Fps problems Game Crashes Guide

PC Updates:

Having the most up to date drivers and such for your hardware is the number one reason games tend to perform unexpectedly. There are a few things you need to follow to help this.
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Windows

Use the Windows Update feature to keep all the main files of the operating system up to date. This includes stability fixes, security releases and performance features. You can do this by visiting the Windows Update Website in Internet Explorer, not Firefox. For Windows XP, users should install Service Pack 3 as this will update everything from the day Windows was released up until the time SP3 was.

The next thing you should do is update DirectX via the Web Installer as it will grab the very latest DirectX content that Microsoft has made available. It doesn't matter if you think you've already got the latest version. Even on Windows 7 that has DirectX 11, games can still crash because they have dependencies that for some reason are only included in the latest web releases of DirectX 9.
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Hardware

Download and run CPU-Z which is a freeware application that gathers information on the specifications of your hardware. You will have to go to the manufacturer of your Motherboard to find any updates (Software or BIOS) that you may need to install or 'flash'. If you do not know the make of your Graphics Card, then you will have to right click 'Properties' on the desktop, hit the 'Settings' tab and look what it says down at Display. It will say something similar to 'Plug and Play Monitor on NVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX' depending on who makes your Graphics Card (Nvidia in this case) and what model it is (GeForce 9800GTX here).

You can then grab the appropriate official driver off the website of whoever makes it (Typically ATI or Nvidia) or choose the most common 'Third Party Tweaked Driver' from the list below or of course choose one not on this list if you've had better experiences with that particular driver.

* = Authors recommendation based on past experience

* XTreme-G Drivers * [Nvidia only]
* Omega Drivers [Ati / Nvidia]
* Z-Tweaked Drivers [Nvidia only]
* X Treme-G Warcat Drivers [Ati only]
* NGO Drivers [Nvidia only]
* LaptopVideo2Go Drivers [Nvidia / Laptops only]

Once you have downloaded your chosen driver, you will first need to remove your current one. You can do this by downloading either Driver Cleaner Freeware, Driver Sweeper (Which works on Vista and Windows 7) or buying the full featured Driver Cleaner over at the Official Site.
These are tools that will allow you to remove parts of drivers that are left after uninstalling the old drivers when you remove them via the control panel. It is for ATI, nVidia, Ageia and more.


Install driver cleaner and follow these steps:

1. Uninstall your existing graphics driver (Usually via control panel)
2. Run Driver Cleaner, update if needed and then run using the appropriate filters
3. Reboot your PC
4. Install the new drivers you have just downloaded (Your screen resolution will be smaller on Windows XP, due to using the default poor quality drivers)
5. Reboot when finished


By running Driver Cleaner each time before you install a new driver, you're ensuring that old parts won't get left behind by the uninstaller thus meaning that you have a 'fresh install' of your latest graphics driver without having any old parts cause conflicts with what you've just installed.

General Tweaking:

t like a game, there are many things within Windows that are enabled because some people want/need it, but doesn't mean that you in particular do. Here, we'll go through basic outlines in generally tweaking your PC for better performance.
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Services

Tweaking services can yield one of the best performance gains in Windows on low end hardware, due to freeing up RAM that is normally allocated to services you might not even need to use.
This is an advanced section however so I only recommend that technically competent users attempt to do this as it can be easy to disable or screw up something that you need.

There are two variants to Black Vipers guides, one for Windows XP Service Pack 3 and one for Windows Vista Service Pack 1.
In theory it should give you a small performance gain since there is less load on the RAM and CPU, along with decreasing your boot time.

If you're a more technically savvy user, I suggest that you make the services tweaks more permanent by using nLite to slipstream Service Pack 3 for XP or Service Pack 1 for Vista (along with everything else you need) and tweak your services using that program so that next time you format, you won't have to go through the problem of having to retweak your services.
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Clean Booting

When you start Windows, typically there are a number of programs that start automatically and run in the background that may interfere with the game at hand. These programs may include anti virus and system utility programs. When you perform a clean boot, you prevent these programs from starting automatically.

You must be logged on as an administrator or a member of the Administrators group to complete this procedure.

1. Click Start, and then click Run.
2. In the Open box, type msconfig, and then click OK.
3. On the General tab, click Selective Startup.
4. Under Selective Startup, click to clear the following check boxes:

* Process SYSTEM.INI File
* Process WIN.INI File
* Load Startup Items

5. On the Services tab, click to select the Hide All Microsoft Services check box, and then click Disable All.
6. Click OK, and then click Restart.

Note: To restore your normal boot sequence, re-open msconfig and place a check in the items you previously disabled.
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CPU and Memory Usage

By using the Task Manager (Alt+Ctrl+Delete), you should know what applications that you use (Eg: MSN, Steam), how much CPU usage that they normally take.
The reason for this is because programs such as Anti Viruses and Firewalls that you get at a retail store (Mcafee, Norton) are resource hogs and that there are far better and free alternatives out there.

