FPS drop at cretain moments.

[Synk]

Hi everyone, I'm having weird problem. I'm playing a FPS game called Combat Arms and I have a problem. The game support couldn't help me so i decided to ask here. In this game there are animations where you can't control your character, and roulette at the end of each game where i get bonus items 0.when these appear i get huge FPS drop and i wonder what could be causing it. I have tried to close every useless process running with the game, tried turning off the anti-virus and the firewall, didn't help. I tried to play on lowest settings, still the same problem. I scanned my PC for viruses and malware, nothing was found. I have recorded 2 videos to make the problem clear:
video 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHixSLhV2EY
video 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDm5zdlj3XA (No need to watch after 3:40)
I have marked the laggy moments in the description, but i recommend you to watch some gameplay so you can understand the difference.

 

[hapkido]

What are your PC specs?

 

[Synk]

What are your PC specs?

I forgot to mention that i have played this game 2 years with the same PC, but this problem appeared before 1 month.
PC specs:
Windows XP SP3
Petium DualCore E5200 @ 2,5 GHz
3,25GB of RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT (512)
I have also updated my video card drivers.

 

[iam2thecrowe]

if the problem has appeared onl;y recently, it could be a game update that has negatively affected performance, overheating of something due to dust clogging the heatsink, a faulty component, or data corruption rectified by formatting your hard drive and clean install of wondows and the game. I would suggest first step opening your case and cleaning the dust from your cpu and graphics card heatsinks. compressed air works but you can blow it out with your breath. check temps with hwmonitor.

 

[Synk]

One more thing i forgot to mention. Sometimes (once every week) i don't get this lag. I mean, i log in - no lag, i restart the game - no lag, but when i restart the computer the lag is back. Today is one of these days. Right now i don't have any lag. Can i do something to find the problem? I have checked the processes running and there is no difference.

 

[Synk]

if the problem has appeared onl;y recently, it could be a game update that has negatively affected performance, overheating of something due to dust clogging the heatsink, a faulty component, or data corruption rectified by formatting your hard drive and clean install of wondows and the game. I would suggest first step opening your case and cleaning the dust from your cpu and graphics card heatsinks. compressed air works but you can blow it out with your breath. check temps with hwmonitor.

I cleaned the dust but it didn't help. i have everest ultimate edition to check temps, but they don't change when i get the fprs drops. What's next? Formatting my hard drive?

 

[hapkido]

You'll want to monitor your CPU and GPU usage. This is really easy with two monitors but still do-able with one. I use Coretemp for monitoring my CPU and Afterburner for the GPU, but the built-in Windows tools should suffice for monitoring the CPU.

Play the game as you normally would, and as soon as you see FPS drops, check your usage levels (you'll have to alt-tab out of the game if you have one monitor). I would suspect you'll see either your CPU or GPU pegged at 100% usage. If it's the GPU, you can try lowering graphics settings in-game to see if that helps. If it's the CPU, you may actually want to raise settings a bit -- this seems counter-intuitive but it can shift some of the workload to the GPU freeing up resources on the CPU.

That's how I would troubleshoot to see if I had a problem at least. It's possible messing with settings will have no effect. If you aren't seeing 100% usage on either your CPU or GPU during the FPS drops, you may want to consider formatting your harddrive and doing a fresh install.

 

[Synk]

You'll want to monitor your CPU and GPU usage. This is really easy with two monitors but still do-able with one. I use Coretemp for monitoring my CPU and Afterburner for the GPU, but the built-in Windows tools should suffice for monitoring the CPU.

Play the game as you normally would, and as soon as you see FPS drops, check your usage levels (you'll have to alt-tab out of the game if you have one monitor). I would suspect you'll see either your CPU or GPU pegged at 100% usage. If it's the GPU, you can try lowering graphics settings in-game to see if that helps. If it's the CPU, you may actually want to raise settings a bit -- this seems counter-intuitive but it can shift some of the workload to the GPU freeing up resources on the CPU.

That's how I would troubleshoot to see if I had a problem at least. It's possible messing with settings will have no effect. If you aren't seeing 100% usage on either your CPU or GPU during the FPS drops, you may want to consider formatting your harddrive and doing a fresh install.

I tried this and and the results really surprised me: The CPU and GPU usage are both very low at the laggy moments ingame,but it's choppy. Here are some screenshots:
http://store.picbg.net/pubpic/34/14/e6fea753da2c3414.jpg
http://store.picbg.net/pubpic/26/33/a8e8614d4ee42633.jpg

 

[hapkido]

I don't see anything that screams hardware issue. Your CPU and GPU both have resources. One more hardware-related thing you can do is defrag your harddrive (assuming it's not a SSD -- don't defrag SSDs).

If that doesn't help, I'd start looking into a software issue. I would try completely removing the game, your GPU drivers (may need to use a tool like Driver Sweeper in safe mode to do this), and direct-x and then reinstalling. See if your problems still exist. If they do, a complete reformat and reinstall might be in order.

 

[Synk]

I found it! I just had to uninstall my ZoneALarm anti-virus + firewall completely! I can't believe it was so simple. Thank you hapkido and iam2thecrowe for trying to help me with this problem. Could someone suggest me good anti-virus and firewall which doesn't cause problems while i am playing?

Could someone suggest me good anti-virus and firewall which doesn't cause problems while i am playing?