FPS Drop In Half-Life: Counter-Strike

[The_Emperor]

I've posted this thread in other discussions, but the problem has developed, and I found no reply.

I've recently installed the game, and for some strange reason, I sometimes have FPS drop (from MAX to 20 for no reason).
How can I fix this problem? What causes it?

 

[SNGX1275]

CPU Speed? Vid Card? RAM? Memory? HD?

Could be background tasks such as antivirus using system resources for a bit, could be a lot of things, we'll need more specifics for a diagnosis.

 

[The_Emperor]

Sorry, these things are usually in my sig

===
Intel Pentium III 803 MHz
ASUS CUV4X
384MB of SDRAM
PNY GF4 Ti4400 (300/650) [40.71]
SoundBlaster Live! Value
Windows XP Professional [SP1]
===

BTW, I've had this problem on Win2k/GeForce 2 MX as well. A format didn't help, so I'm thinking a hardware conflict or something...

 

[Tweakster]

i find with geforce2 / 3 based cards higher resolutions produce higher Fps. Are your ps in other games low and have u tryed reinstalling? (Uninstall halflife, delete counterstrike etc after saving your configs).

Use fps_max 100 (might be max_fps 100) in console.
Get back to us please.

 

[SilentNoise]

Allthough HL is very old & a 800MHZ cpu might be more then enough to run it smoothly, CS is a bit different then HL.

In CS you can have a lot of action on screen ( miltiple players, explosions, etc ) that HL doesn't have so it might be your CPU playing as a limiting factor here.

I play CS on a 800 Duron / GF3 TI200 & the FPS can sometimes drop down to 20/30. That's with no FSAA & trilinear filtering ( no anisotropic ).

 

[The_Emperor]

The FPS drop can happen even if I'm staring at the wall...

 

[Arris]

If you host a lan game with only you in it does the fps drop still happen. My friend runs an 800Mhz Athlon with a TNT2 m64 card and he only drops from 35 frames per second if there is a smoke grenade. Try the local hosted game and get back to us. Also check your System for any IRQ conflicts.

 

[mrslippyfist]

Not really related, but downlad the counter strike reality pack, it has all new skins, gun models and sounds, it looks and sounds soooo much better, but has more polygons, so would probably slow things even more

 

[The_Emperor]

It happens in a LAN game too, yeah.

 

[Arris]

Check your system hardware settings from the control panel.
Does anything show as a conflict (Yellow exclaimation mark?).
Otherwise this seems very strange behaviour. If it still happens in a lan game when facing a wall then it has nothing to do with drivers/video card. Most likely the video card is sharing a IRQ with another device and the drop to twenty is due to the interrupt being utilised by the other device. Is it just a slow down when you experience this or is it more of a stutter? Check you systems IRQs anyway and see if there is anything marked as a problem.

 

[The_Emperor]

The IRQ conflict shouldn't happen in WinXP...

 

[zen8000]

CUV4X and IRQ Sharing

The_Emperor:

I have a very similar configuration to yours and have had the same problems with periodic frame rate drop. Though it only happens in certain games, it know that it can be HUGELY annoying.

MY SYSTEM:
--
Pentium III 800
ASUS CUV4X
256 MB SDRAM
ATI Radeon 7500 64 MB DDR
Soundblaster Live! Value
D-LINK DFE-530TX NIC
Windows XP Pro
--

For a long time I thought it was an inadequate video card (I had an Abit NVidia GeForce MX 200), so I got the ATI Radeon 7500 - still had the same problem.

After researching and messing with this for a long time, this is what I have found:

It is definately caused by IRQ sharing, probably a conflict between the Soundblaster and video (since it seems to happen to me whenever a new environmental sound is introduced), but obviously connected with the CUV4X.

I recently did the "quick and dirty" switch to "Standard PC" from "ACPI Compliant" in the Device Manager and tested the games I had problems with. Once back in Windows, my video card, sound card and NIC were all on seperate IRQs and in the games the problem was completely resolved - I had no slowdown regardless of the sound, intense video loads or NIC activity.

That said, I now have a few other problems, including wierd sporadic system beeps under heavy HD activity and I now have to manually turn off the box after shutting down Windows.

Apparently, the best approach to killing IRQ sharing is to do a clean install of XP, press F5 during the "Setup is inspecting your system's configuration" screen and choosing "Standard PC" right from the beginning. And before you do this, make sure your BIOS is set to PnP BIOS = no. I was just too lazy to reinstall all my programs, etc.

There are tons of sites that address IRQ sharing if you are interested - just do a search. Microsoft has written several articles about it too. Here is one place to start: http://www.anandtech.com/guides/viewfaq.html?i=47.

Hope that helps!

Later
zen

 

[Nick]

glad to see your problem resolved!

 

[Darth Shiv]

Originally posted by The_Emperor
The IRQ conflict shouldn't happen in WinXP...

Well as Arris says it could just be a IRQ sharing problem. It's pretty rare to see an IRQ conflict as such nowadays. I would try changing the slot of your SB Live. But be careful because this *can* cause major headaches (changing back to the original slot should work fine if you encounter trouble). I have had my computer not boot due to a Creative card being in a slot it didn't agree with.

 

[Arris]

Originally posted by Darth Shiv
Well as Arris says it could just be a IRQ sharing problem. It's pretty rare to see an IRQ conflict as such nowadays. I would try changing the slot of your SB Live. But be careful because this *can* cause major headaches (changing back to the original slot should work fine if you encounter trouble). I have had my computer not boot due to a Creative card being in a slot it didn't agree with.

I originally said IRQ conflict but I haven't been using 2000 for very long on my home system so I'm not completely up to speed on how it handles interrupts. But IRQ sharing can cause problems as bad as conflicts used to give. The information from Darth Shiv and Zen is good and I advise following the recommendations. In the Device maanger check to see if your graphics card is sharing IRQ with any other device in your system, because really you want to have your graphics card on an IRQ by itself.

Zen8000 gives some good information of ways to solve IRQ sharing problems. In my current system I have my sound card in the last PCI slot as it was sharing IRQ with the video card causing pauses in games. Some bios allow reallocation of IRQs to PCI slots (including mines but I just moved the card to save creating any more problems). I'd give this a try and if that doesn't help then a reinstallation in the manner Zen8000 details could be worth a shot.

 

[cslord15]

Another thing: Try going to your config.cfg file in your cstrike folder. Add the command line: gl_d3dflip 1. That helped me with random slowdowns when I was running CS on my Ti4200 (it would jump from 60-5 in a matter of seconds.)