getting lower FPS than usual!

Ok, well i am an fps player (mainly counter strike source) and recently i got a new computer and i bought a nvidia 9600gt for it. The performance was going really well for the first few days and i was getting 250+ frames per second (fps) in the video stress test, but recently i have been getting worse game performance and getting even lower than 190 fps average in video stress test, i am with vista and i think it could possibly be a driver problem and im not sure.

Need advice, thanks.

 

Have you installed anything new recently (After you installed the card)? Any services that might be running in the background?

Have you run a virus scan? Defragged your harddrive?

 

ive installed mIRC and i think that is about it after i got the card installed, also ive run a full virus scan with norton antivirus and nothing detected, just defragmenting my harddrive now.

 

Hmm... When you're running the game, alt-tab out of it and hit Ctrl-Alt-Del. Open the task manager and look at the processes list. Check to make sure that something else isn't trying to suck up >5% of your CPU time.

 

yeah, nothing else is using up 5% so i dont know, i also did a virus scan and a spybot scan nothing came up for spybot but a tracking cookie at low risk came up for virus scan.. after i did ANOTHER virus scan.

thanks for help so far by the way

 

You wondered whether it might be a driver problem. Did you update the driver recently/are you running the latest driver for Vista?

Also, humor me and make sure your case isn't full of dust.

 

its a new computer so its not full of dust, also i installed the drivers on the disk that came with the graphics card, so im really not sure.

 

Hi there sometimes the driver supplied with the card is not neccessarily the latest. Depends how long the card was on the shelf.

 

Try upgrading/downgrading your drivers until you find your best performance. With older games such as Source games, the latest drivers might not yield the best performance.

I do strongly advise against downgrading to drivers released prior to your card's release though, the drivers could end up not working at all in that case.

Honestly, if your game experience isn't hindered, I see no cause for alarm. If you do get spikes, (IE your FPS going from ~200 down to 30-60, that IS cause for alarm).

 

Also, Source games do tend to be configured to run well on lower specs, so they may have released a patch recently that killed a bit of your FPS, or implemented a new feature. Try reading their patch notes.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x86_175.16_whql.html

If that's not your driver, you might try downloading that.

 

that link you sent me if 32 bit i am running on 64 bit i am pretty sure, the vista disk says "this disk contains 64-bit software only"

also if theres any other drivers i should download please send me links for them

 

Try this, then.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x64_175.16_whql.html