Hey,

I bought a new nvidia Geforce 8600 GT (512 MB) graphics card a few months ago.

The first game that I tried was Bioshock, and it worked perfectly. I then tried a less graphic intensive game called Beyond Good & evil which worked perfectly aswel.

So I moved onto Gears of War, the first two levels worked on medium settings, but then the game started slowing down and I had to use lower settings.

Then I tried Bioshock again and it kept on slowing down and momentarily freezing; which it had never done before.

So now I am back at Beyond Good & Evil and it can barely get past a cut-scene without slowing down at more detailed scenes or the speech not matching the graphics during not-so detailed cut-scenes. I was able to get by these parts without slowing down with a 125 MB graphics card!!

I do not understand why my games are performing less and less well that they were before. Sure you can say that my computer is congested with ****, but then I could say that I have de-greased it enough to boot up 3 times faster than it did when i just got the card.

I take good care of my computer (registry, spyware, fragmentation.....)
There could not be that much of a performance difference because of system congestion.

oh ya specs:

windows XP SP 2
Intel Pentium D (2.8 GHz)
1.0 GB RAM
300 GB HDD (140 GB free)
Geforce 8600 GT (512 MB)

If you reboot, does game performance come back to full? i.e. the longer you play, the slower it gets, until you leave the computer off for a while and then turn it back on

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I'm guessing you are referring to the internal temperature.
My computer has been on for a long time, and the temperatures are actually pretty high.
I will try the game again tomorrow morning after I give the PC a rest for the night.

Today the lack of performance was shocking; but I have definitely noticed the performance getting worse over the months, such as Bioshock which worked perfectly, but now has noticeable performance issues.

Ever clean out the computer of dust and stuff? Have you installed any recent software on the machine?

Do you have PunkBuster installed? I remember my PunkBuster was screwy and always ran and steadily ate up memory ntil it would make the computer slow to a halt and crash, check your task manager and see what the most memory intensive processes are running

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I clean my computer every month. I live in a really old apartment in France that creates lot of dust (especially over my computer)

I've installed and uninstalled tons of stuff.

No idea what punkBuster even is.

Ah? I originally come from Nice

Alright well, like I was saying, is it an overall performance degrade, or does everytime you turn the computer on, after it's been of for a while, does it work a bit faster then previously and then slowly degrades?

I'm thinking it could be degrading memory, you could try either, if you have more then 1 stick of memory, try each stick individually.

If you still have your other video card, or another vid card of some type, see if performance is different with a different card (and it's appropriate drivers obviously)

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Just thinking out loud, not trying to be insulting ..... BUT it's been known to happen

When was the last time ( if ever ) you defragemented your Hard Drive

It should be done monthly, takes about 20 minutes

I've seen them take 17 Hours ( bad shape )

I also run an 8600 GT 256mb DDR3 Factory Overclocked to 680mhtz

So it gets a bit warm in my case, and I run a Dedicated Fan

But Normally an 8600GT runs at 540mhtz, so I'd rule out the heat

o.k. confession...

My HD was in horrible shape. A recent Defrag took all night.

It's in better condition now, but is it possible or even desirable for all of the files to be compacted completely on eachother, cause the defrag always leaves spaces and says that not everything could be defragged (even in safe mode)

I guess it was so bad cause I'm always deleting and reinstalling huge files (games, uncompressed animations in development) I do this so much cause I'm so psycho about my PC performing well.

So back to Darklord... it is an overall performance degrade. The new Video card will still run faster than the old one. I have heard that maybe my memory is corrupted. So I have two sticks of memory, each 512 MB. Is there some program that i could use to test the efficiency of each stick?

Take one out, test performance, take it out, put other one in, test

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