Windows 7 games lag! In all games, not just online.

[mhenri2200]

Hi,

My Windows 7 PC was working great about 2 weeks ago. I got a base fps of 40 or above on mid/high settings in games like Aion, Cabal Online, Battlefield Bad Company 2 (singel player), Half-Life 2 (singel player) etc. NOTE: the problems that I know people have with this kind of lag is with online games but I have this lag with both, singel player no internet required games and online.

Recently when I have played, I get a periodic lag. At startup everything works good, but after 5 minutes or more, the lag comes in. NOTE, again: the people having this kind of issue have the lag about 1-20 second but I have it 4-10 minutes and then the fps is high again (usually 35+).

"What do I mean periodic lag?"- I mean that every 5-10 minutes this horrible lag comes wich drops the fps to 2-10. And after 5-10 or more minutes the lag dissapears. And again after 5-10 minutes the lag appearsand so on... I have noticed that if my pc is on more then about 6 hours there is no lag anymore. :S

So, can anybody explain what is the problem?
I have thought of reinstalling my windows but its a lot of work to me since I have so many games and programs installed. Maybe there is a different way. Also I have AVG ani-virus (scanned viruses with it - none to be found exept false poisitves) and PC Tools firewall. Also defragmented my hdd and still no good.

My pc info:
MOBO: EliteGroup Computer Systems NFORCE6M-A
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 x2 dual core 5000+ 2,6GHz
RAM: 3GB (3x1GB)
GRAPHICS: Nvidia Geforce 9500GT 512mb
Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit
HDD 1: 320gb (real size 297gb)
HDD 2: 320gb (real size 297gb)

Looking forward in receiving a reply and than you in advance,
Henri

 

[folius]

Well a 9500GT isnt the newest or best card. Getting 40fps is pretty good but I am sure that you are bottlenecking somewhere. Either during loads or in large areas your card isnt powerful enough to handle the instant increased load and in turn makes your framerate drop.

Try sitting in the same area of HL2 (like Black Mesa East) and see if the lag happens just staring at a wall or somthing.

 

[mhenri2200]

Hello,

Thanks for the reply.

I know that it isn't the newest but its the cheapest that can run gta 4, bbc2 and some other games @ 35+fps med/high settings with decent cpu(not mine) and 3gb+ ram.

But I've been using my pc for 2 years by now (the original gpu of my pc was 8600gt and 1,5 years ago I bought 9500gt) and everything has been smooth and no lag issues has been present what so ever. Now all of a sudden the lag comes.

And about my gpu...so you are saying that my gpu can't run gta san andreas with high settings (w/o antialiasing) when I can play Bbc2 with med/high @35+fps.
I bet if I get Quake 3 arena and try to play it, it lags the same way...periodically. So maybe its not my cpu.

I guess I have no choice but to reinstall windows if there is no other option. x)

Thank you,
Henri

EDIT:
I'll try that HL2 wall thing but I still highly suspect that my Windows is just full of crap so a fresh install would do it maybe.

 

[benski]

Try uninstalling AVG.

 

[Johns7171]

3gb of ram on Windows 7 32bit is like 768mb of ram on Windows XP. Minimum ram requirements for XP is only 64mb while for Windows 7 32bit is 512mb. That's like two cars running the same speed but Windows 7 needs 800 horsepower to achieve the speed while XP needs only 100 horsepower. You basically need 8gb of ram to have decent gaming on Windows 7. Backward progress on MS part in order to get the most potential profit.

 

[mhenri2200]

3gb of ram on Windows 7 32bit is like 768mb of ram on Windows XP. Minimum ram requirements for XP is only 64mb while for Windows 7 32bit is 512mb. That's like two cars running the same speed but Windows 7 needs 800 horsepower to achieve the speed while XP needs only 100 horsepower. You basically need 8gb of ram to have decent gaming on Windows 7. Backward progress on MS part in order to get the most potential profit.

lol, I don't need that much. No game needs 8gb ram. If I disable aero theme, kill all unnecessary processe exept avg, pc tool firewall, poweriso and some other random stuff + system processes, my ram usage usually is 400-700mb. With aero theme it adds maybe a couple of hundred megs but not more. SO, in no way would I ever need 8gigs of ram, unless for example you have photoshop cs5, avg virus scan, battlefield bad comany 2, cod black ops and some other mmorpgs open. So, if u dont have like a 100 apps and games opened at the same time then you should be fine. If u have 4gb its enough. The important things here are the gpu and cpu and ofcorse in some part the bus speed of ram...but doesn't make that much of a difference. 8gb of ram for gaming would be great but OVERKILL. Just like 1500w PSU is overkill. Only servers need that much of ram and dedicated servers ofcorse eaven more.

For example my ram usage at the moment is 972mb+-. I have firefox opened, Aion Online opened and also anti-virus and firewall + aero theme and the usual crap.

But, please, correct me if I'm wrong.

 

[mhenri2200]

Try uninstalling AVG.

Ok, I'll try that.

