Graphics card causing 100% cpu useage?

For about 2 months now, every time my laptop does something involving graphics (usually playing games or watching a video on youtube, or anything involving Flash), I'll notice that my CPU usage spikes to 100%, which causes slowdown, i.e.: gameplay/videos will be slow and choppy, sometimes freezing for a few seconds before resuming. It usually does this in intervals, I'll have a few seconds of normal gameplay/video and then the freezing. Considering that this also happens when I play offline games, I'm suspecting that it's my graphics card that is the culprit.

For reference, I'm using an ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics display adapter on my laptop. I've tried updating the driver not too long ago, which ended up installing the ATI CCC, but the problem still persists. I haven't had this before and the games/videos used to work fine.

 

Hi Ricepigeon and welcome.

Have you cleared out the clutter with Windows Disk Cleanup? How much free disk space do you have?

Have you scanned for malware?

Note that notebooks (in spite of what the maker's marketing weenies would like us to believe) do not make good gaming machines. Cooling a gaming PC in a big full-sized case is a challenge. Now imagine the challenge a notebook case has to keep the innards cool. You need to open every access cover and cavity and ensure there is not a blanket of heat trapping dust and dirt.

Note too it is unlikely you have a graphics card, but rather the graphics solution is integrated with the notebook's motherboard. This means it is likely sharing system RAM. Depending on how much RAM you have, during high demands (like gaming), the Page File on the slow hard disk may be very active - which affects performance. More RAM may relieve that - depending on how much you have to start with.

 

Does your laptop has cache?

 

I periodically run malware scans every week, one is running as I'm typing this. So far I have about 61.6 GB of free space (approx 45% of my 137 GB Harddrive) and nothing has shown up yet.

Not sure what you mean by this, or how to access/clear it.

 

I am not sure lisajohn is a sincere poster for the question really makes no sense, hence your lack of understanding of it.

When it spikes, you need to look in Task Manager (or Process Monitor from the Performance tab in TM) and see what process is eating up those resources.

 

When I'm watching a video on youtube, or doing something else that requires flash, the two programs in task manager I'm noticing that spike cpu usage are audiodg.exe and flashplayerplugin_11_3_300_265.exe *32 (the latter of which uses anything in the neighborhood of 110,000k to 134,000k memory). Sometimes Firefox.exe will be up there, but usually doesn't use as much as the other two.

Anything else such as games appears to be the application itself thats hogging CPU.

 

I might suggest using the Adobe FlashPlayer Uninstaller to totally remove all traces of Flash, then run the Adobe FlashPlayer installer again and see what happens.

 

I would certainly advise the uninstall of your current Flash version, followed by a full install of version 10.3 from the Flash archives.

If this does not fix the problem, please fill in the blanks about your version of Windows and which web browsers you experience the problem with. Also your security software may have some bearing, please list it.

If you use Task Manager to look into the problem, ensure you go to View > Show kernel times in the Performance tab, now any rise in the red line above 2 blocks or so indicates something closer to the Windows kernel, like drivers, are pushing the % high.

Check that the audio subsystem isn't using any kind of 'effect', like tunnel, concert hall, etc.

 

Just downgraded my flash player and, while it alleviates the problem a little bit, the lagging and high CPU usage still happens. When it does, I'm noticing that the red line stays between 2 and 4 blocks, even when its not at 100%.

Also, not sure how to check the audio subsystem for any effects you mentioned, but I don't ever recall doing anything like that so my guess is it probably isn't, unless I'm wrong.

I'm currently using Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit and Firefox 14.0.1, and using Avast 7.0.1456

 

Use DPC Latency Checker to see if DPC's are part of your problem, the instructions on the page will pretty much walk you through what you need to do if they are.

 

You can use task manager to monitor ..but i mean you have cache memory or install cache memory a part of the memory usage will be taken by cache memory and reduce weight on others..

 

Just used the DPC Latency Checker, and everything seemed normal until I started getting the high CPU usage again, which it then said

I tried disabling the audio, display, and network adapters and it seems that the high latency still occurs.