80 replies to this topic

[maceman]

I agree with UW. There are too many variables.

What we need maybe is a table by table tweak list.

Start with Checkpoint as that is stutter heaven for me

Maceman

[Arcade4]

And let's not forget the latest find of disabeling "ddraw" in the games registry entry.
It will only allow the DMD to be a couple of sizes but it saves a lot of framerates not having to custom draw every diaplay.
This has worked better for me than almost anything.
My system hates tons of alpha ramps like on TOTAN, LW3, or Scared Stiff.
This one tweak fixed them all.

[Zablon]

And let's not forget the latest find of disabeling "ddraw" in the games registry entry.
It will only allow the DMD to be a couple of sizes but it saves a lot of framerates not having to custom draw every diaplay.
This has worked better for me than almost anything.
My system hates tons of alpha ramps like on TOTAN, LW3, or Scared Stiff.
This one tweak fixed them all.

It's not really a new find, but it is yet one more thing that only worked for a handful of people. I never saw a difference with it. That being said, I have never had issues with the 2 of the 3 games you mention. I did have some stutter on LW3. When I switched to a real DMD instead of 3rd LCD screen, all stutter disappeared on LW3. I never made changes other than adding .hidden=1

My understanding is that even though it is hidden, the cpu process from Pinmame is still happening of it "drawing". Is this correct? So then where did the change in frames come from? It wasn't because of the GPU as in my case the DMD was the only thing running off of it. It's things like this that confuse me Keep in mind, I'm running UVP on this game, and still am.

I think what was mentioned by UW are the primary issues. All of this outdated, unoptimized code being run with newer hardware, newer OS's, newer drivers, etc. It's a wonder it works as well as it does I think we sometimes forget that the base code that runs all of this really isn't upgraded and expect it to just run flawlessly on all our souped up power pc's.

[settingsons]

When I switched to a real DMD instead of 3rd LCD screen, all stutter disappeared on LW3. I never made changes other than adding .hidden=1

I have a PinDMD and Vishay on order so that is good news

All of this outdated, unoptimized code being run with newer hardware, newer OS's, newer drivers, etc. It's a wonder it works as well as it does I think we sometimes forget that the base code that runs all of this really isn't upgraded and expect it to just run flawlessly on all our souped up power pc's.

That is something that amazes me to. We are using a very small program first built about 10 years ago with programs such as VPinmame/UVP/B2S in 3-screen setups running a playfield in full-HD. Now that is impressive! There still isn't a commercially available pinball program available that can do this, and there might not be for some time yet.

Long live VP and all who sail in her

Edited by settingsons, 09 April 2012 - 05:42 PM.

[Arcade4]

And let's not forget the latest find of disabeling "ddraw" in the games registry entry.
It will only allow the DMD to be a couple of sizes but it saves a lot of framerates not having to custom draw every diaplay.
This has worked better for me than almost anything.
My system hates tons of alpha ramps like on TOTAN, LW3, or Scared Stiff.
This one tweak fixed them all.

It's not really a new find, but it is yet one more thing that only worked for a handful of people. I never saw a difference with it. That being said, I have never had issues with the 2 of the 3 games you mention. I did have some stutter on LW3. When I switched to a real DMD instead of 3rd LCD screen, all stutter disappeared on LW3. I never made changes other than adding .hidden=1

My understanding is that even though it is hidden, the cpu process from Pinmame is still happening of it "drawing". Is this correct? So then where did the change in frames come from? It wasn't because of the GPU as in my case the DMD was the only thing running off of it. It's things like this that confuse me Keep in mind, I'm running UVP on this game, and still am.

I think what was mentioned by UW are the primary issues. All of this outdated, unoptimized code being run with newer hardware, newer OS's, newer drivers, etc. It's a wonder it works as well as it does I think we sometimes forget that the base code that runs all of this really isn't upgraded and expect it to just run flawlessly on all our souped up power pc's.

The change in frames comes from not using ddraw at all.
If you drag your display to a custome size ddraw has to kick in and make that happen.
So if you already have your display set to one of the two pre-done sizes then you would not see any increase.
This is my understanding of how it works.

[maceman]

And let's not forget the latest find of disabeling "ddraw" in the games registry entry.
It will only allow the DMD to be a couple of sizes but it saves a lot of framerates not having to custom draw every diaplay.
This has worked better for me than almost anything.
My system hates tons of alpha ramps like on TOTAN, LW3, or Scared Stiff.
This one tweak fixed them all.

