- Sep 5, 2009
- 7
- 0
- 18,510
I've just recently gone back to my old PC, and after the silky-smooth behaviour of my newest gaming machine I'm realising that this older machine has always been plagued by weird lag spikes. Every video game I play just gets these random drops in FPS. Sometimes games are smooth, sometimes they are unplayable, and I have no idea what causes it. It happens even in 2D games that shouldn't tax the system at all, and sometimes even in fullscreen Youtube videos.
Today I started playing Action Henk, which has an amazing configuration tool that updates graphics changes in realtime and shows the FPS performance on the screen. The first time I ran it I got ~80 FPS, silky smooth, perfect performance. The second time, I got this behaviour:
http://gfycat.com/TemptingDazzlingBilby
If you watch the ticker at the top or the spinning globe you can clearly see the lag spikes happen even without the FPS meter.
I recorded this with Bandicam which reduced the peak FPS, but even when I'm getting 80 FPS without Bandicam, I still get FPS drops down to below 20 FPS, and when playing the game, some frames might lag for half a second or more, so it's really unplayable.
I'm just wondering how I can investigate this to determine the cause. I have a background in IT, so I know how to figure things out, but I just don't know where to look with this.
Basic system info is:
Intel Q9450 CPU
8GB DDR2 RAM
Gigabyte HD4850 GPU
Here's a CPU-Z system information report:
http://pastebin.com/74qpvMWm
Today I started playing Action Henk, which has an amazing configuration tool that updates graphics changes in realtime and shows the FPS performance on the screen. The first time I ran it I got ~80 FPS, silky smooth, perfect performance. The second time, I got this behaviour:
http://gfycat.com/TemptingDazzlingBilby
If you watch the ticker at the top or the spinning globe you can clearly see the lag spikes happen even without the FPS meter.
I recorded this with Bandicam which reduced the peak FPS, but even when I'm getting 80 FPS without Bandicam, I still get FPS drops down to below 20 FPS, and when playing the game, some frames might lag for half a second or more, so it's really unplayable.
I'm just wondering how I can investigate this to determine the cause. I have a background in IT, so I know how to figure things out, but I just don't know where to look with this.
Basic system info is:
Intel Q9450 CPU
8GB DDR2 RAM
Gigabyte HD4850 GPU
Here's a CPU-Z system information report:
http://pastebin.com/74qpvMWm
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