HELP!! -- random FPS drop/lag in most of my games

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Tom's Hardware > Forum > Games General > PC Gaming > HELP!! -- random FPS drop/lag in most of my games

HELP!! -- random FPS drop/lag in most of my games

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Hi I just build a brand new PC (myself) about 2 weeks ago and when i play a game like TF2, CS:S, Gmod and TestDrive Unlimited it runs smoothly with a high FPS then periodically like every minute it drops to 1FPS for about 5-10 seconds and then goes smooth again, and keeps on repeating this. I have replaced everything in my PC except for my CPU and still does the same thing. I dont get it because when i play crysis it stays at a steady 20-30 FPS, even thou i meet all the system requirements by far. I have tried updating all the drivers for my GPU, Motherboard (BOIS too) and CPU (i think it was the right driver but the CPU was listed under Mobile CPU rather than Desktop). I have tried to set the affinity of the of the game to one CPU under Task Mgr but still no luck. I dont want to reinstall vista again as i have already done that 3 times and dont want to transfer all my files to a backup HDD again!! :fou:

Can someone please help me I really want to play these games

==specs==
500W PSU
Asus M2N-MX SE motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+
2GB Ram
Ati HD 2600 Pro DDR2 512
320 GB HDD
Windows Vista Ultimate

Message edited by nickazg on 05-03-2008 at 05:42:31 AM

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Do this. Open perfmon and set counters for CPU and memory utilization. Then monitor hard disk read and writes/sec. Then play a game for a while. Write down on a piece of paper what time on your system clock the slow downs occur then examine the perfmon data during those times.

------------------------------ Exchange Engineer - Why is it that when DNS goes down everyone thinks it's my exchange server?

Oh ya, email is the heart of work.
Reply to boonality

Ha y thanks for getting back so quick.
I did a report and at the time when it went all laggy and had a low FPS the CPU went to 100% and everything else looked normal but the report said " your system is experiencing excessive paging because the available memory of the system is low" Ha??. I have more than enough RAM to run this game as it only requires lyk 1GB. it said it used 1.4Gb of ram (83%) on the game and said it had 353Mb of RAM remaining .

Reply to nickazg

Is there another process that's suddenly using a load of RAM?

An updater? (apple, adobe, java etc.)
Anti-virus?
Email checker? (gmail notifier etc.)

Anything like this can effect a game, try disabling as much as you can before playing.

And most new games will probably run better on 2 cores than one.

Reply to mi1ez

No i dont have any anti virus software I only have the windows firewall and I turn off my email aswell. The only process that are taking up some RAM is windows explorer, desktop window manager and all those system things which i end (they only take up about 30mb at the most for some of them).

And i Have tried play my games on both individual cores (only using one core) and also both cores (the default) but no difference to the problem.

Reply to nickazg

did u update ur video card drivers?

------------------------------ Asus M2N-E mobo, 4 gb ddr2 800 mhz ram, Amd Athlon 64 X2 4600+, Western Digital 500 gb hard drive, Thermaltake 700 watt psu, EVGA 8800gt
Reply to db4s

I updated the catalyst control center which apparently has the GPU driver in it aswell but i will download just the drive now

Reply to nickazg

If you're running windows vista you're losing nearly 1gb of ram to it straight away- it is ram hungry! Check in windows task manager and it will tell you exactly how much available ram you really have to use on your system after vista has stolen it. This would explain why you're cpu maxed out to try and make up for the lack of 'available' ram during the game. If I am right you may need to go to 4gb of ram. Vista 32bit will only see about 3gb of that altogether but at least you'll end up with about 2gb of real, available ram for you're games after vista steals about 1.2gb. Vista 64 will see up to at least 8bg of ram or even more I believe but beware 64bit did have some problems with some games but sp1 may have fixed them.

Reply to gerardxfire

But whats weird is that my PC can play crysis fairly smooth (15 - 30 FPS) with no periodic lag and crysis is the most demanding game out there. But with Team Fortress 2, which is not as demanding as crysis has periodic lags at (1 FPS for about 5-10 sec) . Now how do you explain that ??

Reply to nickazg

When I first started reading your post I initially thought about the hard disk being too slow due to bad drivers or a defective drive. But once I started reading I thought about the possibility about your system not having enough memory. But then I only just recently upgraded to 4GB from 2GB on Vista Ultimate X64 and even when I had 2GB’s of memory I never had the problems you described.

But one thing I was sure of making good was the page file. That’s the file on your hard disk that your system uses as memory when you run true memory runs out. If that’s slow then you will experience problems like your describing.

What you have to remember is that even though your not using all your systems memory your computer is still utilizing your page file for non-essential files. Games do also use this page file, and depending on how the game is coded it might use it more than others if at all.

