Jittery screen during gameplay?

[godie howe's elbow]

I saw 1 post about this and somebody responded with 'it doesn't happen to me'.

During practice, qualifying and racing, sometimes the games 'skips' and it certainly screws up my flow. I find myself slamming on the breaks when it happens, hoping that I will be able to make up the positions lost.

Is it a matter of the game struggling with my computer specs or is it a more common occurrence with the game itself.

Thanks for any answers/suggestions you might have. It's a pretty cool game and I still find myself going back to it despite the jittery screen.

[Rory426]

This has been happening with me, not at first, but it starts happening if I play for more than a couple of races. I put it down to Windows Vista being awful on laptops though. If more people were having this problem I'd be more inclined to blaim the game, but in my case I think it's just Vista :(

I have one game that ran perfectly on my old laptop (XP) and it skips and stops and jumps all over the place on my much newer, higher spec laptop, which happens to be running Vista....:doh:

[gordie howe's elbow]

started a new career with Ferrari. I was using McClaren before.

More jitters during gameplay. Not unplayable but I've had more frustrations with the amounts of jitter with the new career I started (all other things the same).

[King Rob]

this happened to me quite a bit and occasionally still happens so i know how much it can screw things up, especially when your trying to break your lap record and end up on the grass in the middle of a hot lap. ;)

the thing that seems to have solved it for me is making sure my virus scanner isn't running scans and\or not having msn running in the background.

[Rory426]

If you're running Vista I can recommend turning off the indexing on your hard drive. This is pretty unnecessary and slows your system without warning.

[siread]

Yes, I think the jittering is caused by background tasks. I know if I get email notifications it really slows things down. I will look into this and see if there's any way to stop it happening or at least pause the game automatically for major skips.

One thing to try for Vista users...
Go to C:/Program Files/New Star Grand Prix/
Right click the New Star Grand Prix.exe
Click the Compatibility tab and check Disable Desktop Composition.

That used to help with NSS4 jitters, but I'm not sure if it will do the same for NSGP.

[montrealbob]

This happens to me, too - and it is most frustrating. The stutters are really bad and usually, I end up slamming into the wall and pissing off my pit crew. I've been racing in Monaco for the last two weeks because I force quit the program during the race.

I've shut down every other program I'm using, and still no luck. It never happens in the first and second races, but gets progressively worse. When I check the task manager, it turns out that NSGP is using anywhere between 80-90% of my cpu (Intel Pentium 1.86GHz). My drivers are updated, and I'm running XP.

It's totally frustrating, since I loved playing this game, but now it isn't worth it - I crash out every time I try to play career mode. Hopefully this can be fixed.

[montrealbob]

Right, so, I'm obviously not a computer whiz, right? So I don't really know what this means, but I just launched NSGP and chose the 16-bit vs. 32-bit display option (I think - I chose the lower of the two in any case) and it has made a world of difference. It's still eating 85%+ of my cpu, but is hardly stuttering at all.

[Cookie Monster]

This is why we need multithreading and multiprocessor support. I bet most people that have stuttering issues have dual-core cpus or quad-core cpus (I have a Pentium Dual Core T3200 @ 2.00ghz so I only get 2ghz and I should get more if we had multithreading or multiprocessor support)

[satchel]

I'm having issues, and I'm running a quad processor. I've closed as many background tasks as possbile, and I still get a regular stutter, once every 0.9 seconds or so (that might sound like it's ridiculously frequent, but it's really not). It's a very minor hitch, and I can ignore it if I concentrate, it doesn't really affect my gameplay, except that it's extremely annoying. I thought maybe the game was needing to access my hard drive too frequently, so I installed the game on another, virtually empty, drive, and it does the same thing. I defragged as well, so I don't think it's a hard drive issue. I've cleaned my computer, and tightened up everything as much as possible, and it's still happening.

Like I said before, it doesn't happen on my work computer, which is a much less capable machine, running Windows 2000. I know it's not my hardware. I don't think it's a problem with the game, either. I think it's some hidden background process. I've run programs called Autoruns and Process Explorer to try to figure out what's going on, but no luck. I have other sophisticated 3D games which work without a stutter, so I'm left wondering what the deal is.

[Manta]

when I play at home, on my vista 32 bit ocmp, it runs fine. Here, at work, I'm running a very standard and out dated pc with XP and it chops and skips during races, but not during practice when its just me on the track. I wouldnt complain about it though, I just assume its because of this older pc not being able to handle the game.

[siread]

I have made some changes (hopefully improvements) to the race engine so this problem might not be so much of an issue in v1.05. (Coming soon!)

[satchel]

Thanks for taking a look at this, Si. I just installed the game on a fresh install of Windows, and it's still doing it, on my machine. Really bizarre.

[Senninha]

Hi all

Have just updated from version 1.04 to 1.06b... The previous version worked well, but now I have updated to 1.06b the Jittering has started.
Have taken the advice of another thread and updated the drivers on the graphics card... hopefully that has fixed the problem