Why do I have lag (FPS) spikes when I'm playing games on my computer? [closed]

Question

On every game I play I get lag spikes that drop the frame rate and lags. I've disabled my antivirus, MSN, AIM etc but I still have lag.

Any ideas what I can do to stop these spikes?

Answer 1

A quick check of review benchmarks (like http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/giga9600gt/12.html - search for gt 9600 <game-of-your-choice> and you'll find more) your graphics card is not great at high resolutions. You could:

1. try reduce the resolution your games run at
2. try reduce options that cause other bottlenecks (reduce or turn of AA, reduce texture detail, that sort of thing) if the game has such options
3. some combination of the above
4. failing that, upgrade the card (though if I'm guessing right the "M" in 9600M implied that you are using a laptop - if so then replacing the card is not an option)

It may also be that you have a heat problem and the card, or your CPU, is occasionally throttling itself down to cool off a little. This is more likely in a laptop than a desktop as cooling is more of an issue in confined spaces and laptops tend to be configured to be more aggressive about cooling at the expense of performance, but given the benchmark scores found after a quick search I think it is likely you are simple asking too much from a 9600.

To be sure, I suggest you edit your question to include more details of the games you are trying to play and the settings you are using and other settings you have tried. Though as this is a purely gaming related question you might find it gets close fairly soon anyway.

Answer 2

1) Don't expect a laptop to play 'system-intensive programs' anywhere near as good as a desktop with an independant video card.

2) Try Exiting Explorer (click start orb, then ctrl-shift-right-click, then click [Exit Explorer]) and then launching your 'system-intensive program' via task manager (Ctrl-Shift-Esc, File-->[New Task]).

Explorer eats a lot of memory and processor.

Answer 3

If you think the lag is network related, and you're using wireless, there's an issue with Windows Vista which may be present in Windows 7.

Every minute or so, Windows searches for available wireless networks. This isn't noticable if you're just browsing the Internet. But, you may experience network lag during these wireless searches.

There are a few ways to deal with this problem, but the easiest way is to use a utility called Vista Anti-Lag:

http://vista-anti-lag.software.informer.com/