It could be a simple fact that Crysis is simply better programmed and loads everything you need on to the systems memory and keeps everything that could potentially slow down your system if loaded too slow off your page file. I would check how fast your hard disk can run by using programs such as Sisoft Sandra to benchmark it.

Also check that your page file is set a large enough allocation, it should generally be twice the size of your memory. For instance if you have 2GB’s of ram set your page file to 4096MB’s.

Just so you can compare, I had my page file set to 4096MB’s for both the min and max size. I also had the page file running from a hard disk that was not running windows and was not used for loading games. It was a raid0 array and would read at 108MB per second. I would say if your hard disk reports anything round about the 10MB per second mark then you have an issue, a healthy hard disk with healthy drivers should run at around 40MB per second or more.

------------------------------ "Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence."
Reply to cafuddled

Yea i upped my page file to 4096MB and looked at my HDD which was at 54MB sec and 14ms access time and it still lags. I am so annoyed about this!! I have no idea what it could be. My last system (which was 2.5Ghz celeron, 1.5 GB ram, 100GB hdd, Radeon 9600 pro 256MB and on Vista), it could play Team Fortress 2 and Counter Strike Source steady at about 15-25 FPS without it doing this lag thing. So could it be something to do with the software side like drivers?? I have updated my driver for my GPU and system BIOS - I can't find a vista update driver for my CPU or Motherboard if there is any. I will try to play these games on my dualboot XP to see if will but i would prefer to keep all my games under vista reather than XP because of the hassel etc.

Reply to nickazg

I just played it on Xp and it wasnt any better if not worse. When i payed it did the lag thing, then after about 5 min it froze then my PC reset.

Reply to nickazg

Hay thanks to everyone who help. I found the problem it was my motherboard, it wasn't good enought to handle my other components. I replaced my MB with a higher quality one, reformatted and reinstalled Vista and all the drivers, played my game and it works thike a charm =). yay finally a PC to play decent games on

Message quoted 1 times

Reply to nickazg

Good to hear. I haven't been around after my first post sorry. That is a strange problem. Must have been a horrible bus layout or something.

------------------------------ Exchange Engineer - Why is it that when DNS goes down everyone thinks it's my exchange server?

Oh ya, email is the heart of work.
Reply to boonality

[quotemsg=598243,1,324119]Hi I just build a brand new PC (myself) about 2 weeks ago and when i play a game like TF2, CS:S, Gmod and TestDrive Unlimited it runs smoothly with a high FPS then periodically like every minute it drops to 1FPS for about 5-10 seconds and then goes smooth again, and keeps on repeating this. I have replaced everything in my PC except for my CPU and still does the same thing. I dont get it because when i play crysis it stays at a steady 20-30 FPS, even thou i meet all the system requirements by far. I have tried updating all the drivers for my GPU, Motherboard (BOIS too) and CPU (i think it was the right driver but the CPU was listed under Mobile CPU rather than Desktop). I have tried to set the affinity of the of the game to one CPU under Task Mgr but still no luck. I dont want to reinstall vista again as i have already done that 3 times and dont want to transfer all my files to a backup HDD again!! :fou:

Can someone please help me I really want to play these games

AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+

Dude i have the exact same CPU and having the same problem with game, it drops to 5-10 fps from 100 all the time. I think we both just found a solution..... hmm and i was about to change my mobo

Reply to gwiny

Could also be a overheating graphics card. I had the same problem this weekend but it got progressively worse until I released the gfx fan wasn't on (the monitoring software could have informed me that the card was running over 128 degrees celius). Afterwards its on now.

Reply to JDocs

Hi guys,

I'm experiencing exactly the same issue. After days of searching the web and trying everything, I stumbled upon this thread:

http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.asp [...] uage=en-us

I have Asus M2N-VM DVI and Athlon X2 64 6000+. Then, suddenly, I found out there are 2 (TWO!) different versions of my CPU:

1. 89-Watt one, made using 65nm technology (SOI) with total 1024kb of L2 cache

and

2. 125-Watt one, made using 90nm technology with total 2048kb of L2 cache

I checked my CPU again with CPU-Z app and it showed that I have the second version (2048kb of L2 cache, 1024kb for each core). Then I checked supported CPUs list on Asus website, and it turned out that M2N-VM DVI mobo supports only the first (89W) CPU type! And that is it! That's where those lags and all the issues come from!

Now that I know the issue, I'm going to buy a new CPU, preferably a more powerful one, but this time I will triple-check whether it is supported by my motherboard.

I hope my findings will help the rest of you looking for an answer. Good luck!

Reply to keniled

nickazg wrote :

Hi, i am having the exact same problem and i have the same set up as you did, i was hoping you could say which motherboard you upgraded to?

Reply to Provinos

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HELP!! -- random FPS drop/lag in most of my games