Smoother Ball Flow

[mace]

Long post alert....

I've been hanging around the group commenting now and again since I started building my cab about six months ago. It's now mechanically complete and running three versions of VP, Future Pinball, Mame, FX2 and PBA. I've put in all the lights and hardware for force feedback and so on through a Ledwiz setup but I've not implemented this yet as I wanted the video running as smoothly as possible.

I'm a bit of a perfectionist so I've tried just about every combo of Nvdia settings, Video settings per program and compatibility settings per program too no matter how much I changed this around (and we are talking about three months of tinkering) I could not get the ball flow in VP and FP as smooth as I really wanted......until this weekend.

I'm running a three screen cab set up with a i3-4150 at stock, the DMD and backglass displays are handled by the Intel chip in my mobo and the main card a GTX560GT is handling the main screen, there 4Gb of very fast RAM and SSD's to hold the data. I have everything switched off in Windows 7 x64 so it only has to worry about pinball. Most of the wisdom on the site talks about disabling compatibility mode and there are several guide which indicate that this should be done in the individual program settings, I've found that on my set up this causes micro stuttering.

If you are suffering with the issue try the following:

- Back up your current settings first (always do this), the easy way is simply to use the snipping tool to grab snapshots of the various pages below

- Set your Nvidea settings to stock, then change max pre-rendered frames to '1', ensure that triple buffering is 'on' and leave vsync to 'use program settings'

- Enable Vsync in all VP and FP programs, in VP programs where available put '1' in the vsync and max pre rendered frames boxes . Then make sure that these programs compatibility settings do not have 'disable desktop composition' checked (you just need 'run as admin' and the correct 'run this program in compatabilty mode for....' selected) by right clicking their exe files.

- Right click 'My PC', click 'Advanced System Settings', click the 'settings' button under the Performance section uncheck everything other than 'Enable Desktop Composition Mode' and 'Use Visual Styles on Windows and Buttons', apply changes close the window then open it again and uncheck any settings that have rechecked themselves (there are usually two) to ensure that only the two settings above are all that is checked.

- (Optional) open the Service program by typing 'services.msc' in the run box under the Start menu and stop the 'Themes' and 'Desktop' entries then change their start properties to 'manual'

- Reboot and give things a try

On my set up this has resulted in nice smooth gameplay in FP, VP 921,991 & P5, PBA, FX2 and Mame (although the last three were never an issue). I'd like to stress that this is my set up only however I have built test tables in the programs, run frame rate lag analysis with help from the tech team at Microsoft where I work (note here: frame rates shown in the programs are not a measure of smooth video performance). Please note that this may mess up the older versions of VP - particularly VP8 in which case you will need to tick the 'disable desktop composition' settings in those programs compatibility settings.

This is the first post where I've tried to give advice and I hope that it helps someone, I've had tons of assistance from the folk here so I hope this may pay a little of that guidance back.

[tthurman]

Sounds like a really nice setup you've got. You should post some pics in the gamers rigs section

[mace]

Thanks, I will when its all ready....eventually :-)

In the mean time here's a short video clip I made for Phil who made the speaker panel: http://tinyurl.com/mnnqxhv ignore my wittering its a reasonable demo of Future Pinball and a Kinect set up.

[Draco1962]

Righteous pincab!

[tthurman]

3D looks amazing!

I'm surprised how well it picked up on your video, but it's clear as day. Nice cab, thanks for sharing

[noiseprisoner]

Thanks for the suggestions. The only system I had any ball stuttering on was VP10 and now it's 99% gone. Thanks again!

[noiseprisoner]

Awesome cab by the way!

[mace]

Thanks for the kind comments, I'll put a full cabinet post together in the rigs section too as there are some parts of the build that I would like to share, in the mean time this is my special Pinball/Rugby mode :-)

http://tinyurl.com/kl4wmdu

[Adultery]

Off topic, I thought this was spam for a new style of shorts! :-)

[Draco1962]

Off topic, I thought this was spam for a new style of shorts! :-)

Way off topic, buckaroo!