Performance issues all of the sudden

[Chunks45]

After a few years I suddenly felt the urge to play AH again so I got out my old dusty joystick (ms ff pro)  and went flying.  Then all of the sudden the force feedback goes out, so I switch to my saitek x45.

Then I fire up AH again and my framerate was CRAP.  I don't know what happened.  I turned some stuff down and it didn't really seem to help, but then all of the sudden it goes up to about 30.  I think all is good, then all of the sudden I try to fire my guns and my framerate drops down to 1-4.  What happened?

The game is basically unplayable right now, I have tried adjusting graphics but nothing seems to do the trick.

I have ZERO programs running in the background, only the bare essential processes running.  The only thing I could possibly contribute it to would be my joystick, but why in the hell would that be so?

My specs are below:

AMD Athlon 3000+xp
Radeon 9800 pro
1 gb PC 2700 ram

I'm also on a 3mbit connection

the framerate problems seem to be only associated with dropping ordnance or firing weapons.

[Irwink!]

I haven't been around all that long but long enough to have seen V2.08 come out. My frame rate dropped dramatically as did that of a lot people judging by the msgs here. Personally, I used to do nothing but login and fly (and die - because I suck). Now I go into my machine services, kill every service that is not essential and then go to task manager and kill all but essential processes in there. That helped a lot. I kill anti-virus and spyware stuff too. The last few times out I've even gone to task manager and set the processor priorty for AH to high. In clear skies I now get frame rates in the 80's. In furballs and what not I might get frame rates down in the 30 something range although I'm usually not paying that much attention during those times. I've got a decent system - 3 ghz 1024gb - but my graphics card is by no means cutting edge. At any rate, having done the above my frame rates have improved dramatically. They're other tweaks you can do too. Search around for frame rate threads and I think you'll turn up a lot of information.

[fuzeman]

Set sound hardware acceleration to 3/4 max, not full.

Using any custom sounds? if so try the default ones.

Wouldn't hurt to post the top 1/3rd of your DxDiag also so we can see the nuts and bolts.

[buzkill]

My biggest performance issue with the weapons was caused by force feedback over-taxing something in my system...i shut down all forces so my stick just has center force, and now i sit at 72 fps all the time (the same as my refresh)


amd64 3000+  @2.0
msi k8tneo mobo
sapphire 9600xt

sound acc. set to full
i run at 1280x1024 with detail set to 90% full
1024 textures
af off
aa set to 2x