In fact I suspect that is the source of evil.
I know that this could be wrong, but earlier when I had avg 2011 I had serious problems with Windows 7. Games started crashing and laging, Windows lagged etc. So when I downgraded to 9.x everything was working again. So, in conclusion maybe the 9.x avg has gone nuts. I'll try Avast, it seems a decent one. Or..no anti-virus app at all.

 

[benski]

I switched from AVG to Avira a few months ago, seems to be much less of a resource hog.

 

[mhenri2200]

Ok. I'm testing Avast at the moment and I'll see, if the lag appears. If it doens't, avg isn't the right choice for me.

 

[mhenri2200]

Ok. I'm testing Avast at the moment and I'll see, if the lag appears. If it doens't, avg isn't the right choice for me.

Ok... it started laging again..so avg wasn't the problem :S

My problem again step by step (just in case):
1)I come home and open my pc(lets say about 14:00), everything is ok - windows starting with the usual bootup time..
2)I surf the web for some time
3)@ ~15:00 I start playing
4)5-20 minutes later it starts laging
5)5-10 minutes it lags
6)now it doesn't lag for ~5minutes
7)lags
8)doens't
9)and so on...
10)eventually I get pissed off and press ALT+TAB and at the same time surf the web for ~3minutes then I go back to the game and everything is extremely smooth again
11)I repeat step 10...
12)@ ~21:00 the computer doesn't lag anymore
13)now I'm happy as I can play with no damn lag, everything works like smooth till I go to sleep (@ ~01:00) and shut my computer down.
14)next day I repeat all steps.

How lovely is my pc.

 

[gamerk316]

My guess is the 3GB of RAM. Sound to me like what is happening, is over time, you are filling up your memory, and when data needs to be moved to the HD to clear space for new data, the combination of an old CPU/GPU and low RAM is killing performance until enough space is cleared for data to be loaded.

 

[Herr_Koos]

3gb of ram on Windows 7 32bit is like 768mb of ram on Windows XP. Minimum ram requirements for XP is only 64mb while for Windows 7 32bit is 512mb. That's like two cars running the same speed but Windows 7 needs 800 horsepower to achieve the speed while XP needs only 100 horsepower. You basically need 8gb of ram to have decent gaming on Windows 7. Backward progress on MS part in order to get the most potential profit.

Not true at all. I installed 7 x64 on the same hardware as XP with only 2GB RAM, and it runs all my games flawlessly. I added an extra 2GB later of for the sake of StarCraft 2, which eats 1GB+ all by itself.

 

[folius]

Most games in Win 7, like BOs, has a memory cap which will never use much more than 1GB of your physical RAM while running. I wish I could dump some more of my ram into running Black Ops so it runs smoother, but you cant =(

 

[Herr_Koos]

Most games in Win 7, like BOs, has a memory cap which will never use much more than 1GB of your physical RAM while running.

Never heard of this before. Source?

 

[mhenri2200]

My guess is the 3GB of RAM. Sound to me like what is happening, is over time, you are filling up your memory, and when data needs to be moved to the HD to clear space for new data, the combination of an old CPU/GPU and low RAM is killing performance until enough space is cleared for data to be loaded.

3GB is quite enought to play some last year and older games as well as this year games. But as I had said the lag wasn't only with the "big" games like bbc2 and others but with simple old games also. And as I said before, my pc worked without any lag for about 2 years untill now.

Most games in Win 7, like BOs, has a memory cap which will never use much more than 1GB of your physical RAM while running. I wish I could dump some more of my ram into running Black Ops so it runs smoother, but you cant =(

Maybe

Uninstall avast. Its junk use security essentials its light. You probably received a few junk updates from MS. Check what it is and remove it

Well uninstalled AVG and installed Avast and as of now there hasn't been much lag now lately, BUT..
now my problem is turned over. Before when I opened my pc it started laging instantly after I stared playing, but now it doesnt lag for about 5+ hours and then the lag starts again. Strange..

 

[gamerk316]

Most games in Win 7, like BOs, has a memory cap which will never use much more than 1GB of your physical RAM while running.

Lies.

Yes, there is a physical limit of 2GB [well, slightly less actually, due to overhead] for ANY 32-bit application, even in 64-bit versions of windows, due to the old 2GB Address Space limitation that affects all 32-bit apps. Hence, why when you open Task Manager, you NEVER see a 32-bit application access more then 2GB of memory at any one time. [Hence, why I laugh every time Tom's does a test of 64-bit OS' using 32-bit applications. ]

Everything the OP describes appears to be common symptoms of paging; runs fine, then a sudden slowdown [reading data from HD to RAM], then running fine for a time. Could also be overheating, or a dieing HD.

 

[photonboy]

RAM cap:

1) yes, I agree that all games have a maximum amount of RAM they will use, regardless of how much you have. It's also true that most modern games use around 1GB. The MOST I've seen (and I've tested about 30 modern games) is 1.8GB.

You can EASILY see how much RAM a game uses either by opening Task Manager and looking at the Process memory use for that game, or else seeing how much the RAM usage drops once the game is closed.

