16 replies to this topic

[D4rkC0mm]

Yesterday these two games' graphics started lagging like holy mess. Age of Emipres was still playable with a low fps because it's an RTS, but HL2? It's no longer playable because of the graphics lag. Today I OCed my vid card a little to see what would happen. AoE3 is a _little_ better now, but HL2 is still unplayable. I'm gonna test with some other games, but does anyone have an idea as to wtf is going on? I ran Microsoft AntiSpyware, but it didn't turn up anything. RAM usage is always below 80% during games, not sure about CPU.

This has never happened before on this comp.

System specs below:

AMD Athlon 3500+ Venice; not OCed
2GB (2x1GB) DDR 400 RAM
160GB & 250GB HDDs
256MB 256-bit Radeon x800GT by Sapphire; Currently OCed

I'm pretty sure it isn't overheating for two reasons:
1) It just suddenly started happening yesterday
2) 2x120mm fans, 1x92mm fan, stock heatsink&fan

The HDD with AoE3 is quite fragmented (I'll fix that some other time), but HL2 is on the other one.

Help would be appreciated.

[EDIT]
Yep, got to the UT2k4 main menu and the entire screen lagged like hell whenever I moved the mouse. Same thing in AoE3.

[EDIT 2]
Noticed something funny. Does it normally take 100% CPU power to move the mouse across the screen? Saw this happen when moved the mouse while the task manage was open to the CPU usage tab.

Edited by D4rkC0mm, 11 November 2005 - 04:56 PM.

[Novahawk]

Maybe one of your fans died... i cant really think of anything else that would just randomly totally slow your processor down like that... check your fans.. they might have died..

[NC Derek]

its obvious you have a nice computer so its not the hardware unless something is wrong with your ram. i would check to make sure your computer knows it is working with 2 gigs of ram. it might only be reading 512. also what is your pagefile? that may be overflowing. you can play around with your pagefile ...righ click on my comoputer from the start menu, properties, advanced, performance... and so on.

[D4rkC0mm]

Fans are all functional. Comp knows how much RAM is present, virtual memory's fine. I did notice that my clock speed keeps varying. Maybe Cool & Quiet is broken and it isn't changing it fast enough. I'll disable it and see what happens.

[EDIT] Well that didn't do anything. However, I've observed that the CPU usage goes up to 90-100% on this comp when I _move the mouse_, and on my mom's computer with a P4 @1.4GHz, it definitely does not reach anywhere near that range when the mouse is moved, erratically spun in circles on the screen, or clicked repeatedly.

I'm assuming what's happening to me isn't normal.

Edited by D4rkC0mm, 11 November 2005 - 05:47 PM.

[D4rkC0mm]

Oh, furthermore, the process that takes up the most CPU depends on what window the mouse is over. If the mouse is over an IM window, gaim.exe shoots up to 99. If the mouse is over the desktop, explorer.exe shoots up to 99, and so on and so forth.

[Aziz]

damn, ive dealt with something similar to your problem, but i dont think it was that serious. I just ended up re-formatting my computer. Now its fine.. but still runs kind of slow.

where do i check how much RAM is being used up?

[D4rkC0mm]

What I use is one of the Kapsules widgets that has a RAM monitor... I don't know how reliable that is. I use PC Wizard 2005 for a lot of things though, and that's how i know my comp knows it has RAM.

[NC Derek]

to check your ram, you can either do ctrl alt delete, then performance and look under virt memory, or to get more accurate info go to start/programs/accesories/system tools/ system information, then scroll to the bottom.

[Novahawk]

ok first of all to check what everything is... go to the system checker when you boot up... like tab on mine i think.. like right when the text first appears.. second.. did you install any new drivers to ANYTHING? if you did then that might be it, so you should try rolling that driver back..

[ShLoNkY]

sounds like it might be a conflicting driver issue. what new was installed??

Edited by ShLoNkY, 11 November 2005 - 07:21 PM.

[D4rkC0mm]

The only thing that was installed that day was AoE3. Would that cause a problem?

[NC Derek]

something is either eating your ram or not supporting the game. or has features the game doesnt support. ive never heard of it with aoe3 since thats a new game. answer this, after youre done playing the game, when youre on the desk top, does task manager still think the game is running?

[D4rkC0mm]

Nope, game's completely closed. I don't understand why it would affect HL2 though, if it's an issue with AoE3. If you missed it, check post #5 on this thread again, if you missed it - I think that might provide a clue as to what the problem is. I tried reinstalling the mouse driver, which did nothing.

Edited by D4rkC0mm, 11 November 2005 - 09:01 PM.

[ShLoNkY]

#1 Uninstall AoE3. #2 reset all things overclocked to normal (default) settings. #3 uninstall graphics driver. #4 drink heavily #5 reinstall graphics drivers

if it dont fix it then, at least, youll be drunk as hell


when you move your mouse around like a sunovab*tch your processor shouldnt go above a coupla % at most......if it does then somethings f*cked up

Edited by ShLoNkY, 11 November 2005 - 11:11 PM.

[D4rkC0mm]

I've found that moving it like a sunovab*tch isn't it required; moving it across the screen does the same thing.

[Haven]

i had a similar problem, once was because i was missing important registry, the second time was power supply issues.....which u got all that sh*t running on a 480 it cant even power it. That might be it if not...then go with the grand ma way. Run all scans, defragment, turn off and watch the fresh prince for a while. NOTE: you may have to turn it back on to make sure its working;)

[D4rkC0mm]

Fixed it. It was a very stupid problem. A day before it started, I dled a stupid little program called Tizzle Talk to see what it'd do (AIM chat mod thing). I got bored with it after a while and left it on its own without uninstalling it, because I'm lazy like that. I discovered (randomly) that if I killed the process tizzletalk.exe, the mouse problem went away. If it's a virus or whatnot, it wasn't detected by anything. (I did uninstall it after that. I'm not _that_ stupid.)

Edited by D4rkC0mm, 13 November 2005 - 01:01 PM.