Slow Graphics - Windows - Does this happen to anyone else?

[Moebius]

Sometimes in Windows, my programs behave incredibly slowly (i.e. down from 60 FPS to 2 FPS!), as if they have no hardware acceleration (could this be it??)
Normally, after a restart or patiently waiting a while everything returns to normal speed...

Has this happened to anyone else?  I'm not sure if it can be considered a 'bug' if it only happens to me and is beyond the control of GLBasic...

[aonyn]

Well I have had slowdowns, but it has always turned out to be something dumb I have done in a function 
As a problem due to a glbasic bug, I have not had any trouble with that.

Is you gfx card overheating or anything?

regards,
Dave

[Ian Price]

Windows always has slight slowdown, even on high speed machines, but from 60 down to 2FPS is definitely not normal, unless you have a massive amount happening on-screen or you are perhaps have a virus-scanner running in the background (even so, 2FPS is incredibly low even if this is true).

Check out what else is running at the same time as your code.

[Moebius]

I'm unsure - good suggestion though.

My brother and I have identical computers which we recently cleaned out because he was having problems.  The circuit board with his graphics card had massively overheated and turned a component into charcoal!  I haven't noticed any severe issues like this but I'll look into it...

Regardless, intensive graphics games still run perfectly and happily on my PC.  If it was solely a graphics card problem you'd expect other apps to have problems...

The main point of this topic is to see if anyone else has experienced this slowdown, and thanks for the suggestion regardless!  I won't complain if posts help me find the solution 


@Ian:
Again, another good suggestion - thanks!  The slowdowns seem to happen occasionally regardless of what app I run.  On other processes, it's understandable that they will slow down an app, but not by that much!  Windows isn't that bad!  Surely? 


Note: Sorry moderators - an afterthought makes me think that this should be in off-topic seeing the way this is going...

[Moebius]

The circuitboard that the graphics card is on does seem to be getting very hot after running graphically intensive tests (bear in mind the actually graphics card has a heatsink mounted above the board, not directly in contact with it...)

More things that seem to point towards overheating:
- After a certain point of graphical intensity the speed suddenly plummets, as if the card has gone past a certain threshold...
- Waiting a while after a 'slowdown' allows a return to full speed, until apps are run again for a while, at which point the speed plummets again...

Also the fan on the graphics card seems to be constantly 'maxed out'...

[Moru]

Put an extra fan model bigger aimed at your grafics card and see if this helps.

I have had slowdowns like the one you describe when running two instances of GLBasic programs or other programs using openGL at the same time. But that seems fixed since I updated drivers, GLBasic and the programs in question.

[Kitty Hello]

Try disabling threaded stuff on the graphics card driver. Also, check for the latest.

[MrTAToad]

Other running programs affect performance too - for example, AV software set for scanning across networks or VirtualBox - when that is running it absolutely kills performance on a native machine...

[Moebius]

Unfortunately I'm not in the position at the moment to install another fan - I'll probably wait until I need a new, better graphics card before I do this...
I have the latest graphics drivers from nVidia already, but I think my type of PC has overheating problems with the card anyway.

The only option I can find regarding threading in nVidia's settings is threading optimisation for multiple CPUs.  I'm not sure if this is what you were referring to Gernot (I thought maybe threading within the GPU if that's possible), but next time things start misbehaving I'll try disabling that.
The 'annoying' thing is that the problem is quite sporadic and rare, so although it doesn't affect me often, it also means that I can't test this easily, or easily check if there are other programs hogging processor time.
I use AVG, which rarely, if ever, causes noticeable drops in performance, but either way, although other programs can slow things down a bit, they don't warrant the sudden, bipolar change from 60FPS to 2FPS and back again 

Thanks for all the input.  It definitely doesn't seem to be a problem with GLB, and so I'll wait and try the suggestions next time things slow down.