ungulating fps!

mimizu

I used to be able to run high-graphic needs games on my computer. But, we had to get it completly erased, and had to reinstall everything. Now, I can't play WoW, sims, civ, PoD, or anything like that, because every few minutes, the fps go from around 60-80 to 2-5. It only does this on games. What is this and how can I fix it?

Edgie

Do you have your video drivers updated? If that doesn't work, make sure DirectX is updated and your sound drivers are updated.

mimizu

Yep, all of the above have been done.

Movitz

The specs would be nice to know. Do the FPS drop for a certain time period or do you have to restart the game to get it running normally again?

If you alt-tab and look at processes when the FPS drops, is there anything there going haywire? Is the HDD working its ass off?

Also, do a virus scan. Nowadays viruses are pretty subtle but there are a couple of them that might bog down the processor a lot.

JNighthawk

Vista? There were a bunch of hotfixes that you needed to get to make games remotely playable on Vista.

TychoCelchuuu

How long does it stay at the low FPS? If it drops there and sits there it might be overheating and throttling down or something.

Daenris

Definitely check and double check what processes you have running during the games. If it's happening across the board with all games, and if it's a regular/similar time interval for all the games it sounds like something is kicking on in the background that's grabbing cpu/memory resources away from the games. Could be a virus scan, something checking for updates, or a bunch of things really.

As mentioned overheating is another possibility, but I would expect that to be a bit less predictable and more variable across games depending on how much demand they're putting on the system. So if it's happening differently in different games this may be a likely culprit.

mimizu

vista, all games, the virus and hardware checks happen once daily, and it stays low for 5-9 mintes at a time, then returns to normal. Again, this only started after we had to reboot the computer.

Daenris

Well... you said it started happening after a reinstall, not just a reboot. So it's possible there's something that cropped up that wasn't running before.

Do a thorough spyware/malware/virus scan to make sure there's nothing on it.

Try installing something (Speedfan may work for you, may not) to measure your temps and see if the computer is drastically overheating during the games.

mimizu

I'm not really sure what the corret trem is, sorry. It was put back to 'new computer from the store without vista'. It's a HP Pavilion Media Center A1640n, but the video card is a fancier card than it came with (it was installed before we had it rebooted, and it worked great before.)

Movitz

Just to make sure here. When you said that you already updated to the latest drives for the video card, you mean that you went to nVIDIA or ATI and downloaded them right? There is often a CD bundled with video cards but this is not the latest drivers, not by a long shot.