If I remember correctly, the find was about 1 year ago, and multiple threads

I ended up changing mine back as it didn't help on my system either. Not sure if it is a win7 64 thing or not, but it has no effect for me at all.

Maceman

[Arcade4]

And let's not forget the latest find of disabeling "ddraw" in the games registry entry.
It will only allow the DMD to be a couple of sizes but it saves a lot of framerates not having to custom draw every diaplay.
This has worked better for me than almost anything.
My system hates tons of alpha ramps like on TOTAN, LW3, or Scared Stiff.
This one tweak fixed them all.

If I remember correctly, the find was about 1 year ago, and multiple threads

I ended up changing mine back as it didn't help on my system either. Not sure if it is a win7 64 thing or not, but it has no effect for me at all.

Maceman

Correct. I am running Windows 7 64 bit.

[Itchigo]

32 inch 1080p lcd playfield
19 inch 4:3 backglass
later added a 7 inch usb monitor for the dmd
and a 26 inch led lcd 1080p as my desktop sits outside my cabinet and also serves as my desktop pc

Scott I may have to get together with you when I 'm ready as that's the EXACT setup I'm looking to build (32/19 without the dmd). I think I can get mine to run off 1 card though. When I get the money......

Edited by Itchigo, 09 April 2012 - 09:27 PM.

[TedB]

2 nvidia 250 gts 1gb

I have a GTX 550 Ti 1 GB for my playing field monitor and a 520 GTS for my backglass. I do have stutter issues, your Fanthom table is one of the victims unfortunately. Might be my CPU, that is only AMD Athlon II X2 Dual Core 3.0GHz (overclocked to 3.45) but I have seen people with less that had no issues.

Still trying to figure out the exact cause of the problem. Wouldn't mind replacing my CPU, but I like to be sure my problems are completely solved then. I see a lot of people have Intel I7 CPU, so that might be necessary for the best performance. If so, I need to upgrade my motherboard as well...

For now, I am enjoying the tables that do work stutterfree and trying to learn a bit more about VP and my system.

Edited by TedB, 09 April 2012 - 10:43 PM.

[settingsons]

And let's not forget the latest find of disabeling "ddraw" in the games registry entry.
It will only allow the DMD to be a couple of sizes but it saves a lot of framerates not having to custom draw every diaplay.
This has worked better for me than almost anything.
My system hates tons of alpha ramps like on TOTAN, LW3, or Scared Stiff.
This one tweak fixed them all.

If I remember correctly, the find was about 1 year ago, and multiple threads

I ended up changing mine back as it didn't help on my system either. Not sure if it is a win7 64 thing or not, but it has no effect for me at all.

Maceman

Correct. I am running Windows 7 64 bit.

This just goes to show how there is no clear cut solution. Maceman uses 64-bit W7 and ddraw 0 has no affect, Arcade also uses 64-bit W7 has massive benefits. I use XP 32-bit and see big benefits.

Out of interest does the lamptimer help either of you with your W7 64-bit configs?

[Itchigo]

2 nvidia 250 gts 1gb

I have a GTX 550 Ti 1 GB for my playing field monitor and a 520 GTS for my backglass. I do have stutter issues

I have a much lesser card (gt220) running both screens and no issues, but I don't run the real hard tables. I also don't have an I7, I have an I5 2400 (3.1/3.4 with 16g system memory and almost 4g shared video memory.
I also don't use a front end (at this time), I don't know if that makes a difference. I use the editor for now until the cab is built.

[Arcade4]

And let's not forget the latest find of disabeling "ddraw" in the games registry entry.
It will only allow the DMD to be a couple of sizes but it saves a lot of framerates not having to custom draw every diaplay.
This has worked better for me than almost anything.
My system hates tons of alpha ramps like on TOTAN, LW3, or Scared Stiff.
This one tweak fixed them all.

If I remember correctly, the find was about 1 year ago, and multiple threads

I ended up changing mine back as it didn't help on my system either. Not sure if it is a win7 64 thing or not, but it has no effect for me at all.

Maceman

Correct. I am running Windows 7 64 bit.

This just goes to show how there is no clear cut solution. Maceman uses 64-bit W7 and ddraw 0 has no affect, Arcade also uses 64-bit W7 has massive benefits. I use XP 32-bit and see big benefits.

Out of interest does the lamptimer help either of you with your W7 64-bit configs?

Yes, lamptimer helped a bit but not in the small increments like it does for some.
I think I had to raise LW3 up to around 200 before it was smooth. Changing it only by 5 or 10 points had no improvement.
But if lamptimer is raised too high then you start to see some lag in the table.

