Graphics Quetion

[Shas aia Toriia]

When playing on the PC, I've noticed that games tend to start off with frame rate issues, even when forced to play on settings that I know are below what my computer can handle.
However, as I play that more often, the game speeds up and I can increase settings back up to what I'm used to playing on, so know I have two questions.

1. Does anybody know what causes this?

2. Is there any way I can avoid the laggy period at the beginning of the game?

[Domochevsky]

Uh... are you running anything in the background? Are you using a laptop? Is there something special about your gear? Your post is lacking in details. >_>

[AlterForm]

Crazy theory:

Upon startup, your games are generating large amounts of temporary files, which your antivirus attempts to scan, thereby choking your processor, and killing your framerate.

The only place I have ever of this happening, however, is in TF2, and even then it would continue through the entirety of playing the game and not simply slow/stop.

[Shas aia Toriia]

Uh... are you running anything in the background? Are you using a laptop? Is there something special about your gear? Your post is lacking in details. >_>

Sorry about that.
Can't think of anything out of the ordinary running in the background. I have some anti-virus software and stuff like that, but that's about it.
Nothing special about my gear. Just what came from the factory, for the most part.
Not running this on a laptop.

And Alter, its funny you should mention TF2, because that was one of the games I've noticed the largest changes on. It used to be I had all the settings turned down as low as possible with the smallest resolution. Now, however, I've got everything on high at 1280x1024.

[lesser_minion]

I'm not sure exactly how graphics-intensive videogames are designed, but it's possible that caching is at fault. I wouldn't be surprised if assets were only being loaded the first time they're needed, so early on you're going to get a lot of reading from the hard disk.

I know Unreal Engine 3 games don't load all of their textures straight away -- sometimes, you even end up with an 'unfinished' scene where some of the textures haven't actually been applied. I suspect that has the same cause.

A lot of scripting languages also become faster the second or third time the script is run. It might not make a difference (the reason why scripting languages are used in the first place is that interpreting a scripting language is not usually the main bottleneck).

[Emlyn]

My guess is eithe anti-virus or the computer is tqkin a while to read files from your hard drive and write them to ram.

[Erloas]

How much RAM do you have in your computer? Also what do you have for a video card.
How long does it take for things to start running more smoothly? A few minutes, or quite a while? Does it matter if you start a game up right away after booting up, or if you spend some time surfing the net or doing other things first? If you play a game for a while and it gets better, then quit the game and start it back up a little bit later does it run sluggish at first still or does it run better right from the start? How about if you switch to a different game?


I'm thinking it is probably a case of limited RAM and/or too many programs running in the background, and it takes a while for the game to get everything it needs loaded into memory, so until then it requires a lot of calls to the hard drive. How many processes does your computer say are running when you open up the Task Manager?

[valadil]

My guess would be paging. Simply put, the computer can only hold a limited number of things in RAM. When it fill up, some of those end up on the hard drive in virtual memory. Figuring out which programs are active and need to be in memory can be tricky and the computer juggles things back and forth. When your game starts up it wants most of your RAM, so other programs (windows, AV, a browser, etc) get dumped into virtual memory.

How much memory do you have in your computer anyway?

[Shas aia Toriia]

How much RAM do you have in your computer? Also what do you have for a video card.
How long does it take for things to start running more smoothly? A few minutes, or quite a while? Does it matter if you start a game up right away after booting up, or if you spend some time surfing the net or doing other things first? If you play a game for a while and it gets better, then quit the game and start it back up a little bit later does it run sluggish at first still or does it run better right from the start? How about if you switch to a different game?
I'm thinking it is probably a case of limited RAM and/or too many programs running in the background, and it takes a while for the game to get everything it needs loaded into memory, so until then it requires a lot of calls to the hard drive. How many processes does your computer say are running when you open up the Task Manager?

Alright, system specs are as follows:
Dual 2.8 processor
3 gb RAM
NVidia 240 GT
Windows Vista 32 bit

Generally, after a few hours of playing the game at lag, it speeds up to normal speeds. From that point on it stays nice and fast forever, regardless of quitting or switching games. Never tried uninstalling and restarting though.
Also, Task Manager says I'm running 73 processes at once, if that helps.

