11 February, 2008

Recently pruchased a nvidia 8600GT GPU card. I thought this card would play Unreal Tournament with little problem, however I was mistaken. Installation was easy enough, but when it came time to fire up UT, the whole game would stutter and severe frame skip.

Just before I had tried to play UT, I had installed the free game that came with the video card, Tomb Raider Anniversary. I realised that this dropped a spyware/rootkit on my PC, the dreaded Securom. I initially thought this maybe to blame, so I followed these steps to nuke it from my system. Still no good fortune in UT so I decided to reinstall.

Loaded the OS, drivers, then UT, still stutters and frame skip. Bummer.

I had resorted to scouring the web and found many with this issue on the nvidia 8X00 series of GPU's, while playing any game based on the Unreal 2 engine. I had conceided that I may never play UT again till a friend of mine gave me a great tip. After explaining the issue, and telling him my system specs, (AMD Athlon 64 X2, 2Gb RAM, nVidia GeForce 8600GT, etc) he gave me a little .exe from AMD which is said to help my problem. I installed it and voila, ALL ISSUES ARE FIXED AND UT RUNS PERFECTLY. I am a VERY happy person to say the least. (Thanks DaveH)

Here is the AMD Blurp:

http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalResources/0,,30_182_871_9706,00.html

AMD Dual-Core Optimizer - The AMD Dual-Core Optimizer can help improve some PC gaming video performance by compensating for those applications that bypass the Windows API for timing by directly using the RDTSC (Read Time Stamp Counter) instruction. Applications that rely on RDTSC do not benefit from the logic in the operating system to properly account for the affect of power management mechanisms on the rate at which a processor core's Time Stamp Counter (TSC) is incremented. The AMD Dual-Core Optimizer helps to correct the resulting video performance effects or other incorrect timing effects that these applications may experience on dual-core processor systems, by periodically adjusting the core time-stamp-counters, so that they are synchronized.

The .exe is AMD Dual-Core optimiser.

Best Wishes.