0 FPS when playing StarCraft II on Low.

Somewhat recently, my computer's gaming performance has dropped significantly, making many games unplayable. I just recently replaced my HD 5770 with an HD 7770, and I replaced my old PSU thinking that might have been the problem. I've uninstalled and reinstalled the drivers to no effect. Can anyone help me with this problem? What sort of information do I need to provide?

 

I built the computer about a year ago, and it ran Skyrim and StarCraft on High with no major issues. Here are some of the specs:

CPU: AMD Athlon II x3 3.3Ghz
RAM: 2x2 GB
PSU: 520W 80+ rated Antec PSU
Graphics Card: ATI Radeon Sapphire HD 7770
OS: Windows 7 64-bit

 

What's your windows score? Let's start there. If you don't know what that is or how to check it then there is no hope

 

Processor: 6.9
Memory: 7.1
Graphics: 7.6
Gaming Graphics: 7.6
Primary Hard Disc: 5.9

Overall: 5.9

 

Have a spare hard drive?
Reinstall a fresh copy of Windows and try your games. Do NOT update Windows, just drivers and what you need to play.
Slowly return to your present install that is slow and at some step along the way you should find a slowdown.

 

Those are good scores and your hard drive score is plenty high enough that it isn't the problem.

What game(s) are you having problems with? and did they ever run acceptably?

What anti-virus/firewall are you running and you need to know everything that is running in the background.
I use autoruns and SystemExplorer. I would also make sure you have CCleaner installed. Run it to delete extraneous files. I also use Wise Registry cleaner. Check your swap file and make sure it is there.
Those are some things I would do. Report back and we can take it from there.

Also, how much free disk space do you have on your hard drive

 

Did you make any big changes just before the game performance dropped? New antivirus, Windows service pack, hardware upgrade, or something like that?

 

I'm having issues with StarCraft II (FPS is fine early game, but late game, FPS drops to less than 1), MineCraft (FPS is <60, despite all graphics settings being on low), and Team Fortress 2 (<30 FPS at times, all graphics on low). Oddly enough, Skyrim on high is running smooth as can be.

All of the games listed ran very well on my old HD 5770, and even some older 256MB and 512MB graphics cards ran the games better than now.

Just a note, I noticed the problem in the middle of using the HD 5770, so my recent graphics card upgrade shouldn't be the problem. I put the 5770 in my girlfriend's computer, and she gets great performance on it, so that card isn't the problem either.

I don't have any anti-virus or firewalls installed, and the Windows firewall is off.

Installed SystemExplorer, and did a security scan: all processes are green. Installed CCleaner Slim, ran the basic cleaner and ran the registry cleaner until there were no issues.

Now, while poking around to try to check my paging file settings, I found 3 performance issues messages in my event log. One of them was a conflicting audio driver error, and I uninstalled the driver in question and I think my performance has improved. I'll play a game of StarCraft later today and see if this fixes the problem.

Oh, and yes, my paging file is set to 4 GB.

3.83 GB out of 29.7 GB for C: (my SSD with Windows install)
139 GB out of 372 GB for E: (all installs and personal files)

None that I know of, unfortunately. I didn't notice a performance drop in the games I was playing at the time, and when I went back to Team Fortress and StarCraft, I noticed it.

 

You have only 12 % free space on your c: drive. That's low. I read 25% minimum recommendations. Where is your 4 GB swapfile residing?

If you don't have AV or firewall you are making a mistake. I don't know the Starcraft game at all. Does it need internet to start and play like some Steam games?

As far as FPS...I would like to meet the Goomba that decided 60 FPS was the acceptable minimum for playing a game. The FPS is far less important than playabilty (vague term I know).

While I really don't think the 128-bit memory bandwidth of your card is a problem I would not consider a card with less than 256 -bit mem.

Did you read the release notes of your video driver to learn if there is a problem with a specific game? I have the 6870 and am not using the latest release. I don't update my drivers if what I am doing works just to have the latest. Video driver updates are designed to fix problems and increase framerates on current games, among other things.

Finally the Athlon 2 isn't much of a CPU and I am not insulting you. It is a budget CPU and one can't expect top performance from that. What is your girlfriends system?

 

Unfortunately, Win7 is taking up most of that space, so there's not much I can do outside of buying a bigger SSD. The games worked fine previously despite the low space on the SSD, so I don't think it should be a problem.

The swapfile is on E:

Any recommended minimal AVs/Firewalls?

StarCraft II requires an internet connection to start and play, yes.

I get what you mean about the playability. I use 60 FPS as a benchmark here mostly because the games listed above used to run smoothly at 60 FPS.

I have not read the release notes, no.

Yeah, I took that into consideration when I built the machine. Could CPU deterioration be an issue here?