Here is a list of common low memory footprint applications:

* Application Killers: Appkill. This is a simple program that will detect a running program and launch/kill the appropriate applications.
* Anti Virus: Avast! Anti Virus. This is far more efficient than Mcafee and Norton and is free for the general user.
* Firewall: Sygate Personal Firewall. A free firewall that prompts the user to allow any application that needs internet access.
* Security Suite: Agnitum Outpost Security Suite. An excellent all in one software package that stops viruses/trojans/hooks from even being executed on your system with its Host Protection feature. A perfect premium solution for every single user.
* MSN/IRC: Trillian. An all in one messenger with next to no memory footprint.
* CPU Overclockers: CPUIdle. This is only needed for non 64bit based CPU's. It will decrease the temperature by 10 degrees and is standard in modern CPU's.
* Music Player: Foobar2000. A simple music player that one can control with global hotkeys and have running from the task tray.
* Media Player: VLC Media Player. A simple media player that already comes with the most commonly used codecs, eliminating the use for K-lite Mega Codec Pack.
* Startup Applications: Autoruns and Startup Delayer. Autoruns manages what starts up and Startup Delayer, delays the startup of applications of your choice.
o Startup Delayer is great for applications such as Steam where it takes a while to launch so delaying it by 2 seconds can reduce the impact of having every application launch at once.
* Network Optimising Applications: TCP Optimiser. While it doesn't actually help get better FPS, it can potentially make your internet connection a whole lot better, which in turn gets better hit registration while playing.

There are many other applications that are no doubt worthwhile of adding here, so feel free to do so.
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Defragmentation

Over the course of time, Windows gets cluttered with all the files that you've moved around, installed, uninstalled and so on to the point where it affects the reading time of the hard drive. To combat this, Windows comes with an inbuilt disk defrag tool that is typically found at Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Disk Defragmenter.

You can also use powerful premium and more efficient tools such as Diskeeper, but you're required to pay for the use of this.

There are also very nice freeware / OSS defragmenters. For example Jkdefrag does a great job.

You should do the following when running Disk Defragmentor:

1. Physically disconnect your modem from your PC
2. Open Task Manager (Ctrl + Alt + Del)
3. Open the Disk Defrag utility
4. Shut down all applications that are under the User Name of the user that you are logged in as including explorer, but don't close the Disk Defrag utility. (Close taskmgr.exe last)
5. Let the program do your hard drives while you go do something else

As long as all the non critical processes (The ones under your username) are shut down, Disk Defragmentor will be able to move every part of your hard drive instead of having parts that it is not allowed to access.

You should defrag at least every one or two months to keep your hard drives running optimally. Remember - by doing this, you potentially speed up your map load times!
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Tuneup Scans

If you don't format regularly, having an application or two that can optimise the performance of Windows is a must since it's prone to get cluttered very quickly. Here we'll list some common applications that can help achieve this for you.

* Windows One Care Live (90 day free trial)
* Crap Cleaner (It has useful tools such as being able to clean the registry)
* AdAware (There is a free and premium edition)
* Spybot Search & Destroy (Useful to have both this and AdAware because if scanner misses something, the other will most likely pick it up)
* GameXP (Be sure to make a backup of your current system with this tool)
* TuneXP (Optimises aspects of the Windows File Management System)

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Process Priorities
How to Enable Extensions for Known File Types
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How to Enable Extensions for Known File Types

In some instances, having a program run higher or lower than normal may greatly benefit your PC. Why it might is up to the application, but we'll go through how to change the priority through what's known as 'Batch File Scripting', a popular tool used by server administrators used to automate tedious tasks.

First, you need to make sure you can see file extensions. Browse to 'C:Program FilesWindows NTAccessories' and look for wordpad. If it doesn't have .exe on the end, then you will need to 'Enable Extensions for Known File Types'. Now you're able to create a batch file! We'll use Steam as an example as to how to do this.

Create a blank notepad file and put the following text into it:

@echo off
cd /d "C:Steam"
start /low Steam.exe -silent

Replace C:Steam with the direct file path of where your copy of Steam is installed to.
Click 'Save As', 'Save as Type - All Files' and name it steam.bat.
Save it to your Steam directory, or somewhere similar.
Open up the Steam directory and drag the steam.bat to 'Start ? All Programs ? Startup'.

This can also be done to set HL2.exe in a high priority / abovenormal priority. Just replace /low and -silent with the preferred priority alongside -applaunch XXX in the command line, substituting XXX with the appropriate Application ID.
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Process Affinities

Anyone with a multi core processor should know that they're able to assign the affinity to individual cores to improve applications performance. For example, you could be running Counter-Strike: Source on one core and be able to launch your internet browser quickly on another core so you can browse while waiting to respawn without it affecting your FPS at all, since CS Source isn't optimised to use multiple cores.

Windows Task Manager is able to temporally assign a process an affinity, but once that application closes your changes are lost. This is because it works off the 'Process ID' and not the 'Process Name'.
To combat this, we have ImageCFG which allows a user to permanently assign an affinity to a process.

The author is not certain how exactly it works, so don't run it on a game executable where you can potentially get permanently banned by automated anti-cheat software due to a modified executable because it's better to be safe than sorry.
Use it for all other applications that you feel necessary, such as MSN/IRC or your music player. Be sure to back up any EXE you run this on before you use it, so there are no problems if you need to have the process run evenly on all cores or if a patch requires the original EXE to be unmodified before it can continue.