FPS drop

[Toffelman]

Hi

My specs i3 540 , 4gb ram , gtx 570 twin frozr iii. Problem is FPS in games are low or unstable for example in BF3 I get 120-40 fps but I sometimes get under 20fps. My res is 1920x1080 and graphics are low.

Thanks

[PostmanPot]

CPU (dual core). Get an i5 (quad core). Another 4GB won't hurt either.

[Pada]

I think it is the RAM, especially in BF3! I know my friend had intermittent FPS issues in BF2 when he only had 4GB of RAM. I told him to upgrade to 6-8GB and that solved his issues.

You can always run like MSI Afterburner and Microsoft's Process Explorer to monitor both your CPU & GPU usage, as well as memory usage. That way you can determine what your bottleneck is.
It might be a good idea to open up Windows' Resource Monitor too, because that'll show you if it is reading & writing to the Page File, which it would do if you run out of memory.

Lastly, do you have Windows 7 64-bit or 32-bit?
You'll need Windows 7 64-bit if you want to use more than 3.5GB of RAM!

[Toffelman]

I have Windows 64bit and I've ordered 8gb of ram hopefully that will sort it out. Everyone I've asked said the cpu isn't the problem?

[hereticangel]

hmmm i could play bf3 on ultra with i3 2100 , only dropped to 30 in some areas , you can overclock your cpu.

[agentrfr]

MOAR RAM!!!!!!!

[Toffelman]

Would overclock it if I could but its all blacked out in my bios?

[killadoob]

I would get more ram, if it doesn't stop get a quadcore. Your card is good but that cpu is a dual core sadly.

Could be driver related as well so try various versions but ram low and dual core is not ideal.

[Polygon]

I had encountered this issue a while back as well.

It got bad enough to make sound and input lag (on a quad core AMD mind you).

Basically, I don't think you have enough RAM and BF3 is paging between disk and RAM/VRAM as the game progresses.

This paging is what is dropping your FPS because your rendering has to stop before new content is put in to RAM/VRAM.

A good sign of this is the game starting fine and then as you play on, things start getting choppy.

Try and borrow another 4GB to test before you try anything else.

Edit: I see you've ordered 8GB. Nice. I am most confident this will fix your problem.

[Toffelman]

Hope it works , would it still be viable to get a i7 930?

[Chevron]

BF3 is a very cpu heavy title. Get a quad.

[killadoob]

Hope it works , would it still be viable to get a i7 930?

Of course, i got a 920 and cannot see a reason to change.

[PostmanPot]

Of course, i got a 920 and cannot see a reason to change.

Ja, got a Q9550, no reason to change.

[Pada]

Toffelman:
The i7 930 CPU won't work with your current motherboard.

You'll have to settle for an i5 750/760 or for an i7 860 if you want to keep your current motherboard.

[S1ght]

Going with it's the CPU, not the RAM.

So tested it out for about 30 minutes on my side. Ram usage I couldn't get it to go over 900megs with total RAM used being under 4 gigs. Keep in mind that my Windows will allocate itself more memory because I have more memory. CPU usage was constant 60-70%.

So my advice would be just get both, RAM is fairly cheap these days and never hurts but the most likely cause is your CPU.