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Periodic frame rate drops in KF and other games

EnoRed

Member
Jan 19, 2011
6
0
I've been noticing this happening in Killing Floor and in a few other games like Monday Night Combat (both Unreal Engine games, so I dunno if that has something to do with it). I'll be playing the game just fine for a while when suddenly my frame rate drops completely. Things start to stutter and frames start skipping until it returns to normal a few seconds later. After that the game runs fine until about a minute later when it happens again. It does it every minute or two, making the game almost unplayable.

These are my basic specs:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5000+ 2.61 GHz
2.00 GB of RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GT 240

They aren't great, but I can run other games just fine like Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead without this happening. Does anyone have suggestions as to what I should do? I've switched off Vsync and reduce mouse lag and that hasn't helped, so short of updating my rig I'm not sure what to do.
 
No. If you thought it might be a factor then you could disable it temporarily. The problem is more likely going to be that you've only got 2 gigs of RAM - if you have a hard drive light on your computer check its activity when the games are running smoothly and when they are stuttering - if there is a lot more activity when it is stuttering then this is probably the cause. You could also try running the games in windowed mode and look at task manager at the amount of physical memory you have free - if this goes above about 85% then you'll likely have this issue as things are swapped from memory onto the hard disk and back again. You could compare this to the amount used when you are playing TF2 and L4D and see if that differs.
 
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You're correct. Windows XP only has a 32-bit version, meaning it has a rather limited amount of allowed addresses. RAM happens to take up a huge amount of addresses, and you'll also need to account for your amount of VRAM (which will always get priority in 32-bit systems over normal RAM), so, for example, if you have a video card with 512 megabytes of VRAM, you'll only be able to use about 3.5 gigabytes of normal RAM (though, in actuality, as much as .25 GB may be taken up by other non-RAM addresses)

Add at least another gigabyte and you should be good. I have 8 gigabytes of RAM and killing floor only ever uses about 2.5 GB for me.

If you feel confident doing it, you could install a 64-bit flavor of Linux which allows for up to 128 GB of RAM (hardware limitations mean you won't be able to add this much, though - haha - settle for 8 to 16 GB) Granted, I don't know if wine supports Killing Floor
 
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Oh my God...
htwuoh.gif


Ignore the Linux suggestion.

Run defrag and perform other maintenance procedures first.
 
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I'm pretty sure I've managed to run the game with a consistent frame rate on the highest settings with only 2GB of memory, but I don't usually do so since my graphics card can't handle it. I doubt it's a fragmentation problem since the game does little reading during game-play unless you have pre-caching turned off. I'm guessing it's either a memory problem (since perhaps the latest version uses more memory than when I tested it on full settings) or something running in the background.
 
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