Hey

Right, heres the problem. For the past couple of months i've been getting intermittent system lag on some of my higher-end games (Oblivion, Gothic 3, BF2). What I mean is they will play with decent fps for a while, then the fps will drop to around 5-10 for a short time, then back to normal, then drop etc. etc. I get these problems on games which have never had problems before. BF2 used to play perfectly fine with a high FPS, as did Oblivion. Gothic I bought since the problems started.

I havent noticed it on lower end games, or on the desktop. I would assume my PC didnt meet the minimum requirements if these games didnt run perfectly before, but since they did its making me kind of confused. Quite often, I can hear either the HDD or the CD drive spinning up when this happens which may or may not be related :wacko

As far as I know, my drivers are up to date and I have run virus scans and spyware/adware scans but while some adware was found, deleting it made no difference. I've tried emailing ATI support but its been 2 weeks now without a reply. I was hoping I could get a better response from a community like this.

My system specs are:
3.4GHz P4
256MB ATI Radeon 9800
2Gb RAM
WinXP
Ample HDD space

I hope you guys can help...
Cheers

An ATI Radeon 9800 isn't all that great these days, especially when playing Oblivion.

Specifically, what hard drives do you have?

Finally, is this lag in playing multiplayer games over the internet? Could be an ISP issue...

Please help survivors of Hurricane Katrina!

www.redcross.org

(OK I think i posted this reply in the wrong place at first)

No this happens offline as well as online. As I said, I know the 9800 isnt great but i've run these games without problems for a long time in the past (both BF2 and Oblivion worked perfectly for almost a year before this started happening) so I know its not a matter of my card not being good enough. It still happens when i drop all details down to the lowest possible :(

You may want to use task manager and see if stuff is using RAM or CPU cycles in the background.

"How many squirrels had to die to make you look fly?!"