Unreal Tournament 3 - 8700M GT

[MPQC]

Well. I just recently bought Unreal Tournament 3. Before I bought it, I did check the system requirements, and it said I'm good to go. So I started playing it - and it's really great fun. I get anywhere from 30-120FPS, depending if the map is open or closed. But I've got a problem with lag spikes - every few seconds, my fps will just spike downwards. (This happens regardless of map - it happens anywhere.) If I'm in a 100FPS zone, it'll spike down to 50. If I'm in a 30, it'll spike to 25. If I'm in a 60, it'll spike down to 30-40. There really doesn't seem to be a set amount for the spike - it just goes down, really. It also only seems to happen in this game, which is why I'm finding it odd.

So before I came here, I tried turning off pretty much everything. I followed the Tweak Guide to turn down everything. And I gained some fps, which I do enjoy, but does not remove the spikes. I really don't mind the lowest graphics, on pretty much any game, but it's quite a pain to have spikes, especially in a fast paced shooter like UT3.

==================================For TL;DR - Start Here==================================

So, here's my laptops specs.

Model: Toshiba X200

RAM: 2GB

CPU: Intel Core 2 DUO CPU @ 1.66Ghz

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce 8700M GT

If you want any other info, I'd most likely be able to find you it. So, now that the intro's done, let's get into a driver update. I did the Driver Agent scan, and found my driver was out of date. (My last update was roughly a year ago - as I've had no issues until now, so I haven't had any motivation to update.. If it's not broken, don't fix it!) I'm currently on 176.26.

There are so many different drivers to choose from, and I'm really not sure where I should start. I read through the explained drivers post, as I'm on a laptop, I'd say I should start around the 187.xx drivers. Is this correct? If not.. Which drivers should I start at?

[Guest helpfulguy]

Give the latest driver a shot -- I think ver 195.62 is a good place to start.

[d3v]

My 8600M GT did that under XP.

I found that setting "Maximum pre-rendered frames" to "1" solved it with drivers from about a year-or-so ago.

Setting it to "0" would crash my computer.

I could then crank all the quality settings up and still maintain reasonable performance.

Before I altered this setting it would just glitch every few seconds, whichever quality settings I used.

With later drivers I found I could set it to "0" without problem.

Nowadays I just set it as "0" habitually so I wouldn't know if things have changed with the periodic frame hanging since I've been using drivers for Windows 7 x64

Edited December 13, 2009 by d3v

[d3v]

Actually; possibly scratch my recommendation.

It doesn't really sound like the same issue.

If not caused by your particular choice of driver, it sounds like you may have an external process interfering periodically.

Edited December 13, 2009 by d3v

[MPQC]

I had previously tried turning off my AV's and the like - though not everything. I'll give that a go, and I'll give your way a go (Probably won't work, but hey, I might as well try.) Then I'll check out this latest driver, see how that works out.

-----

Alright. I gave it a go - didn't work (as suspected.)

I tried disabling all processes (well, all non-essential. AV's, explorer, anything that I could get away with turning off.) This did nothing, either.

I just tried updating to 195.62, and it doesn't seem to be effecting it either. But it seems to be worse then my previous version, as my screen is constantly flickering, every 30 or so seconds. (Just a simple flash, it looks like random lines.) So I'm going to revert back to my old version..

Edited December 14, 2009 by MPQC