WHY!!?!?

[AcrossSkies]

When I am playing games my framerate is fine but completely randomly it will slow down. I play wow and usually have around 115-150 fps in open world and in heavy pvp combat maybe 73-85 but randomly no matter where I am sometime it will go down to 35-40 fps for no reason and I have checked my cpu and ram out using process explorer and nothing is changing so what the heck? Is it a virus? Much help would be appreciated. Thanks

 

[jlee]

Scheduled antivirus scan? Does it happen at the same time every day?

 

[DominionSeraph]

Why don't you have vsync on?

 

[CottonRabbit]

Video card throttling due to overheating? I had a gtx 285 that did that when my room got warm.

 

[AcrossSkies]

Why have vsync on? and my scheduled virus scan isnt at this time so :?

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

Is the game on an SSD or a mechanical hard drive? It could be that when it comes time to stream textures or other data from the drive if you have a normal HDD it just can't keep up.

Why have vsync on? and my scheduled virus scan isnt at this time so :?

The reason that you would want vsync is that it reduces tearing. Basically, the refresh rate of your monitor is 60Hz (or 75Hz, or whatever), and whenever the framerate of your game is above that, you will get instances when the monitor refreshes and your GPU hasn't fully rendered the frame that is supposed to be shown, so it just pushes it out onto the screen as is. It's most noticeable in first person shooters, when you're turning quickly or there's a lot of rapidly changing stuff on the screen; you see a kind of flickering in the bottom half of the screen where sometimes the frames are rendered correctly and sometimes it's just blank. Most times, though, I don't really notice it that much. Performance-wise, it doesn't have any theoretical negative impact; your monitor will only display 60 frames a second anyway, and vsync improves the average 'quality' of those frames.

 

[wuliheron]

Without knowing even your system specs we could guess all day and get nowhere.

 

[boozie]

My money is on overheating.

 

[McWatt]

You didn't mention the duration of the fps drop - if it's for a fraction of a second, it's probably texture loading, as stated above. You can eliminate that slowdown and others by enabling DX11 in the graphics menu, which surprisingly and delightfully makes a major positive performance improvement in WoW.

 

[gothamhunter]

Why have vsync on? and my scheduled virus scan isnt at this time so :?

I never understand why people won't turn on V-sync. It removes screen tearing and keeps your GPU from going overboard when it's unneeded.

You get 120fps? Sorry to say that it doesnt matter, unless your monitor can handle seeing that many, and my guess is that it's a nice 60Hz monitor that would benefit greatly from having Vsync on. Have a 120Hz monitor? Cool, then you might be better off not turning it on.

A good example of where it helps - have any of you played alien swarm? It's a free game on Steam. If you don't have vsync turned on, well at least for a few of my friends and myself, it would render parts of the game too fast; I was getting almost 1000fps on the menu screen. Because of this, my GPU was grinding away to calculate those, and made it jump from 43 degrees to 104 degrees in about 2 minutes and BSOD'd my computer.

Turn on vsync and walah, a steady 60fps.

It's old, but here's a nice explaination of Vsync:
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=928593

 

[Red Storm]

I used to have what appeared to be random lag in multiplayer Source games, and then I found out it was the Windows wireless service doing a quick scan for signals every minute or so. Once I got that fixed, no more lag.

Not sure if WoW suffers from this. Could you provide more details on the slowdowns and how often they occur? Do you notice a pattern (every few minutes on the dot), or is it purely random?