Poor performance on a good system help!

[Shodan-]

Hey all,

I'm having a very strange performance problem that I was hoping someone could help me with.

The problem is, that i get about 70 - 80 fps on 1024x768, however every 2 or 3 seconds, the game... hickups, like the sound glitches for a second and the fps drop to 0 and then back up. The hard drive is writing a whole lot and I think it might have to do with my paging file, or fragmented harddrive.

Here are my specs.

AMD Athlon XP 2800+
512 DDR 400
128 DDR 200
Geforce 6800 128
ATA 133 harddrive etc 1 gig free...

The only other thing i can think of is the 2 different speeds of ram. Is it faster to have 512 ram that is 400 mhz or, 640 of ram running at 200 mhz?

Thanks all for any help!

Shodan-

 

[dc_pimpino]

Yo

I got 2 things you should try at first;
1. Remove a lot of things you aren't using, free up about 5 - 10 GB.
2. Defragment the whole thing

You got a nice graphics card there, that's for sure, so i don't think you will have to play around with the settings concerning the gfx card. However you are playing the downloaded-through-steam version of hl2, right? I think that a lot of "pieces" of your hard drive are fragmented so i'm pretty sure that if you free up some space and do a defrag it should be fixed.

Concerning the ram, It's better using 512MB @400mhz, i used to have 1gb running @266 and it didnt run very well at all comparing to 750MB @400mhz.

Come back as fast as you've tried my suggestions

ps
I hope you are using anti-spyware software else, start doing it asap ;p
Ad-aware 6
Spybot search & destroy
Spywareblaster
Are probably the best out there.
ds

 

[O'Neill]

try adjusting the windows pagefile to something like 512/512

 

[Shodan-]

Update

Ok, so I was able to do 1 of a few things suggested.

I removed the 128 stick and removed the paging file completly. Halflife loaded, but then when i loaded a game it ran completly out of memory and crashed.

SO I'm thinking that's a little help in the right direction. Performance seemed a little faster (in windows) with the second stick out, but I need to burn a lot of crap off my hard drive before I can do that.

Gunna get another stick of 512 after work today, and frag the thing remotely, I'll get back if this resolves the problem..

Cheers, and thanks for the great suggestions.

 

[-303-sKuLL]

nope sound setting m8 change to 2 speaker set up that helped me.

 

[Shodan-]

2 speakers

IS on 2 speakers, the only thing good on my setup. drools at mackie 824's.

It's gotta be a ram issue although I'm open to any other suggestions anyone has.

 

[GuNzABlaZiN]

Common problem, doesn't seem hardware related at this time.

 

[r3verSeD]

I have exactly the same prob..

Ok this is just stupid tho man! I have 512 mb of ddr333 ram and farcry doesnt hiccup barely at all! WTF IS THIS! I am seroiusly getting pissed off. I improved a bit by upping the pf and agp aperature size but come on.. Does not make sense.

 

[nyorker]

hiccup

i had the same problem.. all i did was reduce the resolution to 1024.. i had it at 1280 originally.. i have the aa/af at 4 and 8 default and everything on hi and relflect everything and the game runs great now. my specs.

amd 64 3200
1 gig geil ram
gef 6800 128 meg
asus k8v se deluxe mb.
atx blade case with neon lights, awesome..

if u have 2 different sticks of ram , it could be that because your amd 2800 is almost as fast as my pc.. always have the same type of ram in your pc... it would hicup when loading as i ran into the tunnels but now that i droped the resolution it runs fine.

 

[phialsquiz]

i got same problem but seems its casue by the stupid autosave feature. Just found out a way to disable it. U have to start up with console mode and type : autosave 0
Try it maybe it helps.

 

[RaBiD WeAzEL]

Looking at your system... I wouldn't epect to to run TOO much better than what you're getting now...

Processor is lower than many these days... Still not too bad... But then your RAM looks a lil risky... 512 and 128mb? Odd...

Plus, you need to try to free up your hard drive a bit... That always makes your computer happier.


My computer runs CS:S at about 110-150fps (usually) not on-line... And oddly enough, on a very good day, it'll run 180-200 but, average on-line is around 80.

Just look at my sig for my computer stats.

 

[fli_guy84]

- try using newer drivers ( forceware 66.81 and above )
- try disable vsync
- try not to run anything in the background (winamp, aim, msn etc)

 

[eXcel]

im pretty sure it is the autosave, do like phialsquiz suggested.

 

[FuriousDude]

My first post...don't know if it's gonna help something since I don't own HL2 yet (but tomorrow I will). I had a similar problem in Farcry and by disabling "Fast Writes" in my graphic card settings the problem was solved. Check if you've installed you're AGP drivers as well, I forgot that at first...

Hope that helps!