Frame Skips after format.

[jlv]

I was playing MX Sim alone offline, and the game was running smooth. I got bored and fired up iRacing and played for a while and when I exited I noticed I never closed MX Sim, so I opened the window back up and had major skipping issues, every 1 to 2 seconds the game would skip.

I had an issue like that once where if I issued enough triangles using immediate mode GL commands it would develop a hitch, but it would be fine using vertex arrays. That was why I switched to arrays for the text rendering a while ago. I was drawing text using immediate mode and when you brought up the chat console the framerate went down permanently until you restarted the game. It was technically a performance bug in the driver, somewhere it must have been expanding a buffer somewhere to where it wasn't cached any more. If you can narrow it down to something specific and repeatable I'll see what I can do.

Some other ideas -
Check if DMA has been disabled on your hard drive.
Raise the priority level of mx.exe.

[yzmxer608]

Here's a search that might help.

Does this only happen when recording demos?

I thought recording demos would save it as default when you exit or the race restarts? Is this not true?

[jlv]

It opens "demos/default.mxdemo" once the race starts and begins writing to it. When you leave that race the demo is renamed if you've used /namedemo.

[yzmxer608]

Oh ok, would make sense then that it would help if you have a slower drive. Wonder if I should symlink my demos folder to a mechanical drive to avoid constant writing to my ssd.

[Phathry25]

No. It didn't make a lick of difference for me. It's the oddest thing, it seems to happen at random, sometimes when I start the game/computer and somtimes after an hour of playing. It slowly gets worse until the game is basically unplayable, and then just as sudden as it started it is gone. It happens over maybe a 15-20 minute period. My frame rate never wavers from 125FPS and I am using anywhere between 60MB texture memory, and 400MB on a 1GB GTX550ti. Core i5-2500k @ 3.3GHz. 8GB RAM. Windows 7 Home Premium SP1.

I've tried:

• Raising priority
• Switching from shaders/direct to shaders/copy
• hardware/direct to hardware/copy
• disabling demo recording
• updating GFX drivers
• toggling vsync
• disabling windows update
• updating windows
• ensured DMA was enabled

Adding to this list.

• Cleaned computer/heatsinks/fans
• Re-seated all connections on motherboard (RAM, GPU, CPU, SATA Cables)
• moved MX Sim drive from SATA 2 to SATA 3 port

Last week for the race I was able to restart just before my race ran, and that got me about 20 minutes before the skips would start. I did some more digging this week and by watching the resource monitor I was able to identify my hard disk as the culprit. I could see the corresponding spikes in disk activity and the skips in game play. I disabled demo recording once more and the game actually behaved well after that tonight. As I sit and watch the resource monitor sometimes the disk speed scale is listed as 100KB/sec and other 1MB/sec is this just the scale self adjusting based on use, or is my disk speed wavering as I sit here idling?

The bigger question I have is where did I go wrong when installing windows or the SATA driver this time around? This is the same hard disk that I have used in the past with no skipping, so it makes no sense to me that it would suddenly have write speed problems. Where do I check to see which drivers I have installed, and likewise find updates for them?

Thanks!

[jlv]

Are you sure you found the right DMA setting?

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/wind ... -on-or-off

Windows will disable DMA and use PIO mode if it thinks the drive has buggy DMA. Since a drive just failed for you it wouldn't surprise me if it went to PIO mode.

Did you ever try disabling the paging file? Not a great solution but if it helps I might be able to make the game lock its pages on Windows.

[Phathry25]

Are you sure you found the right DMA setting?

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/wind ... -on-or-off

Windows will disable DMA and use PIO mode if it thinks the drive has buggy DMA. Since a drive just failed for you it wouldn't surprise me if it went to PIO mode.

Did you ever try disabling the paging file? Not a great solution but if it helps I might be able to make the game lock its pages on Windows.

Ah Yes, I knew I forgot something on my troubleshooting list. I did disable the page file as well, no change. Just double checked the DMA settings using the linked guide and both drives have DMA enabled.

[jlv]

Try this: http://mxsimulator.com/snapshots/mx-2013-01-10-1149.exe

That exe will try to increase its working set size to 1 GB. Make sure it says "Working set increased to 1 GB" in the lastlog file. If it fails it will say "No 1 GB working set for you".

[Phathry25]

Okay, I was just playing skip free with demo recording set to off on the 1.8 EXE. Saw your post and loaded up the 11:49 EXE and turned demo recording on, skips right at game load. Turned off demo recording, start new race, skips are gone.

At least we've managed to narrow it down to something somewhat replicable. I'm still not convinced it's a software issue, at least on your end. There has to be something on my end that we're missing.

I''m going to try to symlink my personal folder onto my other drive and see if that helps at all, or is it a junction that I want? I always get the two mixed up.

Thanks!

[jlv]

I'd use a symlink. Is it possible that somehow write caching has been disabled on your system? Should be under the hard drive properties.

[Phathry25]

It is enabled.

[BrutalMX]

I turned on demo recording for a race and forgot to turn it off..and Sim was freezing up again...why does it do this JLV?

[jlv]

The file caching/buffering in Windows is screwed up on some systems. Actually it might be more accurate to say it's screwed up in general but happens to work on some systems.

When it freezes, does the mouse pointer freeze too?

[BrutalMX]

The file caching/buffering in Windows is screwed up on some systems. Actually it might be more accurate to say it's screwed up in general but happens to work on some systems.

When it freezes, does the mouse pointer freeze too?

In game it does, but I usually play in Windowed mode so when I move the cursor to the bottom of the screen I can minimize it and everything in Windows seems fine...I give it about 30 seconds and Sim resumes with my throttle usually stuck pinned haha.

Could it possibly be my harddrive?

[Phathry25]

May I ask that you create your own topic for this problem? I am having enough trouble tracking what I have done and should try without having to read through posts meant for someone else. Thanks.