I don't recall my girlfriend's computer's specs off of the top of my head. Similar processor and motherboard, though.

 

Also, this may be related, but my computer has occasionally been 'freezing' up for a few seconds at a time. It happens every once in a while, and I notice it particularly while I'm playing music, but it occasionally happens while I'm just browsing the internet with no other major tasks opened. When it happens, I hear a spinning up sound (from my hard drive, maybe?)

The hard drive (the non-SSD one) is a carryover from my previous build, might that be the problem?

 

If you're on Win7, Microsoft Security Essentials combined with Windows Defender should do you nicely. MSE is not a resource hog, and once installed pretty much just sits there and does its thing without any hassle on your end.

Only if something's wrong with it. I assume you defrag it regularly? If you are worried about it, might be worth running checkdisk or a diagnostic on it. Hard drive manufacturers usually offer diagnostic tools on their website, that you can download for free for testing drives. If nothing else, that would help you rule out a factor.

Speaking of ruling things out, have you considered temporarily installing another video card, to see if that makes everything go back to normal?

What SSD are you using? They're great things, but way more complicated and complex than platter drives are, and occasionally slowing down is a symptom of an SSD that hasn't managed to keep up its own self-maintenance as it ages. Are your games installed on the SSD as well, or are they on E:\?

 

DO NOT DEFRAG SSD's. Look it up

 

If it was my system I would install Windows on the HD and install the games on the SSD. I don't see where having windows boot fast is of any value. Cpu's don't deteriorate they just stop and the only one I ever had stop was cause I started the computer without a fan/heatsink.

I use Norton Internet Security. You can get 1 user 3 computer license for less than $30 and sometimes free if you don't mind rebates. If anyone tells you Norton is a resource hog run from them and their advice.

What kind of hard drive do you have? RPMs, cache, IDE or Sata?

0 FPS means no playability Does this mean the game starts and stays on one screen?

The intermittent freeze is extremely difficult to diagnose. Don't forget to check your sound system, use the drivers that came on your MOBO disk or updated ones from the MOBO vendor website only.

My guess is the spinning sound is from a dvd or cd rom if there is a disk inside

 

I've got E: scheduled to defrag once a week. I'll do some basic diagnostics on it after I get home from work and see if it's a problem.

I experienced the problems with a different video card, and I bought a brand new one to replace it (the older one was also getting, well, old). No luck.

The SSD was some OCZ 32GB SSD I picked up on a sale from Newegg. I don't recall the specs, unfortunately.

The games are installed to E:.

I know it's a 7200RPM Sata drive, unsure of the cache--it's the oldest component in my system, and it came from a prebuilt.

In the case of StarCraft II, at the beginning of the game (very few objects on screen and acting in the background), my FPS is 60+, with an occasional odd spike down to ~20. Near the end of one game (lots of units in play), the in-game FPS counter shows "0 FPS" and I'm getting less than one frame per second. It's not 0 FPS, but it's unplayable as is.

I'll go through that stuff after work today. I'll uninstall my audio drivers and install only the ones from my MOBO's website and see if that helps.

No disc in tray at the moment. Any idea what else it could be?

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After work, I'm going to tinker around with my audio drivers, check out my E: drive to make sure it's not the problem, and try installing StarCraft II to C: instead to try to rule out my old hard drive possibly being the cause. I'll report back tomorrow and let you know if anything changed. Thanks for all of your help so far, by the way!

 

In the case of StarCraft II, at the beginning of the game (very few objects on screen and acting in the background), my FPS is 60+, with an occasional odd spike down to ~20. Near the end of one game (lots of units in play), the in-game FPS counter shows "0 FPS" and I'm getting less than one frame per second. It's not 0 FPS, but it's unplayable as is.

This is some good info. I don't know what it means though because I am not that astute. It makes me think of memory not being utilized properly. Data that needs to be buffered somewhere for quick use that just isn't working. Have you run memtest86 to check your memory? Alot of the guys do it...I quit bothering cause to me it's a waste, but it will determine if your memory has issues

And you are welcome for the help. I like trying to solve computer problems

 

Someone did the research

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Wi...ender-Malware-User-Account-Control,19059.html

 

Helping is what we're here for.

Please report back and let us know if moving the game to another drive made a difference.

 

Posted from another site:

I was starting to suffer from some performance issues on my desktop PC that were starting to grow irritating. Noting a lot of disc thrashing, it occurred to me that I may have been a little behind in my hard drive maintenance. Sure enough, the drive was pretty darned full, and just as surely, clearing some space made all the difference in the world. On the one hand, it's always fun to contemplate the upgrades that would come with deciding to get a new machine, but on the other hand, it's nice when problems can be solved so simply.