I've been experiencing a very strange slowdown problem while running some games on my Sonoma 760 laptop.
The problem occurs in FEAR and a couple other 3D games where the frame rates drop to about 20-30% of normal values for a couple minutes and then bounce back for five minutes or so. Nothing in the game specifically causes this as it will occur in a variety of situations regardless of how complex the graphics scene at the time is or what performance settings I have configured for the game.
After using graphics card and CPU monitoring software and manually setting the CPU to run at full throttle, 2.0GHz in my case, I noticed in the Windows XP task manager performance tab that when the phenomenon occurs the CPU usage drops from 100% down to less than 10% while the game continues to run. Disabling non essential background tasks has no effect and there seems to be no unusual activity by other apps in task manager. The game continues to run, just very very slowly.
Seeing the CPU usage drop like that and logging the graphics temps, speed and CPU temps and speed has ruled out that high temperatures are causing certain components like the graphics card or CPU to throttle down for a short while. The CPU isn't throttling down here, it's just getting lazy and not doing it's job for a couple minutes during the game. Very strange.
I've searched around and discovered similar reports in various games with various systems and graphics cards with the only common thread being a late model Pentium M Sonoma processor. I'm going to assume that all the other people were running WinXP but I'm not certain. I'm running XP Pro SP2 and have a 7800 Go GTX graphics card.
I wonder if this is a Windows compatibility problem, a hardware issue, a driver issue, or a motherboard chipset issue.
I would like to see if anyone else has encountered or heard of this problem.
The problem occurs in FEAR and a couple other 3D games where the frame rates drop to about 20-30% of normal values for a couple minutes and then bounce back for five minutes or so. Nothing in the game specifically causes this as it will occur in a variety of situations regardless of how complex the graphics scene at the time is or what performance settings I have configured for the game.
After using graphics card and CPU monitoring software and manually setting the CPU to run at full throttle, 2.0GHz in my case, I noticed in the Windows XP task manager performance tab that when the phenomenon occurs the CPU usage drops from 100% down to less than 10% while the game continues to run. Disabling non essential background tasks has no effect and there seems to be no unusual activity by other apps in task manager. The game continues to run, just very very slowly.
Seeing the CPU usage drop like that and logging the graphics temps, speed and CPU temps and speed has ruled out that high temperatures are causing certain components like the graphics card or CPU to throttle down for a short while. The CPU isn't throttling down here, it's just getting lazy and not doing it's job for a couple minutes during the game. Very strange.
I've searched around and discovered similar reports in various games with various systems and graphics cards with the only common thread being a late model Pentium M Sonoma processor. I'm going to assume that all the other people were running WinXP but I'm not certain. I'm running XP Pro SP2 and have a 7800 Go GTX graphics card.
I wonder if this is a Windows compatibility problem, a hardware issue, a driver issue, or a motherboard chipset issue.
I would like to see if anyone else has encountered or heard of this problem.
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