[maceman]

Out of interest does the lamptimer help either of you with your W7 64-bit configs?

For me, neither work ( ddraw disabled or lamptimer tweaks). Now, Mind you, I haven't tried many tables, just the ones i feel are very slow for me. I am thinking if there was a way to tweak checkpoint lamps, it might help, but i haven't found a way. It seems the ball ''gyrates'' at a specific rhythm around the table in this specific table. So weird and different from other stuttering issues for me.

Cheers,
Maceman

Edited by maceman, 10 April 2012 - 02:04 AM.

[htamas]

Also vp uses only 1 core.

Well... I'm not so sure about this.
Yes, I know it was said that since VP is a single-threaded application, it only uses one core, but I experimented today with Checkpoint, and my experience is different.
That table is one of the worst offenders as far as stuttering goes, even without UVP. While playing, I was monitoring performance via Task Manager. It seemed that both cores were utilized almost evenly. There was a little imbalance, but for the most part, they were both busy and not 100% utilized (apart from a few momentary spikes). The game still stuttered of course
Then I set processor affinity for VPinball.exe to one core only. The one assigned core was immediately pegged and pretty much stayed between 85 - 100% utilized the whole time while the other core hardly had any activity. It was completely lopsided as expected. Game play got certainly much more choppy.
So this tells me that Windows XP must be doing a pretty decent job at load balancing, even if the app is not multi-processor-aware.

For the record, at least in my case, none of the mentioned tricks I'm aware of help if the game stutters, except for deactivating UVP. The lamptimer works to a certain extent, but only if I set it at extremely high, and then there is serious lag with the lamp update so that is not an option.
Setting ddraw to 0 or moving the DMD to the playfield doesn't make a difference.

Some people with way stronger hardware than mine reported stutter with AFM or Twilight Zone - I have absolutely no issue with them, and I do have UVP on for those. TOTAN works fine as well, but only with no UVP. However haddonfield's latest TOTAN mod stutters, no matter what.

As I said in another thread, getting rid of stutter borders on applying voodoo or something like that. There is indeed no silver bullet.

[Zablon]

^^^ what he said. I have tested and seen this thing in Win 7 as well. VP is definitely using 2 cores and suffers when having only 1 core.

[ressof]

Wow this thread has been busy!  Nice to hear it helps for others to and some very nice explanations.  Jimmyfingers - what you describe is interesting.  I have never had stutter with any if your mods.  Also what is interesting to know that some of us needed to go a lot higher in the increase in ms for the timer.  As I said for the handful of tables that had some stuttering I only increased the timer interval a min of 5ms and max of 15ms.  Having said that I to get the PC to the standard it performed before this timer tweak  I already did tons of other tweaking.  In case it helps here  is a summary:

• BG and DMD running in 16-bit mode
• Processor affinity settings to run VP and UVP on separate cores
• Most XP services disabled (5 or 6 only running)
• Overclocked processor from 2.8 to 3.8 ghz
• Turn off virtual mem completely
• Pinmame directdraw off tweak
• no firewall, no virus checker, no internet

It seems as soon as i introduced a 2nd and 3rd screen that us when the tweaking became necessary.

I was thinking at work today why this made such a difference  for my setup and i suspect the extra milliseconds where a timer is not running are just enough to prevent some kind if process bottleneck from occuring.  The lamp scripts in the tables  I had issues with are quite heavy.  Dozens of lamp updates which are executed by calling a subroutine dozens of times.  Not knowing how the VP timers work I was curious if a timer can be fired while the last instance is still running so did a test and used a boolean variable to only let the timer do stuff if not currently running... and only one instance can run so that isn't an issue.

If would be nice to hear some results from other cab owners.

What is "Pinmame directdraw off tweak"?

[koadic]

What is "Pinmame directdraw off tweak"?

Go into the registry for each rom and change ddraw from 1 to 0, and you can add that into your default setup so it will be copied into any new rom's settings...

Inside RegEdit... HKCU->Software->Freeware->Visual PinMame->[rom name]

[JAM0]

What is "Pinmame directdraw off tweak"?

Go into the registry for each rom and change ddraw from 1 to 0, and you can add that into your default setup so it will be copied into any new rom's settings...

Inside RegEdit... HKCU->Software->Freeware->Visual PinMame->[rom name]

what's the benefit to doing that?

[koadic]

what's the benefit to doing that?

For some, it helps with stuttering and increases the frame rate

[joeyhza]

None. No benefit at all from what i can see. I've tried it and it makes no difference