Lag issues Created 16 years ago2008-10-11 18:10:41 UTC by Madcow

I've been experiencing massive lag issues lately.
I can't really remember doing or installing anything which caused it to be like this, but anyways..
I play a game, for maybe 5 or 10 minutes, and then I get this big lagspike, and the game becomes totally unplayable. Then it stops and works fine again, and here comes the weird part, the next lagspike shows up after only like a minute or something with just as much magnitude, and then these lagspikes keeps on coming every minute or 30 seconds..

Notice that this doesn't only happen to online games, but to single player games aswell.

This only happens to sexy games like all of the games which uses the orange box engine, COD4, and STALKER.
It doesn't happen when I play older games like Zero Hour or CS: Source.
I know that somewhere around the time when this started I installed Norman AV, but I always turn On-Access scanner off while playing games, and that should shut down all Norman activity right?
Please tell me if you have any similar experiences with Norman AV.
EDIT: I just uninstalled it and I still get the spikes, so that ain't it

I took these two screen shots of the net_graph while playing Half-life 2 Episode 2:

Without lag:WITH lagI marked the obvious changes with red
These numbers might not have any value at all but I have no idea what any of them mean except FPS, but I decided to show them anyways ;P
(Notice that the LERP thingy turns yellow when it starts to lag, don't know what that means, but it looked important D: )

Any help is appreciated, I miss playing TF2 :<

Sounds a lot like overheating.

Make sure everything's cool.
I suggest getting Everest and doing a stress test. It'll watch your CPU / general temps and voltage as it pushes your computer to the maximum capacity.

What kind of card do you have (AIT or Nvidia)? If it's Nvidia, get Ntune:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/ntune_5.05.54.00.html

I do believe it has a graphics stress tester.

For ATI get ATiTool:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/ntune_5.05.54.00.html

I hear it works for Nvidia card stressing, too.

You should run those stress tests at the same time, as long as Ntune / ATiTool is only stressing your graphics card and not everything else like Everest does.

I ran a small test with nTune but I didn't get a result that pointed at overheating, but I didn't have time to make a long one so it's probably because of that.

I pulled out the GPU and wow was it dusty.
Shitty thing is it has this plastic cartridge around it so I need to blow out the dust using compressed air. I'll fix it later today.

Right now I have a Temperature of 57 Celsius and I just started it up :/

If it wasn't for you I would never have guessed, and I would probably have ended up with a burned GPU again.
Thanks :>

Edit:
Cleaned the GPU and I am no longer getting any lag.
Just played Ep 2 for about 20 minutes and the temperature didn't go any higher than 48 Celsius, and best of all, not only a little lag.

Thanks a lot Luke

Yah, out of the ordinary lag issues is usually always a heating issue. Especially when it occurs after a certain amount of time every time you play.

No problem

50 ?C is a low temperature for a GPU.

57?C isn't good when idling. It's completely fine when doing something graphic intensive, though.

What card is it, cow?

Mine is 60 ?C idle, and don't goes up to 70 when full load. Nothing dangerous. Well I can set fan speeds so temperatures doesn't really matter to me

Mine idles at around 50 as well, it's nothing dangerous. GPU's can take quite a bit of heat.

What card is it, cow?

It's an NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GS.

Mine is 60 ?C idle, and don't goes up to 70 when full load. Nothing dangerous. Well I can set fan speeds so temperatures doesn't really matter to me

That depends on what graphic card it is. Mine could apparently not stand such treatment, while others might, I don't know.
Games works fine now tho, so it was obviously a problem. ;>

It's true that cards can stand up to high heats, but if it was the problem, then who cares, really.

Mine idles at 50 Celsius all day. During game play I think it goes to mid 60's.