Periodic fall in frame rate

[reckoner]

Hi. I use a Nvidia 9500 GT gfx card with Asus M2N MX SE plus mobo, AMD 64 X2 5000+ processor, 2GB ram. While playing most of the recent games like mafia 2, fifa 12 ... the frame rate keeps falling periodically to around 10 or below. Can anyone provide a solution???

 

[nukemaster]

When this happens, does your hard drive led(light) on the tower blink allot. Sometimes you may be loading the next section of a game(textures and whatnot) while playing. It could also be the page file being written to / read from.

To make sure its not the game. when it happens and stops, can you still go to the same sport in the game without it happening again? It so, it may be loading or paging.

I would recommend closing ALL un-needed programs when gaming as this can cause windows to need to write data from memory to the hard drive when the game requests more memory space.

It should be noted that some virus scanners(well most) scan in real time and if your game loads textures/meshes/sounds while playing, then they have to be scanned first, this adds to the lag for some systems. You may wish to try to add the game folder to your virus scanners exude or ignore folder to test this out.

If you have windows Vista or 7(the 64 bit ones), it may be worth adding some ram to that system, with XP it may not be worth it as XP and any 32 bit operating system (this includes windows Vista 32-bit and Windows 7 32-bit) will not address more then 4GB of total memory and that includes parts of the board and video memory so more like 3.0-3.5(tops for the most part) of memory.

You can use the task manager(ctrl+shift+esc on the left side of the keyboard) to see how much memory your system is using as well, but if you tell us what version of windows you have, we can provide more detail on how to read the task manager information.

 

[reckoner]

when it happens and stops, I can go to the same sport in the game without it happening again. I use windows 7 ultimate 64 bit. The problem is that no matter at whichever point in the game, the framerate falls every 1 minute or so, and after a few seconds it returns to normal.

this is a screenshot of my msi afterburner after playing a game.

 

[nukemaster]

Almost looks like your video card just runs out of things to do. There had to be a bottleneck somewhere.

Open your task manager(hold ctrl+Shift+Esc) to see how much memory your game is using and how much available memory you have. Do not worry about free saying 0 or close to, that is normal its all about available.

For example here, i used SC2 as you can see, it is eating a fair bit of memory. by the end of a game its at 1,519,900 k

Now check out your available memory, if this is too low, programs may have to swap to the hard drive causing a slowdown.

Let me know if you are running very low on memory or not.

 

[reckoner]

I checked the available physical memory and memory used by the game....

Tell me if this is the problem.

 

[nukemaster]

It does not look like it. The game still heaves you with 447MB available memory for other stuff. I still recommend closing off your other programs when you play.

So unless you have lots of other stuff happening(i mean 447 is a bit low, but my no means out of memory, just shows how good Windows 7 is at memory management). You can leave the task manager up while you play and that blue line will track memory usage, then when it happens you can go see how far if any your memory use climbed.

I am not sure if Mafia II does load in real time(just played it, does not seem to), but if it does it could cause this, but to be honest you normally only see this behavior on MMO games(as the worlds are massive and it is more easy to load parts of the game at a time to reduce memory use).

 

[reckoner]

hmm... Can this happen due to ne other cause. I mean my mobo's got PCIe 1.0 while my gfx card is advertised 2.0. also is my Processor good enough?? Also I'm having to use my old CRT monitor since my LCD's wrecked and it'll be some time bfore i buy a new 1.
It gets real irritating.. X(

 

[nukemaster]

Your card is not going to need more them the pci-e 1. So thats a non issue, the system in general is a bit old, but you are still in the min requirements(the recommended are a bit higher, quad core + 9800GTX, that is about 2-3 times the speed of the 9500 GT) for that game. I just played a few missions and notices once that when i got out on the lower freeway the game fps went to ***. and i mean all the way to ***(i think i just bugged it).