Odd loss of gaming performance

[Soylent Joe]

Source games are very CPU intensive, or so I've heard. Try giving your CPU voltage a nudge, maybe it's slightly unstable. If that doesn't work, then give the NB voltage a nudge.

But, my CPU isn't overclocked at all and hasn't been for a year. I'll still look in the bios to make sure all of the settings are looking good. I'll bump up the vcore a tiny little bit.

 

[hat]

Try clearing the CMOS... and don't just use the jumper, actually take the battery out. I've seen some very, very strange issues get sorted that way..

 

[Soylent Joe]

Try clearing the CMOS... and don't just use the jumper, actually take the battery out. I've seen some very, very strange issues get sorted that way..

OK so bumping up the voltage didn't do anything. I actually just played a free NASA game from steam that also uses the Unreal engine and it too ran like crap. I'll try resetting the CMOS in a bit if I don't get any other ideas.

 

[qubit]

I'm sorry that I don't know why your PC performance has dropped off (but see below). However, I don't want misconceptions to get a foothold: it's certainly not caused by the state of your hard disc whether it's fragmented, full, slow, fast or just having a bad hair day*.

When you're playing UT3, the game isn't accessing the HD in the middle of a fragfest, so the HD performance is irrelevant. And if it does, any HD access by the game during a fragfest will cause an annoying hitch (short pause) in your animation, regardless of how fast the HD is - you'll even see it on the fastest SSD. The hitch will just be a bit shorter, that's all.

Now to troubleshooting. In situations like these where there's no obvious fault or solution, it can help to shotgun it. Grab a spare HD and install Windows, the latest drivers, all the games showing the problem and one or two that seem ok.

Then playtest/benchmark them and see how they run. Then perhaps start installing your other apps and see how they affect it. Sometimes apps have odd interference issues with each other that's not obvious. A good example a couple of years ago was Kasperky and Steam. Kaspersky really didn't like Steam and they tended to deadlock, requiring the user to quit Kasperky before Starting Steam. You're not running Kaspersky Internet Security are you...? Shotgunning it can also help you to think laterally, helping you to nail the cause of the problem.

Finally, you should use a separate HD and not another partition on the same HD, in case the install goes wrong and trashes your old and new installs. Trust me, this has a higher probability than you think.

*Also, while quite unlikely, you're current HD could be failing and causing a loss in performance as it places extra demands on the HD interface on the PC and wastes clock cycles due to data/signaling errors. Try unplugging it when using the new install and see if there's any difference. It's not likely, but will only take 10 minutes to eliminate this possibility. So, the bad hair day might just be causing it...

Try clearing the CMOS... and don't just use the jumper, actually take the battery out. I've seen some very, very strange issues get sorted that way..

+1 on that!

OK so bumping up the voltage didn't do anything. I actually just played a free NASA game from steam that also uses the Unreal engine and it too ran like crap. I'll try resetting the CMOS in a bit if I don't get any other ideas.

What's that NASA game? I'll go grab it.

 

[Soylent Joe]

I'm sorry that I don't know why your PC performance has dropped off (but see below). However, I don't want misconceptions to get a foothold: it's certainly not caused by the state of your hard disc whether it's fragmented, full, slow, fast or just having a bad hair day*.

When you're playing UT3, the game isn't accessing the HD in the middle of a fragfest, so the HD performance is irrelevant. And if it does, any HD access by the game during a fragfest will cause an annoying hitch (short pause) in your animation, regardless of how fast the HD is - you'll even see it on the fastest SSD. The hitch will just be a bit shorter, that's all.

Now to troubleshooting. In situations like these where there's no obvious fault or solution, it can help to shotgun it. Grab a spare HD and install Windows, the latest drivers, all the games showing the problem and one or two that seem ok.

Then playtest/benchmark them and see how they run. Then perhaps start installing your other apps and see how they affect it. Sometimes apps have odd interference issues with each other that's not obvious. A good example a couple of years ago was Kasperky and Steam. Kaspersky really didn't like Steam and they tended to deadlock, requiring the user to quit Kasperky before Starting Steam. You're not running Kaspersky Internet Security are you...? Shotgunning it can also help you to think laterally, helping you to nail the cause of the problem.