2) Properly written games should buffer ALL the needed data for the area of a level you are in, then prebuffer the next area BEFORE you get to it (and move out of memory that area you were just in).

Unfortunately games don't do that as well as they could. They're a lot better now. I just played HL2 again; remember the speed boat that keeps pausing as the next area is loaded? There's no excuse for that kind of thing to happen now.

Consoles:
Console ports have the problem of being designed for the hardware of consoles and when they are ported they often don't take the extra time to do it properly with enough RAM or whatever. Heck, the PS3's been out since 2006 and there's only about three games that properly use the full PS3 potential. Why many PS3 games stutter is because it was much harder to optimize for the full PS3's architecture. Instead, they ignored certain parts of the PS3 to make the XBOX->PS3 conversion easier. Unfortunately, when they only used those parts of the PS3 hardware the processing power was lower. Properly utilized the PS3 has more processing potential.

Both the PS3 and XBOX probably regret not choosing more RAM in the design (oddly the PS3 has less; you'd think since it came out AFTER and they knew XBOX->PS3 porting would be common they'd choose similar memory specs. Ah, live and learn.)

 

[scorpinot]

You shouldn't have bought the bootleg version of Windows 7 Ultimate. If only you could install windows updates...

 

[mhenri2200]

Did I meantion that DURING THE LAGS the System Idle Process is around 90 and above, sometimes 99.

Btw, I have Windows 7 Ultimate and I CAN update my os and its up to date as of now.

 

[scorpinot]

Time to format your harddrive.

 

[mhenri2200]

Time to format your harddrive.

Good call. I think I will try that as soon as I get a backup done.

By the way, when I'll reinstall my windows, I would have anyways formated my hdd before installation because I have 2 hdd's. One is a backup hdd. Anyways I have A LOT of data so it isn't going be easy because I need to sort all things out not just copy them to my other hdd arbitrarily, otherwise I'll be in a serious mess.

 

[ralalande]

Well a 9500GT isnt the newest or best card. Getting 40fps is pretty good but I am sure that you are bottlenecking somewhere. Either during loads or in large areas your card isnt powerful enough to handle the instant increased load and in turn makes your framerate drop.

Try sitting in the same area of HL2 (like Black Mesa East) and see if the lag happens just staring at a wall or somthing.

He needs a 9500GT w/1gb
no lag with i5 and 9500gt

Have lag on AMD w/512 mb video card

 

[awelles]

What's your hard drive?

I can make a similar problem go away by disabling APM on my Western Digital.

Install CrystalDiskInfo
Function > Advanced Feature > AAM/APM
Slide APM to the right (value FEh), hit enable
Can now close CrystalDisk

Problem goes away until next boot. Give it a shot. Good luck.

 

[vitja]

it's has nothing to do with hard drive, it has nothing to do with RAM and even more - it has nothing to do with Antivirus! the problem is in updates that come automatically! i have the same damned problem. my PC was working fine for 3 years, so there is no any problem connecting with PC. last week i reinstalled Windows (i have W7 32bit) because it got too stuffed and so. and i realised that i have the same problem you described.
every game i enter, i can play for 3-5 minutes and then it just slows down. it doesn't mess up, it just becomes 3 times slower. every game. and my PC doesn't overwork. i turn off game and PC lags a little bit, but it isn't anything bad, no overworking.
then i realised that first 2-3 hours with new Windows i could play normal, UNTIL first updates came. the problem is there.
try to re-install Windows and turn off automatic updates or just find out which update exactly messes up your pc.
i am no computer genius, i'm just a nerd, but my pal told me that it's somekind update with last numbers of 33 in it which can block your pc from stuff like games.
yesterday i re-installed Windows again, but goddamn, i forgot to turn off automatic updates and it again installed it automatically after first restart. so tomorrow i will re-install it third time and first thing i will do - will turn off automatical updating.
the problem is only in that thing, believe me! i tried everything. i was changing drivers, i was downloading programms for proper working of video card, i was searching for solutions in internet, i did pretty much everything you can do in such case and no progress. so the only logical outcome is updates, because, i remind once more, first hours untill updates came to my pc, i could play stuff normally.

once again, im no pro, so i cant use your funny language and explain so that it would be pretty understandable. and im sorry for my bad english, i just caught cold.

 

[whybrow]

i have this exact same problem, i have had win 7 64 bit on for well over a year now, i suspect its just easier to reinstall windows. My games are fine, but like you said maybe every 10 minutes or so i get about 4-5 seconds of lag, like its loading massive amounts of data into the ram or something, then its all fine again. It has to be something with windows, maybe a update like you said because my pc was fine for a long time before this happened. And it has nothing to do with hardware being too slow etc like you said. I have a core 2 duo E6750 4gb RAM, Radeon 4870 1GB and my games and windows drive is 2 x WD Veliciraptors in RAID 0. Theres no way thats too slow. i think i might just reinstall windows unless someone has found a true answer to this.