Occasional Slowdown 5FPS

[vanilla]

Hey there! I have good settings for my hardware, running BF at around 90fps with few action on the server and 30fps when being hit by an orbital strike.
Since a few days however, I will suddenly get really low FPS, around 3 to 5 for maybe 10 seconds. It will be ok after that, but it soon is going to strike again making the whole game unplayable.
I can't see what is causing this since I normally get good FPS, as said around 90 and in-action 30ish to 50.
I'm kinda afraid that my GFX Card is getting old, it's been under pressure for about 2 years.
Here are my specs:

500 Watts PSU Corsair
Asus Rock Mainboard
AMD 64 X2 Dualcore 4400+
GeForce 7800 GT 512MB
1GB Ram

Note that these problems just occured a few days and I was able to play mostly flawlessly with that rig over the last 2 years.

[imported_Field]

Hey there! I have good settings for my hardware, running BF at around 90fps with few action on the server and 30fps when being hit by an orbital strike.
Since a few days however, I will suddenly get really low FPS, around 3 to 5 for maybe 10 seconds. It will be ok after that, but it soon is going to strike again making the whole game unplayable.
I can't see what is causing this since I normally get good FPS, as said around 90 and in-action 30ish to 50.
I'm kinda afraid that my GFX Card is getting old, it's been under pressure for about 2 years.
Here are my specs:

500 Watts PSU Corsair
Asus Rock Mainboard
AMD 64 X2 Dualcore 4400+
GeForce 7800 GT 512MB
1GB Ram

Note that these problems just occured a few days and I was able to play mostly flawlessly with that rig over the last 2 years.

Yeah that was one thing that i was wondering myself was if and how long it would take for your certain video card to wear out and manifest itself in poor performance. I am also having some oddly bad framerate issues and would hate for it to be my card caus i dont have enough money to get another one:dead:

[vanilla]

Whats your GFX?

[sempf]

i did got the same problem(it solved with a new gfx card). so it can make a difference. and maybe you just got a virus. it happened to me a few times and it will make your performance look bad.

[vanilla]

I checked for viruses, but didn't find any. I will now try finding some spyware. But if this doesn't solve the problem, I really would like to know Fields GFX.

[Basil.]

Did you try other games you play to see if they drop in fps? Did you install a new driver for your video card. When i installed the newest driver for ati cards it was bad and had to go back to a older one.

[OriJuice]

Battlefield tends to run odd partitions in the background from what I understand; and that may be the culprit. With only 1 gig ram I can't see much anything being to good to run in the background (like mine when I play BF). It may be a PB related error (With PB running background activities between A/B and K exe's. Just my wild guess though. Did you update your computer with any new software lately that may impact performance? Like new Anti Virus, Firewall or what have you.

[vanilla]

I play other games and they do not drop in FPS.
Supreme Commander and Live For Speed both run fine all the time.
It's only BF2142 that gets these slowdowns.
I can only hope it is a Ram related issue as OriJuice pointed out.
I can't remember doing anything special to my computer, no. Anti Virus is always turned off when I play Battlefield. Also I tried to play without FRAPS, with the same result unfortunetly.
However, I have updated my GFX with the newest BETA drivers from nvidia.com. I will try downloading the latest stable release and report. If nothing works out, I may try reducing the quality of the graphics. Hear ya later.

[ccb056]

Graphics cards, when they go bad, do not cause you to drop fps. LOL When graphics cards go bad, they stop displaying alltogether, or display artifacts.

I'd recommend updating drivers, running CCleaner, clearing the bf2142 cache, and disabling any services that run in the background when you play (viruses, tojans, etc)

[Zarious]

My wife was getting something similar to this (yes she plays too) any time she went inside of a titan. Her frames would drop to almost nothing. She cleared out her cache and it seemed to fix it. Wouldn't hurt to give it a try before you drop green on a new card.

[vanilla]

I cleaned the Cache. I used CCleaner. I installed BF on the C partition.
I tried to lower the graphics. I updated PB. I updated my drivers to the newest BETA drivers. I downgraded my drivers to the current stable release.
I scanned my PC 3 times with my Avira Antivirus software. I used Lavasofts Ad-Aware and Spybot Search and Destroy.
I still get the slowdowns every 1 or 2 minutes for approximately 10 seconds each time.
I also encounter lots of graphical glitches. And once in a while the whole game freezes and suddenly looks like some infant used too much paint on the game.

[Sir. bzb]

Random colourful graphics after all that are not a good sign, that is the sort of thing a card on the way out can do. Equally bad drivers can do the same thing and i suppose high temps could do.
Try different drivers, lots of different drivers and if it continues to provide 'interesting' graphics then yeah, you might want to start looking at what cards are on offer.