Stuttering

My FPS is very smooth yet every couple of seconds the game freezes for a fraction of a seconds. Everything simply stops moving, but the music keeps playing and the mouse is movable. I can't find anything that triggers it. It seems to occur at random moments yet frequent enough to seriously hinder gameplay.

So far I've:

• set all graphics options to mininum settings
• played in windowed mode
• deframented my hard drive
• forced v-sync through ACC
• disabled Crossfire
• messed around with various priorities and core affinities for Spartan.exe in taskmanager
• checked CPU and RAM usage, all looks fine
  
• checked core temperatures, they range between 50C and 65C (which is quite acceptable if I'm not mistaken

My computer should be more than capable of running this, especially with all graphics turned down. Suggestions anyone?
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Have you checked for graphics card driver updates recently? Have you conducted all Windows system updates that are availible?

What graphics card do you have?

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I've just finished updating Windows and I picked up the latest drivers from AMD (I have two Mobility Radeon HD 5870 video cards). Sadly, the problem persists. I´ve also tried disabling my anti-virus software (Avast), but that didn't do it either.

Two oddities that I've experienced and that may be helpful in the diagnosis:

• Simply running the Launcher won't start the game as the big 'Play' button is grayed out, running the launcher as administrator solves this
• The game takes quite long to start after clicking the 'Play' button. For perhaps half a minute nothing happens before it actually starts.
• There seems to be some minor screen tearing near the top of the screen when scrolling across the map, even with v-sync on. It's not nearly as bad as the tearing I get when I disable v-sync though.

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Do you run with any advanced Catalyst Control Center settings for your AMD card?

Running the game as an administrator will fix the other issue you described.

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What would these advanced settings be exactly?

Kudos for the speedy replies!

|||Actually i have the same problem! The game fps is real smooth for 20 seconds or so, then for 15 seconds the fps dropsand gameplay is real slow,:( and then its normal for 20 seconds again. Very annoying and it spoils the game for me. Are there more people with this issue?|||Do you guys have a fast hard drive? I have a slow one and that caused theoccasionalstuttering for me. Until prefetch got itfiguredout.|||What do you mean with 'prefetch'?|||

TiniKeet wrote:What do you mean with 'prefetch'?

It's a Windows 7 service that detects files you use often and loads them into memory (RAM) while the computer is idle so they can be quicklyaccessed.|||Tnx. I think my harddrive is fast enough. My laptop is about 3 years old now, and it exceeds the specs for this game. Is it possible to attach files @ this forum?I want to upload t 'Dxdiag' file..|||

Guys, this maybe is the "Throttling" effects: your video card is reaching a too high temperature and, for cool down a bit, it will drop his frequency since temperature will go down.

This game has some problem with GPU Burst: i'm discussing it in mine thread (http://forums.ageofempiresonline.com/forums/100759/ShowThread.aspx#100759).

You can check if you have a throttling with some monitoring tools (I suggest RivaTuner for that, it can monitor with a graph temperature and clock of Core and Memory over the time, so you will get immediatly what happens).