular "interruptions" = pauses. That is indicative of some other process briefly taking priority to do whatever it needs to do.Video drivers or chipset drivers do not have a habit of doing things like that.Now, if you were to say that the stuttering occurs when you bank the plane, I would quickly point to texture loading, which is pretty much unavoidable although a well tuned system will do better that a poorly tuned one.

[Cee-Jaay 0]

Bert you were right.After a spot of research into other AV programs. I uninstalled Norton and replaced it with a less 'demanding' equivalent.And instantly - no freezes or pauses.Thanks for the help and advice.Cheers,Chris

[Guest apopilot77]

Well it seems like you have solved your problem. I however have the same problem with stuttering on a superfast system. I dont know what is making this happen. Mcafee and everything else is shut down.