Frames Dropping While Playing Counter Strike

[Kente]

Lately, when playing CS after 20 or 30 minutes my fps will suddenly drop. I normally can pull 99 fps in the game but after a certain amount of time my fps will start to fluctuate around 60. The game seems slightly sluggish, and I can only regain my original 99 fps by rebooting my computer. Also, I notice that when this occurs I can exit the game and my entire computer seems a little slower than normal.

Could this be because of a lack of RAM? Seems to me that for a game like Counter Strike I wouldn't need a ton of RAM. Any thoughts?


Specs:

Athlon XP 2000+
EPOX GeForce2 based Board
Radeon 9500 Pro
256 MB DDR
Windows XP Pro

 

[magomago]

Spyware perhaps? Do you have Adaware and do you run it? That would be something important. Also see if you have indexing service enabled...maybe its kicking in when you play.
As for ram I have win2k and when I play CS ram usage hits the low 300s for me
And see if your Virus Scan isn't set to start scanning all the sudden for no apparant reason...

Have you tried updating all your drivers (I' assuming you have a nforce board) also? Do that just to be safe though it probably isn't the issue since you are experiencing slowdowns out of nowhere

 

[MangoTBG]

It's God telling you to stop playing CS

 

[buleyb]

no, keep playing CS


and what directx version and Catalyst driver version you running? Oh, and what version of CS?

 

[charlie21]

256 MB of RAM isn't enough for XP. Shut down everything you don't need running ,fire up CS, and play until it starts getting sluggish. Alt-Tab out of CS and check your memory usage under Task Manager.

 

[buleyb]

although I agree 256MB is low-end of XP, this is a known problem across the CS forums

There are some things you can do to fix it though. And turning off the fisher-price graphics in XP will clean it up enough to work fine. Once CS is loaded, it runs on some fairly budget systems running 2k or XP.

 

[Kente]

I have DirectX 9.0b installed and yes, i have ad-aware with the up-to-date DAT file. I have no other applications running, including antivirus software while playing CS (version 1.5). I don't have the latest Catalyst drivers (3.6?), but I'm about to install them now.

Actually the problem that I'm having didnt start until around March or April. I built this computer in January, and never had a bit of trouble for the first two or three months. I guess I will head over to the CS forums and see what they have to say about it.

 

[buleyb]

My experience so far,


unless you need DirectX 9 for another game, stick with 8. Doing this made my problems go away. Also, try Steam which is the CS 1.6beta.

There are plenty of bug-fixes, so try this before you go to Dx8

Feel free to PM me for an email if you can't get this working. I had the same problem, but have corrected it through a few measures...

 

[Kente]

Getting rid of DirectX9 is quite hard isn't it? I've downloaded two german programs that will "theoretically" uninstall it... but i'm not so sure i buy it. The only other way to roll back to 8.1 would be to reformat I believe, and I'd hate to do that if directX isn't the issue:/

Another thing I just tried... I installed the newest catalyst drivers and still no luck. So then I decided to get a program that will free my RAM and monitor how much of it is in use at any given time. Well, before firing up CS I will have about 150-170 MB of free RAM. After things slow down and I come out of CS, I have around 40 MB of RAM free. To me that seems like a huge decrease in free RAM just for CS, but that's just me. And this is with no other applications running.

 

[Mday]

you may have some services running which should not be, and you should definitely have more RAM (but that's beside the point). and check out your temperatures after leaving cs.

 

[MDE]

Look at BlkViper.com for a list of services you can disable. After going through that on a clean reboot I only use ~90MB of RAM.