Drastic drop in Frame Rate when entering a populated area.

[major347]

Ok, where do I begin? I guess I'll off with a little info on my system.  I have a AMD Phenom II 955 (oc 3.6) on an Asus MB with 8gb of Gskill 1600mhz RAM (cl 9). The OS and Aces high are on a Adata Sp900 (sata 3gb/s) ssd everything else is on WD 750gb hdd. A Seasonic 750watt PS. My GPU is a HIS Radeon HD 7950 3gb witch is the most power component, I know I know... i bought that planning on a future computer. Windows 7 is running on minimal programs and services in the background with no conflicts. When I play AH I shut down any program that use internet. I am pretty knowledgeable on computers

I game a lot on my computer with many different games. all of them run really really well except AH. Every other game I can run maxed out or almost maxed out and get FPS rock steady >60FPS. With AH I float around 55 until I get to a populated area where WHOA 20-40FPS. ANNOYING!!! I have tested this by turning off most, all of the advanced graphics, AA and no real change.

It seems like when there is a lot data traffic for AH my FPS drops. My connection is a 15mb/s Mediacom Cable through a Linksys G wireless router (hardwired 100mb/s). Just thought of testing directly to modem, I'll do that tonight maybe.

Anyone else have this kind of problem? How did you fix it?

[Bizman]

Do you play AH on wireless? If so, try with a wire and see if that helps.

[major347]

through a Linksys G wireless
router (hardwired 100mb/s)

Wired to the router, not wireless

[gyrene81]

through a Linksys G wireless
router (hardwired 100mb/s)

Wired to the router, not wireless

gaming on wireless g is going to be troublesome...wireless n isn't much better although I have tried on a 450mbps adaptor at 5ghz and it seemed to be fast and stable. you would do better wired to the router.

[major347]

gaming on wireless g is going to be troublesome...wireless n isn't much better although I have tried on a 450mbps adaptor at 5ghz and it seemed to be fast and stable. you would do better wired to the router.

i am on a wired connection. my computer has never been on a wireless connection. it doesn't even have a wireless card.

[Skuzzy]

What you are describing sounds like the CPU is not able to provide the video card with the data fast enough to keep it busy.  If you turn down game graphics and the results are the same, then it points to the CPU being the bottleneck.

Check your CPU usage, when nothing is running on the computer.  It should be at 0, virtually all the time.  Any deviation from that is a sign you have other active processes taking time away from the game.

[Bizman]

CPU vs GPU imbalance would have been my next guess after learning wireless wasn't the issue, but I had to go to watch my younger daughter in a school concert. Skuzzy's advice for checking that are way better than mine would ever have been, though. 

[major347]

ok I guess I will be my services again.

what about Microsoft Security Essentials?
Would it cause that much of a slow down? that is really the only major background program running.

whatever I install I make sure it doesn't load when the computer boots. I usually reboot before an evening of AH.

[gyrene81]

do a full system power down, then turn it back on...once windows is up and running, before you start any programs, open task manager and look at the performance tab. let it sit for 5 minutes without touching the mouse or keyboard...any processor activity means you have a process running that probably shouldn't be while the system is idle.

[major347]

do a full system power down, then turn it back on...once windows is up and running, before you start any programs, open task manager and look at the performance tab. let it sit for 5 minutes without touching the mouse or keyboard...any processor activity means you have a process running that probably shouldn't be while the system is idle.

Ok I did that. and a steady 0% for several minutes.

[Bizman]

If you suspect MSE could be the culprit, just uninstall it, reboot and try AH without it. You should be safe enough during playing AH behind the Windows firewall, maybe your modem/router has one too. If it helps, it'll be time to change the antivirus. If not, the reinstall of MSE is no big deal.

Another thing that came into my mind is that AH is the only game on the SSD. There's been quite a lot of talk about SSD's losing their speed due to AH writing on the disk all the time. Doing a benchmark test wouldn't hurt. You can even try to uninstall AH and reinstall it on the regular disk where your other games are.

[ImADot]

You can even try to uninstall AH and reinstall it on the regular disk where your other games are.

I don't think you need to uninstall the current game to install it somewhere else. I think you might even be able to simply copy the game folder to another location and run it from there. It's been a while (and a few versions/patches) since I tried, so maybe it isn't just a simple folder copy anymore.

[major347]

something i forgot to mention. i just bought the SSD about two months ago and did a fresh install of everything. i did see a general performance increase in AH with the SSD (removed a shutter and load times are a lot faster, so i am keeping aces high on the SSD.

last night I bypassed the router and just went straight to the modem. i saw a little better performance increase ( populated areas 45-55 fps with spikes to 35 )

i then moved MS Security Essentials to lowest priority through task manager and moved AH to High. no change.

but with 45-55 fps in a big dogfight i can live with. as long as can bypass the router. hard to do when my wife or kids wants to watch netflix too.

my router is not a gigabit router. If I get a new router with a gigabit connection, do you think i would the same outcome? ( lets just assume nobody else was using the internet to. )

[Skuzzy]

I do not recommend running Aces High on an SSD.  While it may seem to get you better performance in the short term, long term it will degrade the performance over time due to the number of small writes the game constantly does.

If your system is performing correctly, here should be no stutters when loading textures are done as the game anticipates those loads and does it before they are actually needing to be rendered.

[gyrene81]

i'm starting to get a bigger picture of all the contributing factors here...what graphics settings are you using major347?