Frame rate suddenly drops heavily

Hi all,

I would to start off saying that I hope I've posted this thread in the correct section.

Since some time, I've been having problems playing SP and MP games. For example, just a few minutes ago I was playing CS:GO with around 200fps (I know the human eye only sees about 25fps; and I always disable VSYNC since it's of no use to me). Suddenly, the frame rate dropped to 100fps. That wouldn't bother me if there wasn't such an awful lag. It feels like everything is delayed by one second - it just doesn't feel like 100fps at all, more like 10fps. This happens in other games as well, e.g. Far Cry 3. I have absolutely no clue as to how to fix this.

My computer specs are:

Windows 7 Ultimate x64
16GB RAM @ 1333MHz
Intel i7-2600k @ 3.40GHz
Nvidia Geforce 590GTX 3GB

What else is in your computer?

When you mention the power supply, list the make and model.

Got a SSD on which I have Windows and Office installed. I also have a 3TB HDD by Western Digital.

I have the following power supply:
Antec High Current Gamer HCG-750, 750W ATX 2.3

I tried to play New Vegas and for some reason, I only had slight stutters when entering new areas (which are probably always there since textures etc. must be loaded) but otherwise everything worked fine. I played CS:GO again and noticed something else weird going on. My frame rate would suddenly drop from 200fps to 100fps for a few seconds and then go back.

It's been a while since I reinstalled Windows (I think in December 2011) - could this be the source of this problem? Also, I move a lot of files from my SSD to my HDD then to my external disk - could it be that the fragmentation is causing these weird fps drops?

Restarted my PC a several times, installed a new graphics card driver and tested a few other games. For some reason, certain games work without a problem (e.g. Fallout: New Vegas) whereas other games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive or Red Orchestra 2 don't. The latter ones did run on my system flawlessly some time ago.

Wow, that's a nice PSU so it's certainly not the PSU.

Sometimes the latest driver is the culprit, especially with previous generation GPUs. This isn't always the case, but I recommend trying a 200 series driver as opposed to one of the 300 series drivers. This of course would be just be an experiment.

Tried both an old and a beta driver and neither did fix my problem. I would really like to play some CS:GO now but it just doesn't run fluently enough (although I get constant +100fps).

Nicolas9 said:

Tried both an old and a beta driver and neither did fix my problem. I would really like to play some CS:GO now but it just doesn't run fluently enough (although I get constant +100fps).

What was the version number of the old driver that you tried?

I installed Geforce Driver v267.91 from March 28th, 2011.