Can anyone explain this problem? Created 14 years ago2010-01-29 02:26:30 UTC by Soup Miner

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BAiDZ5uUpM
My TF2 client is "jumpy", and has been for as long as I can remember. My framerate and ping are both fine, but the game is riddled with these tiny jumps.
This only happens in TF2 as far as I can tell.

looks like choke to me.

net_graph 3. show results.

Does it happen in local games as well?

Definitely, but it gets worse with other players in a game.

Apparently this is a big problem with multicore rendering, and someone on the Steam forums told me to turn it off. Now it's calmed down.

I hate to say it, but alot of games just hate Multicore systems. That's mostly what's kept me away from a Quad core.

Never knew this, wonder why it happens with multicore.

I take it back, this wasn't fixed. At all.

It's just arbitrary as to when it's going to happen. And it's not choke.

I'm starting to think it's just my processor, but TF2 is the only game that this happens in.

I was having similar issues as well. I just went through some major hardware upgrades, so I'm not suffering from the issue anymore myself, but a crowd of my friends and I experienced the same exact issue that you're dealing with, all starting near the same time. We suspect it may have been some changes Valve made to TF2's engine through a Steam update, which would explain our issues seeming to occur at the same time, but I haven't seen anything in the update news that would point to that as an answer.

Enable showbudget and post some screenshots of its readout when you're experiencing the hitches. It looks a lot like the issues I was suffering from in this thread (and disabling multicore rendering didn't help): http://twhl.co.za/forums.php?thread=16773

I remember I had a similar problem when I changed motherboards, even on a totally brand new formatted hard disk with only windows + steam. Went back to my old motherboard and it was back to normal.

I am using an awfully cheap motherboard.

I don't think it's hardware related if you have the recommended specifications(and I do believe you have them). From what google says, at the beginning of 2009 multicore rendering was added to TF2. Well, maybe it's software related.
Or you can just try setting the affinity of tf2 to only one core and see what happens.

if you've got a spare motherboard and hard drive it's worth giving it a go, it'll take like 45 minutes to put the parts together, install windows and steam on the hard drive, copy the files over and get in game to test it. how long has this been happening anyway? can you trace it back to a particular event? (tf2 update, hardware change, etc)

I may have had that problem with my old PC as well.

can you trace it back to a particular event?

Not particularly, but I think I first noticed something was off when I watched my brother play on his PC and saw a subtle difference. I always thought it was his video card, since he was on an 8800GT and I had been using mine for a long time. But now that mine's a new 9800GT, I don't know.
If it somehow is my motherboard, there's a needed upgrade that I've been on the fence about lately.