Ingame Framerate issues...(possibly solved?)

[·WídgêT·]

I've been having some weird problems with my framerate lately, and today I've seen the dips first hand. On a normal day before these issues started popping up I would be sailing smoothly at 30 fps, then about a month ago I'd be getting period problems with my framerate dipping down to 5 fps or below for 10-15 seconds before correcting itself. Today when I went to play, those 5 fps dips are happening roughly every 30 seconds for a period of 5 seconds at a time, and my "normal" rate when this isn't happening won't go above 20 fps.

I'm hoping this isn't a virus-type problem due to the fact that the situation seems to be deteriorating. I'm going to run a scan now just to make sure. Any ideas what might cause this?

[Taipan™]

Close xfire when playing Halo. See if it continues.

There is a xfire bug where when people connect/disconnect from your xfire it kills halo framerate. I had this problem and it was becoming very serious since I have about 330 friends so the frame drop was constant. I knew it wasn't hardware not keeping up because any other time I was getting ~800FPS.

I normally reinstall windows like every 6 months so I dont loose performance, when I did do a reinstall of windows it fixed my problem.

If xfire is indeed the reason, then try:

A. Disabling notifications of people connecting/disconnecting
B. Reinstall xfire

EDIT:

Also have you ever tried playing with No Vsync (e.g. 60FPS) it is MUCH more fluid like then 30FPS

[MrMxyzptlk]

I suggest that you run the game totally local - no network/Internet of any kind - to determine where your "framerate issue" lies.

[BFM_saes]

Also have you ever tried playing with No Vsync (e.g. 60FPS) it is MUCH more fluid like then 30FPS

VSYNC should limit the framerate to 60->75Hz for an LCD monitor, or a fair bit higher for a CRT. 32 FPS would be because of some other setting.

As for "smoothness", I personally can't stand turning VSYNC off on many games because of the awful tearing.

[Taipan™]

I never get tearing.

[·WídgêT·]

I'll try out these suggestions tonight, couldn't get to it yesterday because the ESD pad of my computer was acting up and the screen was messed up, but it's all fixed now so I can get back online tonight.

[·WídgêT·]

Ok I think it was my "virus" guess that was the issue...

So 2 nights ago after I determined my issue was infection-based considering this has never happened before (even with countless programs open), I ran a full scan of my computer using MalwareBytes. The program picked up 12 Trojan-related applications running on my computer, which effectively was making my whole computer slow down as a result (this is why I thought it was viral in the first place, because my whole computer was slowing down).

After disposing of these issues and rebooting, I gave my computer a rest, and then the next day my ESD pad went nuts and my screen was messed up. So I had to wait until tonight to test out my theory and see whether it was the Trojans that caused all this. So after getting my computer back today I decided to test what Mxy suggested first, then went through a few of my own. The results:

LAN server (no internet): Perfectly fine, consistently around 25-30 fps, ran a few laps around an empty BG map and no framerate hiccups were spotted.

Full BFM server (with xfire open): Same as above, only this time BG was full (I got lucky there considering the variable was consistent ), and my framerate didn't go lower than 22 fps

Full BFM server (with both vent and xfire open): Another small dip, but it never went below 20 fps.

I didn't spend enough time in the server to see if the problem went away completely, but there is a significant improvement. Hopefully I don't have to deal with anymore Trojan applications