I use my PC almost exclusively for gaming, and while many titles play just fine with high graphical settings, some are more problematic and suffer from slow load times, stuttering framerates or just plain crashing. I've accepted this as the norm with some titles, assuming my system wasn't good enough to play them properly, but I've now noticed problems with older games that used to run well. For example, Battlefield 3, Crysis 2 and 3 and Metro 2033 Redux play just fine. A heavily modded Skyrim will play OK, but takes ages to load new areas, and it's the same with Far Cry 3. Incredibly, Call Of Duty: Ghosts also runs very badly on my system. However, I recently reinstalled Far Cry 2, which had previously run very smoothly and this now takes ages and ages to load or else crashes altogether. So I reckon there are three possibilities/options: :: Just turn down the settings and stop moaning - maybe I'm being completely unrealistic in expecting to play games at 2560 x 1440 with high settings :: Update my hardware (see specs below) - it was a solid system when I built it, but some components are a bit dated now :: Find out what's really going on behind the scenes - is it poor game optimisation, dodgy drivers, some program that's hogging my system I run utilities and programs like Malwarebytes on a regular basis. Would you please look at my specs and see what you think? Operating System Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit SP1 CPU Intel Core i7 960 @ 3.20GHz 53 °C Bloomfield 45nm Technology RAM 12.0GB Triple-Channel DDR3 @ 617MHz (8-8-8-20) Motherboard ASUSTeK Computer INC. Rampage III Extreme (LGA1366) 29 °C Graphics (two GTX 690s) DELL U2711 (2560x1440@59Hz) 2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 (EVGA) 37 °C 2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 (EVGA) 35 °C 2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 (EVGA) 33 °C 2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 (EVGA) 29 °C ForceWare version: 353.30 SLI Enabled Storage 119GB M4-CT128 M4SSD2 SCSI Disk Device (SSD) 558GB Western Digital WDC WD6000HLHX-01JJPV0 ATA Device (SATA) 32 °C Optical Drives PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-218L ATA Device HL-DT-ST BDDVDRW CH10LS20 ATA Device Any thoughts/suggestions welcome. Thanks in advance.
I'm not sure - I'd never heard that term before and have just had a quick look on the Windows help page! Do you know how I can find out where it is?
Typically windows will put the page file on your system drive, you have an SSD so if it is getting full the pagefile might not be able to expand so put it somewhere else, as you have 4 2Gb 680s the games are probably spilling out of the 2GB vram and each card will then cache on disc, along with everything else that caches and it'll be slow, worse still if you have no space games will crash. How to optimize, a fixed size on your SSD will probably do. http://www.online-tech-tips.com/com...uters-performace-configuring-the-paging-file/ Also try a disc clean up and defrag which should clear out some crap and run trim on the SSD. That's just one Idea, another thing to try is configuring SLI to use one 690 to see if performance picks up, more GPUs is not always better. 690s are old now though, not sure how well they cope with latest games, you could get by with a 970/290 on that screen res for not a lot of dough or go even higher, nowt wrong with the rest of your system spec really, sure not the latest and greatest but its fine.
But the defrag doesn't do a defrag when you have an SSD, it runs the trim, which if you have had the drive for a long time probably needs to be run to get performance back. So long as windows recognizes your drive as an SSD it will do the right thing, perhaps I should of said optimize rather than defrag, as windows tool is not really defragging much when you have SSD.
If he's running Windows 7 TRIM should be enabled by default, and there's no need to manually run any kind of garbage collection. To check TRIM is running, just open a command prompt and type in: Code: fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify If it returns a 0 Trim is running, if it returns a 1 it isn't.
OK- problem solved - well sort of. I managed to borrow a GTX 970 and that immediately saw the games in question run smoothly, so I've now bought a GTX 980 Ti. Thanks again for your help and suggestions. I'd never even considered my 690s were so out of date. However, that still doesn't explain why those older game that used to run OK were suddenly performing badly. Hopefully the page file fix will help.
How hot was your GPU running? Perhaps the thermal compound in it has degraded and now it's being throttled. It's one explanation why games ran fine before but don't any more.
Odd suggestion here, even with your new graphics card on the way, make sure your Power profile in Control Panel is not set to "Power Saving" ... trust me, run with it. Make sure it's at least Balanced.
