What has happened to my GPU performance?! help?

Hey guys, coming back to get some help for yet another situation that has me completely baffled. I started playin games again (dont laugh) haha on my pc, and noticed that the frame rates in every game i used to play on high settings have declined quite drastically and even stutter on settings with no AA, AF, and lowered resolution :violin:

now, in response I've

-defragmented my disks several times

-updated my GPU, and Audio drivers

-did repeat runs in my registry with tons of utilities

-Antivirus and Antispyware runs, everything shows negative

-went into the Nvidia panel and limited to single LCD, made everything application controlled, even switched to work for best performance rather than quality.

-killed tons of startup processes, even removed many programs I never used to free up disk space, all that runs is necessity


the games are the classic HL2, Doom3, and the original Fear. and with my system specs its obvious that there should be way more performance, im even seeing frame drops in the Media Player :x:

is there anything else I can do to restore my system to how it originally performed?! I find the only thing that really puts any sort of limit on my system is my 27 gigs of data but in todays terms thats minimal

should I start killing off services or something? I know half life 2 is notorious for their stuttering problems but I know I shouldnt be getting the same problems in my other games that used to run fine on high settings before, and it does so even without HL2 or steam on the computer.

help out an old friend once more?
much thanks in advance!!!


-mike

 

Does this stuttering start straight away or build up over a period of time?

 

i never thought it through but yeah it does

things usually start out fine and it just keeps getting worse

 

haha hey sniper

yes ive cleaned through temp files, ran chkdsk, im gonna try older drivers but the issue was happening with my old drivers as well, although a different sort might still work, ill get on that now.

ive disabled antivirus software too

lower resolutions arent helping much although i dont want to resort to measures like that, haha im starting to miss the quality I used to get

 

hey

uploaded some drivers from a year or two ago and they have helped a bit.

although the problem has eased down greatly, its still quite present

a steam update mentioned that the stuttering is caused by a video cards inability to filter through textures?

at random points in the game, I had the same problem before with the old drivers, I get this whole uhh, abstract art kind of thing going on, where things get very strange haha, dont know proper terminology for it however

anything else you guys can suggest?

a clean reinstallation of windows and reformatting cant happen, It'd be too much work to reload and install all of the music recording programs and software I have as well as backing all the files

 

You don't have a spare HDD laying around you can zap a clean install on just to run some tests?

EDIT: also have you checked that your GPU & CPU isnt fully clogged with dust? Could just be a temperature issue.

 

unfortunately I have no spare HD's around, nor computer systems that I can try to work it out by plugging into, there is some dust so I'll clean it out

-mike (zrock)