Finally, you should use a separate HD and not another partition on the same HD, in case the install goes wrong and trashes your old and new installs. Trust me, this has a higher probability than you think.

*Also, while quite unlikely, you're current HD could be failing and causing a loss in performance as it places extra demands on the HD interface on the PC and wastes clock cycles due to data/signaling errors. Try unplugging it when using the new install and see if there's any difference. It's not likely, but will only take 10 minutes to eliminate this possibility. So, the bad hair day might just be causing it...

What's that NASA game? I'll go grab it.

Oh jeez that's a lot. I'm using MSE, not Kaspersky. So do you think contacting Steam support before I go through all that may be useful? Also, here's the game, Moonbase Alpha. I'm doing some testing with the HDTune benchmark right now to see if the read speed drops while gaming or accessing files. I was running it right before typing this and I accessed the detailed services menu from the task manager and it dropped down to 2 mb/s from about 80 mb/s (and stayed there for about 2 seconds). So I'll do that and post the results.

When it comes to a game accessing the files on the hard drive, would Source and Unreal games be any different than games running other engines? Like, do those tend to constantly access info?

 

[shevanel]

have you used process explorer to check for hardware interupts?

have you tried disabling the secondary display and not just unplugging it?

I use alt+up alt+down to turn my secondary display on/off.. but with your setup I highly doubt that is the culprit.

LOL, I just realized how unhelpful my post is but I am just naming a few things I would check 1st if I noticed a drop in cpu power..

Also, have you check your power management option? Maybe when the secondary display was activated it could have magically set you PV to power saver or balanced which sometimes causes a lack of cpu speed depending on how it is setup and if you gpu is loaded out the cpu might not always kick up to the full multi if its set to downclock.

 

[qubit]

Oh jeez that's a lot. I'm using MSE, not Kaspersky. So do you think contacting Steam support before I go through all that may be useful? Also, here's the game, Moonbase Alpha. I'm doing some testing with the HDTune benchmark right now to see if the read speed drops while gaming or accessing files. I was running it right before typing this and I accessed the detailed services menu from the task manager and it dropped down to 2 mb/s from about 80 mb/s. So I'll do that and post the results.

Yes, troubleshooting often involves a fair bit of effort I'm afraid, especially when you have to shotgun it. I work in IT and it's also my hobby, so I'm quite confident that shotgunning it will help you get to the bottom of it -at least you're likely to have a working system, even if you don't know the root cause. Heck, if you have even a vague idea what the problem is before you do this, then certainly try that out first. Thinking about it, before you do anything else, try installing the latest DirectX patch, available here and see if it makes any difference. I remember UT3 ran like crap on XP back in '07 when it was released (tended to crash at startup). It ran fine on Vista (Vista who?) and better (not perfect) in XP with the DX update.

Certainly quitting or perhaps even uninstalling MSE might make a difference, although I don't think it's terribly likely. This is the kind of thing you can try out easily with that new install: test it out with the bare minimum, as above, then install MSE and see if it makes a difference. Then bung on other programs which you have on now and see what happens. You can also try the official testing utility from the HD manufacturer to see if it spots any faults.

Good luck.

Thanks for the game link - looks interesting. Downloading now.

have you used process explorer to check for hardware interupts?

have you tried disabling the secondary display and not just unplugging it?

I use alt+up alt+down to turn my secondary display on/off.. but with your setup I highly doubt that is the culprit.

LOL, I just realized how unhelpful my post is but I am just naming a few things I would check 1st if I noticed a drop in cpu power..

Also, have you check your power management option? Maybe when the secondary display was activated it could have magically set you PV to power saver or balanced which sometimes causes a lack of cpu speed depending on how it is setup and if you gpu is loaded out the cpu might not always kick up to the full multi if its set to downclock.

