Namely, as you can see from the shots above, I'm getting periodic hitches when running a game. The framerate is just fine, and the space between each hitch is glass-smooth, but 3 or 4 times a second, +showbudget shows a spike in seemingly random readouts. This problem is unique to Source Engine games, and becomes more pronounced when playing networked Source games, like Team Fortress 2.
What I find so irritating is that this issue is nowhere to be found in systems that my friends have, whose hardware is considerably older and more out-dated than mine. Moreover, I don't really know where to start in trying to sort this out; dropping settings does nothing, and even though +showbudget can be affected by background applications, stopping every process that I can halt safely and even a fresh installation of Windows don't do anything to resolve it. The only conclusion I can come to is that there is some bottleneck in the hardware.
This is what I have under the hood:
- MSI NF750-G55 Motherboard
- AMD Phenom II X2 Black Edition @ 3.1 GHz
- 4 GB DDR3 @ PC 1600 RAM
- nVidia GeForce 260 w/ 512 MB GDDR3
- 2x Seagate Barracuda 250 GB HHD's @ 7200 RPM
- Windows 7 Professional, 64-bit
