MarcusFlintlock on 28/1/2021 at 17:36
Hey all.
I've been having this issue for a while now and I'm starting to get really sick of it.
Essentially, for whatever reason, fan missions for Thief Gold have a kind of "horizontal stuttering" for me. I say "horizonal" because at least to me, it doesn't seem like the kind of issues you get when you turn off vsync in cam_ext. Essentially, when moving forwards and/or at diagonals, the screen will (seemingly at random intervals) jut to the left or right for a split second. This happens a lot when jumping as well—the screen jitters a little, just enough to drive me mad. I obviously thought this was some kind of vsync issue, so I tried messing with cam_ext, but nothing has worked. I tried changing all the kinds of vsync, different kinds of single display modes, enabling, disabling, and/or changing the framerate cap (I've a 59hz monitor), running the game in windowed mode, enabling / disabling "d3d_disp_limit_gpu_frames 1 1" and the same with only one '1', phys_freq, and use_hi_res_timer.
Nothing has worked.
The most annoying thing is that Thief 2 works perfectly fine, even with NecroAge enabled or disabled, but Gold does this regardless of whether I've disabled all visual mods or not. And furthermore, the base game works perfectly fine, both with and without NecroAge! I really want to know how to fix this or if it's even possible, because I'm currently playing through the 1 Million Units contest right now and wanna be able to rate all of them!
Anyone got any idea what the difference between Thief 2 FMs and Gold might be? Or why there's no stuttering in base-game but there is in FMs?
Yandros on 29/1/2021 at 04:19
As this doesn't appear to have anything to do with mods, I've moved it to Thief Gen.
trefoilknot on 29/1/2021 at 15:36
No idea. But (since NewDark) I've never had an issue that a clean install couldn't fix. Have you tried that? It's the modern equivalent of "pull out the cartridge and blow on it." It just works :)
MarcusFlintlock on 29/1/2021 at 17:11
Quote Posted by trefoilknot
No idea. But (since NewDark) I've never had an issue that a clean install couldn't fix. Have you tried that? It's the modern equivalent of "pull out the cartridge and blow on it." It just works :)
Tried and it didn't work. Full uninstall from Steam and then deleting the folder too. It doesn't seem to be a modding problem either (sorry Yandros), since I use AngelLoader and have the "disable all mods" checkbox, which verifiably works on things like NecroAge.
If it helps, I'm using TFix and during installation, I check every option apart from the legacy engine. This time, I even disabled anti-aliasing to see if somehow this 20-year-old game was having performance troubles on a mid-range PC. But that didn't help.
lordhern on 5/2/2021 at 00:01
have you checked your video drivers? I used to have problems using my older machine with it's ancient ATI video card - i had to use a specific build to get unreal engine to work and reboot to a different build to run system shock and thief gold.
on a random side note have you tested your video card ram?
MarcusFlintlock on 5/2/2021 at 17:30
Quote Posted by lordhern
have you checked your video drivers? I used to have problems using my older machine with it's ancient ATI video card - i had to use a specific build to get unreal engine to work and reboot to a different build to run system shock and thief gold.
on a random side note have you tested your video card ram?
I have an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970, which is from 2010 (roughly). If it's an issue of drivers, it'd probably be an issue with the drivers being too new then too old.
As for video card RAM, it has 4 GB. I assumed this would be enough for a decade-old game but maybe not? Or does "testing" your video card RAM mean something different?
ZylonBane on 5/2/2021 at 17:52
Quote Posted by MarcusFlintlock
being too new then too old
Happens to all of us.
lordhern on 6/2/2021 at 09:13
it sounds like you tried all the software stuff so look at hardware.
"tested your video card ram" means using a boot testing disk that can test the ram of your addon cards (video card itself) - it can look for errors in ram and sometimes even diagnose 2d and 3d accelerators. Before you ask, I don't remember the name of the software I used fifteen years ago when I was troubleshooting a machine that had flaky video ram which caused 2d acceleration problems.
pending that, have you tried changing your motherboard speed? or undeclocking your CPU and/or GPU?
MarcusFlintlock on 3/4/2021 at 00:54
Okay, so I have no idea how I did this, but the problem is (mostly) gone now. Annoyingly, it's gone after I've pretty much taken a two-month break from Thief.
The solution? Somewhat unclear, considering how many options I messed with, but all I did this time was 1) uncap the framerate, and 2) enable "use_hi_res_timer," both of which I could've sworn I'd done.
There's still some minor "juddering" but it's WAY easier to ignore now, especially if I turn off NecroAge. So yeah, time to actually enjoy Thief Gold!