And to Valadil, I have 3gb of RAM, 250gb on my hard drive, of which some 20 or 30gb is open.

[Emlyn]

3 gb of ram and vista isn't great, but that should work. Try defragmentig your hard drive, it's possible the game files have fragmented. Also killing some of the running processes wouldn't go amiss, look for processes running under your account that aren't critical. Logging other users off if you don't already would be helpful as well. A virus scan couldn't hurt either, run it in safe mode to be sure it's effective. A couple other thugs you could do are shut the computer off before you play so RAM is cleared, and check to make sure the page file, virtual memory, is set to 6 gb.

[Erloas]

73 running processes is quite a lot... my work computer I'm on right now has 31 and thats including excel, word, calculator, outlook, and adobe acrobat. Of course its also XP. Though I think even on my computer at home running 7, I don't think I have more then 40ish, most of which are Windows processes. How many of them are under the your username instead of system, network services, or local services, especially when you first boot your computer and haven't done anything else.

If it takes a few hours to get up to speed... thats something weird. Loading times and swap files I would figure would be settled in 10-15 minutes at most.

First thing I would do is remove everything you don't actually use that is preloading. Adobe and Apple just love to have things pre-loading all of the time even if its something you rarely use (I stopped using quicktime years ago... and luckily so did everyone else, and I despise iTunes, acrobat does it a lot too). They are far from the only ones, google is getting pretty bad about it too.
And if this is a pre-built computer and you haven't done a re-install of windows then chances are Dell (or whomever, they all do) has loaded 10 different programs that no one ever uses and simply makes the computer run slow. Its actually almost faster and easier to do a re-install rather then trying to un-install all of the programs, but for some people its too much work.

First thing I would do is run MSCONFIG (type it into the run/search bar on the start menu), go to the startup tab and disable everything you don't use constantly. Nothing you disable that way is system critical, though things like Nvidia's control panel, and messenger programs you might use all the time can be worth keeping. If you don't know what something is, then disable it, you can always re-enable things later if need be.

General things like running a hard drive defrag, as Emlyn suggested, could always help. And run something like Malwarebytes, AVG, Avair, or several of the other anti-virus programs on a full system scan (as opposed to the quick) couldn't hurt. (in terms of performance, rather then data security, Norton and Macafee are as bad as any virus out there and I would remove either if they are installed, though if you are currently paying for either you may as well use it until its up then switch to something that is much better and free)

[Legoshrimp]

On anti-virus I like Microsoft Security Essentials. As a test you might want to try turning off your anti-virus and then running one of the games that you have a problem with.

[Shas aia Toriia]

So I tried everything that was suggested. . . and nothing. No change.

[Domochevsky]

So... personally im thinking that this is hardware related. When did this issue start to occur? What changed beforehand, if anything?

And if it's not hardware, then what does the eventlog say? Any errors or warnings?

(Stumbling around in the dark here.)

[Shas aia Toriia]

So... personally im thinking that this is hardware related. When did this issue start to occur? What changed beforehand, if anything?

And if it's not hardware, then what does the eventlog say? Any errors or warnings?

(Stumbling around in the dark here.)

This has been going on for months now, maybe even a year, every time I start a game that has come out within the last 3 or 4 years. The only thing that changed around that time was I got my new graphics card, the 240 I'm still using.

[Erloas]

Checking the event viewer might show something. It is under admin tools in the control panel, or right-click my computer and click manage, or simply type eventviewer in the start-menu run bar. There are a bunch of logs there and if a lot of errors are in the logs you might check to see if they are all the same thing.

You might also try completely cleaning your computer of all video drivers and then re-installing a new copy and see if that helps. Sometimes legacy video driver files cause some issues. I can't think of the specific applications, but a quick search should find them, to remove all traces of drivers.

Although its a lot of time, sometimes its worth it to simply wipe everything (after backing up what you want to keep to someplace else), re-install a fresh copy of Windows and start over. Its usually a last resort sort of fix, but it catches everything that isn't a hardware failure.
The event viewer should give some indication if it is some sort of hardware issue, although I can't think of any hardware problems that would lead to these sorts of problems.