(0.8.1) Green Valley: stuttering

[InhumanPwnage]

I've completed every stage except Green Valley. Every time the game starts, and I get up to th mountain, in the beginning, my game starts stuttering. FPS goes down to 6.

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cj7wHLCDPE

The video is unlisted. Only people with link can see it.

[Auria]

Hi,

what is your GPU, and what OS are you using? Green valley is by far not our most demanding track so I'm a little surprised it would be this one causing trouble

[InhumanPwnage]

My laptop has a discrete NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M (2GB VRAM) + inbuilt/dedicated Intel HD Graphics 4000.

Other details I pasted from DxDiag, can be read here: http://pastebin.com/TjHNAKxF

[cand]

1. You are playing on Optimus. It's quite a buggy tech, so please close that possibility first - force NVidia to be used for STK.

2. If it still happens, please profile it, to see if the lag is from cpu or gpu.

[InhumanPwnage]

1. You are playing on Optimus. It's quite a buggy tech, so please close that possibility first - force NVidia to be used for STK.

I've been searching the net for ways on how to disable it, all go to this thread about re-installing windows.

Not an option for me. How do I force my GPU to take STK?

2. If it still happens, please profile it, to see if the lag is from cpu or gpu.

I've never heard of the term, but by searching over the net, you mean I should get a program like CodeAnalyst and see if I can profile STK from there?

[BioHazardX]

Even on my laptop with 1 gb video card I notice obvious low framerates on Green Valley when I play, the other tracks aren't affected from this performance drop.
IMHO the issue is the high-quality background of the track or it isn't optimized very well.

[cand]

You disable it in Nvidia Control Panel.

I've never heard of the term, but by searching over the net, you mean I should get a program like CodeAnalyst and see if I can profile STK from there?

Yes, any of the free profilers should work. They're offered by AMD, Intel, MS...

[Auria]

Profiling can be done but if you are not a developer this may not be the best option to consider right now. Getting something useful out of a profiler usually requires that you have a very good idea what you're doing, so if you're not used to do that, I don't think there is much use in looking into it right now

let's start by making sure you're using the nvidia GPU. Right-click on STK, select "run with graphics processor", and in the submenu select the one that says "nvidia". Also try to note which one of the intel and nvidia entry has "default" written next to it, if the intel one says "default" then definitely the game is running on the "bad" GPU

[asciimonster]

I have the same problem. It also happens in city lights. Suddenly the frame-rate drops from about 50 fps all the way to 2 and the game becomes nearly impossible to play. Also the sound starts playing intermittently. After a while it sometimes recovers, but not often.

I've been able to reproduce the behaviour reasonably successfully. It starts when most of the karts are slightly more than half a lap in front of you. If you manage to get back closer to the lead karts it stops. Also when the karts are nearly lapping me it also stops.

I'm running windows 7 on pentium G620 CPU and a ATI G100 graphics card. I'm doing a standard race with 15 AI karts.

When I run the task manager I see when the game us running normally, I see about 30% usage on both processors (I have to). After the framerate drops 1 CPU jumps to 95% whilst the other drops to 10% or less.
I therefore think that this is not a graphics card issue, but a bug in the game engine itself.

[asciimonster]

Wait. I just managed to get one whilst playing shifting sands.

[Funto]

Just a note, there's an in-game CPU profiler, we should definitely extend it to ease troubleshooting such cases...

[hiker]

Interestingly, I had that problem with the new lighthouse track, but only in debug compilation. Release compilations were just fine.

A few things to try:

• Try to use smaller textures, either resize some of the existing ones, or just replace them with other smaller ones (will look odd of course, but doesn't matter for now).
• Is it depending on the number of karts?
• Is it perhaps depending on a certain kart? We noticed that konqi's animations are way too detailed. Just disable some karts (start with konqi), just by renaming the kart.xml file.

Cheers,
Joerg

[elbedd]

In 0.8.1, I always have problem with this track (I have to press [Esc] to pause game because it was to slow).
One try under 0.8.2 and it works well.

[samuncle]

Glad to hear that the problem disappeared.

Our current track that requires a maximum amount of power is Cocoa Temple.

[ArDanWol]

Hi InhumanPwnage,
I had the same problem on my laptop which also has an Intel HD Graphics 4000 card in it. I fixed the issue by decreasing the game resolution. Hope this is somewhat helpful.