Help me diagnose this framerate problem

[fitzroy_doll]

Every so often, I have the following framerate problem while testing maps in my HL2 (appid 220 based) mod. Framerates overall are high, but there are frequent jagged spikes below 20 fps in some areas of some maps, as shown in these showbudget screenshots:




Areas of concern appear to be related to world rendering, static prop rendering and swap buffer. I am taking the suggested steps to correct the issue, but so far without success, as the problem cannot always be reproduced (though when it does happen, it is usually in the same places in the same maps).

I was wondering if anyone recognised the "birthday cake" pattern of jagged framerates and whether this relates to a known issue, with hardware, maps, game settings or perhaps something else. Any input will be greatly appreciated.

[stoopdapoop]

those are the kinda spikes I see when someone has dynamic lights that are too large, or too many of them. But that doesn't seem to be your problem. From the looks of it, everything shoots up, then goes back down which is strange.

But I did notice that you had a bit of an unaccounted bar, which is usually associated with processes that are running outside the engine. And just random system load because of a background processes would probably explain the render time going up for everything. I know that your bar isn't very big, only taking a few milliseconds to process unaccounted stuff, but I know that my uncounted bar isn't very accurate much of the time, only going up a little when it's clearly a background process hogging up my performance.


Unnnlessssssssssssssss the spots that it happens are consistent, in which case I'm not sure maybe you can tell us a little more about the parts of the map that it happens in, if it always happens in the same spots.

[fitzroy_doll]

Many thanks for your reply. In the course of attempting to give more detailed information about the problem, I have discovered that the spikes occur not in particular locations, but rather after a certain amount of time playing...
in certain maps...
sometimes...
I think it's hardware related. It's almost as if windows is running out of memory and switching to the swap disk, which would partly explain the "unaccounted" overhead and the spikes (slower read/write). Heap size is set to 1 gig (out of a total of 2), but there seems to be some kind of performance cliff in there somewhere. Will try different settings and see what happens.