There's nothing wrong with your suggestions - have a thanks!

 

[Soylent Joe]

Alright I ran some benchmarks and I think we've found our problem.

Exhibit A - My 640GB backup drive. 77% full. Was doing nothing at all during this measurement. This is basically where the drive should be at, it's always been about the same.

Exhibit B - My 640GB system drive. This was while doing nothing.

This was while I was going crazy, opening every big file I could find, launching programs, BOINC running, download programs running, HD movies playing.

This was while doing nothing but loading and playing Killing Floor (you can clearly see where it quit loading and started playing there at 73% completion). KF and TF2 were both taking FOREVER to load also.

The health shows "OK" on the bad drive, and a quick scan showed no bad sectors but I'm doing a full scan now. So basically, I'm going to back up my files and keep on using it. If it starts to really annoy me (I can live without the games that it messes up) I'll reinstall Windows as a last ditch effort (unless this is a mechanical problem that can't be avoided). I guess I can RMA it after that :shadedshu

I do realize that the weird HDD may not be the only thing messing up the games, but I don't think we can really find out the true problem until this problem is fixed.

 

[qubit]

Oh jeez that's a lot. I'm using MSE, not Kaspersky. So do you think contacting Steam support before I go through all that may be useful? Also, here's the game, Moonbase Alpha. I'm doing some testing with the HDTune benchmark right now to see if the read speed drops while gaming or accessing files. I was running it right before typing this and I accessed the detailed services menu from the task manager and it dropped down to 2 mb/s from about 80 mb/s (and stayed there for about 2 seconds). So I'll do that and post the results.

When it comes to a game accessing the files on the hard drive, would Source and Unreal games be any different than games running other engines? Like, do those tend to constantly access info?

You seem to have added a bit to your post and I don't seem to have fully addressed it anyway, so here's a bit more.

I wouldn't worry too much about that sudden drop to 2MB too much. Accessing various programs and Windows functions will cause the throughput to drop quite significantly as the drive thrashes around all over the platter, like something demented on speed. This is quite normal.

I don't think Source and Unreal games do anything special with their disc accesses. In particular, the Source engine is known to be lighter on the CPU & GPU than others - just look at the frame rates in graphics card reviews. They tend to be be quite high ie the game runs pretty smoothly and looks awesome.

 

[qubit]

Alright I ran some benchmarks and I think we've found our problem.

Exhibit A - My 640GB backup drive. 77% full. Was doing nothing at all during this measurement. This is basically where the drive should be at, it's always been about the same.
http://img808.imageshack.us/img808/4610/blackupidle.jpg


Exhibit B - My 640GB system drive. This was while doing nothing.
http://img704.imageshack.us/img704/4338/blackidle.jpg

This was while I was going crazy, opening every big file I could find, launching programs, BOINC running, download programs running, HD movies playing.
http://img706.imageshack.us/img706/4249/blackfiles.jpg

This was while doing nothing but loading and playing Killing Floor (you can clearly see where it quit loading and started playing there at 73% completion). KF and TF2 were both taking FOREVER to load also.
http://img822.imageshack.us/img822/7537/killingfloor.jpg

The health shows "OK" on the bad drive, and a quick scan showed no bad sectors but I'm doing a full scan now. So basically, I'm going to back up my files and keep on using it. If it starts to really annoy me (I can live without the games that it messes up) I'll reinstall Windows as a last ditch effort (unless this is a mechanical problem that can't be avoided). I guess I can RMA it after that :shadedshu

I do realize that the weird HDD may not be the only thing messing up the games, but I don't think we can really find out the true problem until this problem is fixed.

I can't see anything wrong with your system drive from those screenshots. In particular, the system drive graph while "doing nothing" will show lots of dips like that. Windows will access it lightly all the time, to do stuff like updating the file index, optimising files for faster application startup, auto defrag and fiddling with the page file. And just to wind you up. On top of that, HD Tune Pro will be logging stuff and further causing page file access - the page file gets accessed long before the RAM is filled up, no matter how much you have, it's just the way Windows works.

