Awkward problem regarding games and videos...

R

RYjet911

Geek Trainee
I'm guessing such a problem would fall under graphics cards...

Whenever I'm playing games, or watching a particularly high quality video, I will occasionally experience huge drops in frame rate. For example, I play STALKER: Clear Sky on lowest settings and get a 70-80 frame rate, but every minute or so the frame rate drops to about 10-15. It's not just Clear Sky either, all my newer games seem to do it, and even on my older games (1990s games) it's slightly noticeable.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, there doesn't appear to be much pattern to when they occur. I first thought it might be too many enemies on screen, but even during the most quiet parts of my games it occurs, and more active parts run fine sometimes.

I've suffered difficulty in finding a solution. I've recently reinstalled windows, and subsequently updated my graphics card's drivers to the latest version. Any help on why these sudden drops in frame rate occur would be helpful.

My Computer:
OS: Windows XP Professional
Processor: 2.8 GHz Pentium D
RAM: 1 GB
Video Card: ATI Radeon HD 3450
Motherboard: Asus P5L-MX
 
Sounds very much like a CPU problem. Almost sounds like your computer has background tasks that are affecting CPU load. If you pay close attention to the way the framerate behaves you can tell what is the issue.

-If the latency between your screen movement and your mouse increases durring the times when your framerate drops (if there is a delay between your mouse and your screen)- the issue is your Graphics Card.
-If the framerate simply drops but the mouse responds quickly it means that the CPU is skipping frames durring pre-rendering due to load. You see, your CPU pre-renders between 1 and 3 frames before it gives them to your GPU. You are always 3 frames behind on your visuals. If you GPU is slow then the time of lag for those 3 frames is longer since there are less frames processed per second. When your CPU skips frames, there is no lag. Simply missing "in between frames."

Possible causes:
-Antivirus Activity
-Program Updates
-Clocks, gadgets on your desktop. (less likely)
-Any software process that gets your CPU loaded.

Secondary Causes (more severe):
-Adware/Spyware Activity

Keep an eye on your CPU usage. Clean boot your system in msconfig. (RUN> msconfig) select minimal startup or basic startup or whatever the **** it's called I can't remember. (im on a library computer so those options are not available for me to even look at)
See how it behaves on those settings.

If nothing works, we'll continue looking for solutions in this thread.
 
I'm not sure about background processes, because I turn unnecessary programmes off before going on a game. I do not currently have an anti-virus programme, no updates were going on (And if they were the updates would probably have caused continuous lag until they were done) and there are no gadgets or anything on the desktop.

It's possible it could be due to adware and spyware... I'm not sure I browse much that would get them though. Can you recommend any decent and free ad/spyware removal programmes?

It's also difficult to tell if the mouse is moving at a different rate or not since all my games are first person, so I have to rely on a stationary cursor and everything else moves slowly.
It doesn't get affected when videos start to lag though, and certain sites like Black20 cause graphical lag in their videos for me.

BTW, also, can you tell me what the svchost.exe process is? I've always wondered why Windows needs so many of them, all taking up my precious RAM.
 
The Video/Mouse lag can be best diagnosed in FPS games. But don't worry about that.
Anti Spyware/Adware and Anti-Virus:

-Free anti-spyware/adware programs I can suggest are "Spybot - Search and Destroy" and "AVG" a free, dayly updated antivirus.

Regarding svchost.exe:

-The svchost.exe that run under "SYSTEM" or "LOCAL SERVICE" or "NETWORK SERVICE" are valid, there should be 1 to possibly 5 of them.
-The svchost.exe that run under your user name should be terminated. As far as I know they are illegitimate and consume system resources.

You should also terminate any process that resembles:
ms-290.exe
es-30-xg.exe
atd-12di.exe
(and I mean anything that looks like these because there is a ton of variety of them)
expolore.exe (not explorer.exe)

These are signs of a potential virus with my experiences.

Hope this helps.
 
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