I've been havin a problem with games recently where they have a major slowdown in speed, example: old game Guild wars, released in 2005 was gettin 75+ fps before now it's 20-30

Several games like mass effect, left 4 dead, fallout 3 were all goin great now they all have this lag/slowdown effect and idk what the problem could be, i've tried all sorts of things.

Firstly I thought the cpu could be the problem and I tested the cpu in 3dmark prior to the system goin fubar and got the same score as it is now, so that ain't it. memory is good, bought the same power supply as my bro who runs a superior system and still the same lag, so it ain't the power supply. reinstalled Windows XP sp3 and nothing, it can only be the graphics card but i've updated them to the latest drivers and tried older drivers to no avail.

I'm gettin a new rig but I really wanted to solve this problem, or give the comp to someone else at least.

It all started when I installed GTA IV (was never goin to play it on this rig just try it out) then noticed pretty low fps which was expected so closed it down and tried some other games then the low fps began, thought it might be securom so uninstalled both that and gta IV but still nothing.

here's the specs

Intel(R) Pentium(R) Dual Cpu E2180 @2.00ghz @1.99ghz
2.gb ram
XP sp3
NVIDIA Geforce 7900gtx 512mb


Although the system is sucky it did run modern games pretty well but now they all fail, any ideas what could be causing this slowdown ?

GPU might be overheating. Have you ever overclocked it? Do you have any other Graphics cards to try in the machine?

I never thought of that actually, hav'nt OC'd it myself but I did lend the pc to a mate a few months back when his pc was messed up, so he may have done it himself.

I've got an 8400 about somewhere i'll hook it up and let yah know, thanks for the reply.

or your hard drive might be getting full.
do me a favor and check under my computer and right click your hard drives and click properties and then post what percent is free and what percent is used
and then just for funzies give it a defraging and a run a quick spyware/malware/virus scan on it
and post findings here

i say the hard drive thing cuz it just happened to me like a month ago

Sometimes the latest drivers are bad for some games.

Try doing a ROLLBACK of your GFX drivers. Assuming you installed them near to when this problem began.

OK I had a look and drive C: has 49gb left and D: has 103gb, damn , tried nod32 and kaspersky antivirus and no viruses, tried ad-aware and still nothing, defragged with O&O defrag and still laggy.

Tried a gf-8400 and gf-7800 too, not the best cards but they would run guild wars at top speed for sure, also tried cod4 on the current 7900gtx and the 7800 and got 20fps where I was gettin 60 before, whyyyyy


Tried your idea amtech and still the same slowdown in games, wth . this is really strange now I thought at least something would work cos these are good ideas, one last thing I could try is get my bro to take apart the entire system and build it up again from scratch. this is definently the hardest pc i've tried to get workin again, it's just crazy.

thanks for the replies

Do a restore back to before you installed GTA 4, then make sure it's all gone from the PC.(as in there's no signs in the registry, un-install and reinstall the Grpahics card drivers.