Having said all this, the drive could still be failing and not look too obvious about it for a while on performance charts. First off, does it sound funny, perhaps? Repeating noises, odd squirly sounds, running hot (check ventilation ok first, though), excessive vibration* or something else just doesn't seem right?

Running a HD benchmark while running a game, will significantly slow down load times, as they are both competing for the drive and thrash the hell out of it with random accesses. You can see just that in the scatter plot and the reduced throughput.

You can run a SMART check on it, but I don't think its faulty.

*My failed WD drive vibrated excessively (see my thread on its replacement) and made my case vibrate maddeningly. I now have four good WD drives in there and there's no rattle at all from it.

 

[Soylent Joe]

Having said all this, the drive could still be failing and not look too obvious about it for a while on performance charts. First off, does it sound funny, perhaps? Repeating noises, odd squirly sounds, running hot (check ventilation ok first, though), excessive vibration* or something else just doesn't seem right?

I hear some muffled scraping while accessing stuff but nothing loud. No clicks of death or vibration. They both have good airflow and show 38C in HDTune. So you really think that second system drive graph isn't anything to worry about?

 

[CJCerny]

I hear some muffled scraping while accessing stuff but nothing loud. No clicks of death or vibration. They both have good airflow and show 38C in HDTune. So you really think that second system drive graph isn't anything to worry about?

I haven't seen anything your benchmarks that indicates any hardware problems. The fact that you say that some games are not suffering performance issues pretty much rules out hardware. Could be video card driver issues. Have you tried different video card drivers?

 

[Soylent Joe]

I haven't seen anything your benchmarks that indicates any hardware problems. The fact that you say that some games are not suffering performance issues pretty much rules out hardware. Could be video card driver issues. Have you tried different video card drivers?

Yeah I said in the OP I updated from 10.4 to 10.6 with no change.

 

[qubit]

I hear some muffled scraping while accessing stuff but nothing loud. No clicks of death or vibration. They both have good airflow and show 38C in HDTune. So you really think that second system drive graph isn't anything to worry about?

Nope, it's fine. Just take any Windows PC that's simply sitting there and stare it out (you'll lose). While staring at it, look at the HD light and you'll see it blip frequently. Vista & 7 do a lot more background accessing than XP.

Heck, a combination of Windows 7, indexing, SuperFetch and your virus scanner can set off a thrashfest to do your head in. And all while you're not touching it. It was a real joy on a fast, but notoriously noisy Raptor X 10000rpm drive.

You might be interested in my thread, Stopping Vista & 7's constant HD hammering from driving you nuts

Seriously, try that DX update before anythinng else and let us know.

I have to go to sleep now (small hours of the night over here) but I'll check back tomorrow.

 

[Soylent Joe]

Nope, it's fine. Just take any Windows PC that's simply sitting there and stare it out (you'll lose). While staring at it, look at the HD light and you'll see it blip frequently. Vista & 7 do a lot more background accessing than XP.

Heck, a combination of Windows 7, indexing, SuperFetch and your virus scanner can set off a thrashfest to do your head in. And all while you're not touching it. It was a real joy on a fast, but notoriously noisy Raptor X 10000rpm drive.

You might be interested in my thread, Stopping Vista & 7's constant HD hammering from driving you nuts

Seriously, try that DX update before anythinng else and let us know.

I have to go to sleep now (small hours of the night over here) but I'll check back tomorrow.

Thanks a ton for the help. I'll try that update now.

 

[Soylent Joe]

Well the DX update didn't work. I guess I'm down to contacting Steam support, resetting the CMOS battery (I have a feeling that this also won't do anything), or installing Windows on a little 80GB drive I've got to see if anything changes. I've got to cut grass right now, might take some action when I get back.

 

[Soylent Joe]

Steam support is mighty slow responding :shadedshu

 

[AsRock]

Did you try reinstalling your v card drivers ?. Did you add any more USB devices as a little while ago a few people had a issue with to many or some USB devices.

