Flak causing stutter

[Foxendown 0]

Having searched, I know I'm not the first person to have posted about this, but I am trying to understand why the flak effects cause my system to stutter. I've looked at obvious causes. The odd thing though is that this does not appear to an FPS issue. The stutter is really bad when the counter is showing a steady 75, which is around where my system normally is in FE. I've tried loads of different combinations in the settings both for my video card and the sim but it doesn't make any difference. I've tried playing with levels of sound acceleration in case that's the problem, but no go. Without flak, the sim runs as smooth as silk on my system.

 

My specs are Core 2 Duo E8400, Radeon 4670 1024 Mb, 2 Gb RAM, Soundmax on board sound (possibly a weak link I know but it generally performs well with my other sims). If anyone has any thoughts about this I'd be grateful. I was going to look at the *ini files for the flak effects next in the hope that it might be possible to adjust some settings.

 

While on the subject of flak, it seems completely harmless and it would be better if it killed now and again (not too often since at higher altitudes in WWI I believe I'm right in saying flak was pretty ineffective because of failure to understand deflection shooting). However as it often seems to be bursting around you (at ranges that should shred your aircraft) rather than behind you, that situation is not being modelled

[+Stary 2,427]

Have you patched your copy of FE? Flak used to cause stuttering, but one of early patches fixed it.

[Foxendown 0]

Have you patched your copy of FE? Flak used to cause stuttering, but one of early patches fixed it.

 

Fair question. I've got FE+EP+Nov'08 patch

[Foxendown 0]

Found the answer to my own problem-it was the sound. I had not tried one option-turning acceleration off completely. In control panel I set sound acceleration to "emulation only" and the sim is running smoothly even in the heavy flak barrages. It doesn't seem to degrade sound quality either. I have always assumed acceleration helped by taking the load off elsewhere but evidently not in this case.

[GreyCap 0]

Found the answer to my own problem-it was the sound. I had not tried one option-turning acceleration off completely. In control panel I set sound acceleration to "emulation only" and the sim is running smoothly even in the heavy flak barrages. It doesn't seem to degrade sound quality either. I have always assumed acceleration helped by taking the load off elsewhere but evidently not in this case.

 

Eh, that's interesting. I knew about turning off acceleration if there was some sound issues, but I never thought that it might help with performance.

[Foxendown 0]

What made me suspicious of the sound was the fact that the fraps reading was so high even when I had a slide show. There was a similar problem with an earlier version of IL2-you had to set acceleration to basic to stop the stuttering (that was with a SoundBlaster Live card). Most of the sims I've got work fine with full acceleration-in fact if you don't use it in IL2 now you get a nasty crackle. But in FE and MS FS2004 it seems to cause problems unless it's turned down or off.