Hey guys,
I've got a weird problem. When I'm racing (either single player or multiplayer) and everything is good, my fps is over 100. Randomly, though, the game will hiccup and then my fps will drop to around 30-40. It feels like there is some limit being put on my fps, because it will just sit on a certain fps and not fluctuate much. It randomly hiccups again and fixes itself. I'm running no v-sync and no fps limiter.

System specs:
3.6ghz P4
plenty of hard drive space
GeForce GO 5800 gfx card
1 gig of ram

Sometimes if I alt-tab out and close an aplication, when I get back to the game I'm at 100+fps again. I don't know if this is from closing something or from alt-tabbing. It's not cause of running out of ram though, because I'll still have >500 megs free when I do this. Any input would be great. The game isn't really playable at 30fps.

Thanks,
Brian

update: alt-tabbing out and back in makes the fps go back up. so anyone have any suggestions?

update #2: alt tabbing doesn't make the fps go back up. must have been a coincidence, but now it's not helping.

Open task manager (ctrl+alt+del), view processes and press the CPU tab twice to sort them according to cpu usage. Run LFS in a window and see if any app pops up and hogs the CPU when the slowdown occurs.

what all are you running in background.. antivirus software could definetly cause huge fluctuations

i mean you can always just .. set a limit to your fps that way it wont be 'jumpy'

Nothing seems to be hogging cpu usage when the fps goes down.

I don't think setting a limit would help if my fps drops down to 20-30 fps for a good 5-10 minutes.

I've tried playing with all programs closed except for the logitech wheel program, and it still does it.

Thanks for the help, anyone else have any suggestions?

I'm no P4 expert but could it be the thermal throttling dropping the CPU speed?

EDIT: this program should tell you that: http://www.panopsys.com/downloads/ThrottleWatch.zip

Thanks for the program vari.
My CPU speed does seem to be dropping when the frames drop. Throttlewatch, however, says TM1 Throttling is 0.

It appears to be dropping to about 2.9 GHz.

Anymore ideas? I think we're on to something.

Oh, and this is an alienware laptop. It runs a desktop P4, not a mobile one.

Thanks for all the help so far guys!

I think that's an indication of a cooling issue then. Might be a good idea to clean the CPU/GFX heatsink if you haven't done that lately. I guess you could try and play with opened case to see if that happens then. You could also limit your FPS to a bit lower number like 60 so that LFS doesn't use 100% of the CPU all the time. It should prevent the overheating quite nicely.

EDIT: The throttling may also happen because of power saving I guess so try putting that to "always on"

Yeah it does seem to be a cooling issue. Tonight I'm going to open her up and go to town with the compressed air.

Thanks so much for your help!

~brian