Performance Issues under Windows 7

[RotatorSplint]

'Ello,

I recently sprung for Windows 7 and installed it on my desktop. Everything is running well, but I have some pretty nasty performance issues in most Source games (particularly TF2), but the problems are also moderately present in other engines (Borderlands/Mirror's Edge, etc.). The issue is that periodically, roughly every 3 to 4 seconds, my framerate will drop to a noticable 10-20 FPS for a split second, then return to normal.

During the "normal" moments of gameplay, my framerate hovers along a nice 60 FPS (unless I'm in some major combat). I have tried lowering my resolution to 640 x 480, making sure background programs and services are off (Like Opera, and I've screwed with msconfig a few times), running CCleaner, disabling my second monitor so that Windows isn't being drawn while TF2 is running, and disabling multicore rendering. None of these attempts have done anything to help.

I've noticed that the problem becomes increasingly present from the time I've launched the game to several minutes into gameplay. The issue also seems more present in network gameplay than single-player games (but then again, Episode Two has always out-performed TF2 for some reason). +Showbudget, as you can see below, is reporting a bunch of resource-hogs, but the culprits tend to be somewhat random in their appearance. The only recurring performance-killers, according to +showbudget, are Game and Mat_threadedendframe, whatever that last one has to do with.





Any help is much appreciated! I haven't been able to find much useful information online, so I'm thinking of going to Steam Support with this one if I can't get it resolved soon.

[MrTwoVideoCards]

This is usually caused by a bios update, have you updated recently?

[Terr]

One thing to check is your graphics card options... there's often something for "pre-rendering" X frames in advance which goes by different names depending on Nvidia/ATI. You may try bumping those down.

Also test with all real-time virus scanning disabled.

[RotatorSplint]

Thanks for the advice thus far.

I always disable my AV before I game to save on resources, so that was off. I found that the pre-rendered frames option was set to 3 by default, but disabling it yielded no difference in performance. Shucks.

I did, indeed, flash my BIOS when I installed a new processor a few months back. The motherboard is an ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe with an AMD PhenomII X2 550 newly installed. I wasn't aware that a new BIOS could cause performance slow-downs, but the benefit the new processor yielded could have easily masked that. What can I do about it?

Much appreciated!

[Terr]

Perhaps double-check that you have vsync disabled both in TF2 and in your video card drivers, since the "dip" could be when it usually stays above 60 fps but occasionally drops lower, resulting in a doubled frame before it catches up.

[RotatorSplint]

I had forgotten about that, but gave it a try and it didn't help. My good performance leveled around 90 for most of the time, but the poor performance remained in the 20-30 range

[korge]

I get the constant stuttering as well. Ill idle at around 60 fps, then when I actually play, itll drop to around 20 - 30 and constantly stutter. Its really awful.

[Psy]

Try this. Open up the task manager, go to processes, then right-click hl2.exe and select 'set affinity'. Untick 'CPU 1' and see if that improves the stuttering issue.

[Duke Nukem]

got the same issues. especially on cod6 when i serve as a server. on xp it worked fine. on win7 it sucks. guess its something with the firewall, hmm...