Very good system, very low FPS

[Squick]

Ok, we are stumped, so I will post the entire situation here and hopefully someone will either have had the same situation or will be able to offer up some help.

We have two computers in the house, one is an Athlon 2200+, 1.5 gigs of DDR2700, Geforce4 Ti4600, 120 gig 7200 RPM 2 meg cache maxtor HD, this one is using an nForce2 motherboard. The other computer is very similar, Athlon 2000+, 1 gig of DDR2700, same video card, same hard drive, this one has a VIA motherboard.

The 2200+ never drops below 30 FPS, even at high detail with 100 people on the screen. The 2000+ drops to 5-10 FPS with only a tiny bit of action.

Here are the things we have done to isolate the problem, all to no success:

- Swap video cards
- Swap ram
- Install new hard drive on 2000+ and reload with a fresh load of XP, nothing but drivers and Planetside, did not help a bit.
- The 2000+ was using a soundblaster live, we replaced it with a Hercules Muse 5.1, and actually tried without any sound, neither helped.
- Updated Detinator drivers to the latest official, and the latest beta drivers.

The 2200+ gets 13000ish on 3DMark2001, the 2000+ gets 12000ish. No other game has the same issues, so we are not able to reproduce the problem anywhere except Planetside.

I do not want to pull the heatsinks off either processor since we do not have shims on them and we really do not want to ruin a processor putting the heatsink back on. So short of swapping motherboards, does anyone have any other suggestions? Has anyone ever had this happen to them in Planetside?

Thanks,

Squick

[Hijinks]

wierd. judging from your 3dmark scores, you have installed the via 4in1 drivers right?

[Squick]

On both loads we tried first without, then with the 4in1 drivers. Neither changed the results at all.

[Wrecker]

I am also having severe FPS issues in certain spots.

Running a P4 2.66, GeForce 4 ti4200 w/128, 1 gig of DDR 333 and a 7200 HD with plenty of space and defraged.

At times I drop down to 10 FPS with very very few people near me. Other times I have 150 FPS. AMP Stations seem to be particularly bad for me but I just can't figure out why.

Tried different video drivers, updated mainboard drivers.

Not much info here but I wanted to post since I'm using an Intel CPU as opposed to your AMDs; that isn't the issue.

I may try tonight playing on my 1g AMD, GeForce 2 GTS, 512 133 ram machine...

Using Fraps for my FPS by the way.

Wreck

[Suast]

I don't fully understand your problem, but I have had similar experience with the VS Sanctuary respawn. The best way to make it go away is to press Esc and click quit. It will begin the countdown, but then if you move forward, SOMETIMES it will revert to normal FPS. This has only happened to me in the VS sanctuary. Then again these might be two different problems.

[Wrecker]

Squick give this a try:

The next time you begin seeing the (what I refer to as "unreasonaly low FPS") issue try this... real complicated now...

Alt-tab out and back. I didn't even need to let my desktop show... I ran from Marduk Tech Plant on Ishandar to Enkidu AMP Station's back door. As soon as I entered the basement (not the back door hallway) my FPS dropped to 4.

I alt-tabbed and my FPS went back up to 70.

I have no idea what alt-tabbing does to the game. Make it refresh textures? Resets the video somehow? No idea whatsoever.

Anyway, it is a lead. Give it a shot and see how it goes for you.