Maybe even try reinstalling the chipset drivers too.

 

[qubit]

Steam support is mighty slow responding :shadedshu

What is there to ask them? The problem will either be in the games themselves, so the game developer or forum is the place to go, or with Windows itself.

Trust me my friend, do that install on your spare 80GB drive. Put on all the latest drivers and patches and see how it goes. It might be a bother to do, but one of the great things about doing this, is that it may help you to think outside the box and zero in on the problem. Mind you, I have enough trouble thinking in a straight line anyway...!

And the other benefit of doing this, is that even if you don't find the cause of the problem, you'll have a fresh and properly working Windows install and the problem will have been fixed anyway. Now, don't be surprised if you don't see much performance difference - it can happen when software is patched and there's not a lot you can do about it.

You might also want to check your driver settings: perhaps some quality settings have been cranked up and you hadn't realised? That will tank performance quite easily on any system.

 

[Soylent Joe]

Did you try reinstalling your v card drivers ?. Did you add any more USB devices as a little while ago a few people had a issue with to many or some USB devices.

Maybe even try reinstalling the chipset drivers too.

Nope no new USB devices. I'll try reinstalling the video card drivers again. Also, would you have to somehow uninstall the chipset drivers before you get the new ones? Or would just laying the new ones down on top be enough?

What is there to ask them? The problem will either be in the games themselves, so the game developer or forum is the place to go, or with Windows itself.

Trust me my friend, do that install on your spare 80GB drive. Put on all the latest drivers and patches and see how it goes. It might be a bother to do, but one of the great things about doing this, is that it may help you to think outside the box and zero in on the problem. Mind you, I have enough trouble thinking in a straight line anyway...!

And the other benefit of doing this, is that even if you don't find the cause of the problem, you'll have a fresh and properly working Windows install and the problem will have been fixed anyway. Now, don't be surprised if you don't see much performance difference - it can happen when software is patched and there's not a lot you can do about it.

You might also want to check your driver settings: perhaps some quality settings have been cranked up and you hadn't realised? That will tank performance quite easily on any system.

I guess this is what I'll be doing after trying the new drivers. So, if I get in there and see that it's working on the new install, should I just reinstall Windows on my main HDD? It wouldn't be a huge hassle as I now have everything backed up thanks to the scare I had a few days ago.

 

[qubit]

I guess this is what I'll be doing after trying the new drivers. So, if I get in there and see that it's working on the new install, should I just reinstall Windows on my main HDD? It wouldn't be a huge hassle as I now have everything backed up thanks to the scare I had a few days ago.

Glad it's all backed up - it's no joke if you lose it, eh?

Once you install on the new drive and only if it solves the problem, no point otherwise, then you can image it over to the original drive, wiping out the old install. No need to go through the whole lengthy installation, patching and configuration process again.

For this task, I use the excellent Hard Disc Manager 2010 Professional by Paragon Software. There's a cheaper version as well, if you don't need the advanced features.

 

[Soylent Joe]

Well, I followed Erocker's guide on how to properly and thoroughly reinstall video drivers and the problem is gone! Back to regular performance

Huge thanks goes out to all of you who have been posting very helpful suggestions

 

[brandonwh64]

Well, I followed Erocker's guide on how to properly and thoroughly reinstall video drivers and the problem is gone! Back to regular performance

Huge thanks goes out to all of you who have been posting very helpful suggestions

YAY!!! now you can PWN people in TF2!

 

[AsRock]

YAY!...

 

[qubit]

Well, I followed Erocker's guide on how to properly and thoroughly reinstall video drivers and the problem is gone! Back to regular performance

Huge thanks goes out to all of you who have been posting very helpful suggestions

Awesome! Saved ya all that bother, too. What sort of performance increase are you seeing now?

Can you please link to erocker's guide and I'll stick it in my favourites to help the next lost soul. I seem to remember making a thread similar to this years ago for ati drivers, fixing the problem where the tray icon would annoyingly disappear and stay gone.