Attack of the Crashing Framerate

[Occulus]

Crossposted from the Computer Help and Support forum.

Riddle me this:

NV 6800 GS 256Mb PCI-e on an MSI K8N Neo Platinum with 1.5Gb of RAM, running an AMD Athlon 64-bit 3500+ CPU, with WinXP Pro 64-bit Edition installed (Service Pack 1, so Dxdiag says), all latest BIOSes and video card updates (vid driver Nvidia Forceware version 91.36).

Recently, on the above machine, I've notcied periodic framerate crashes in 3D games. Normal system operation is unaffected. Said crashes usually occur when changing camera angles, although I've seen it happen just sitting there not actually panning or anything. An example would be the FRAPS framerate display in Black and White 2; the framerate will, after a few minutes, drop from about 65-70 to 15 for about 45 seconds or so, then jump back up for a few more minutes before crashing down again. This also occurs in older games, such as Command & Conquer: Generals, its Zero Hour expansion, Rollercoaster Tycoon 3, etc. I haven't tried Half-Life 2 or Oblivion yet... I'm afraid of what I'll find.

Some forum posts I've read regarding these sorts of issues refer to poor implementation of shader model 3.0 as the culprit, but I doubt that... the games I listed have always run buttery smooth, without the framerate crash I'm describing... is anyone else having this problem with the 9xxx series of drivers for this card? Or is it a problem between my motherboard and my video card?

ANY help would be appreciated. My games are becoming unplayable until I fix this...

(I do have Fedora Core 5 installed; I'm about to try installing UT2K4 on it and see if I have the same issue. If I do, it may be a hardware problem... but I personally think this is a software issue. Please note, I've tried using multiple driver releases- yes, I used drivercleaner- in trying to fix this issue, but there has been no effect.)

EDIT: I just played Neverwinter Nights in Fedora Core 5 and noticed no framerate crash. I'm thinking this is a driver issue.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

1. Does this happen when you are NOT running FRAPS? I find that program,

even when running in the background and not making a video, it has a significant impact on framerate compared to not having it. And my system components are significantly higher (4800+AMD, SLI Geoforce 7800's x2 etc.).

[jayfish]

2. What's Your HDD Activity Like When This Occurs?

Jay

[CabalPowered]

3. My first guess would be some compatibality with vid card and 64 bit

I just installed several servers with Nvidia chipsets and W2k3 server 64 bit and had a hell of a time getting everything to work. Nvidia's support for 64 bit is a bit weak right now. In one instance, the drivers I downloaded were labelled 64 bit but didn't contain any 64 bit drivers.

If you have a copy of 32 bit XP, I'd try a dual boot setup and see if you can recreate the crash in a 32 bit environment. On the games themselves.. I've always had problems with CCZH but mostly multiplayer and not graphics problems. RRT3 has a horrible frame rates when in night mode. That's half the reason I quit playing that game.