Bad FPS everywhere and all of a sudden

[Finja]

Hello,

since Monday and without any changes on my system or on the graphic-setup of Age Of Conan my fps broke down. Especially in raid-instances while the boss-fights and in Khitai my fps are around 5-6 and that's absolutely unplayable.

Until Monday I never had this kind of problem. My fps always was around 50-70 in raid-instances and up to 140 in all other regions of the game.

System:

Intel i7 4770k (temperature max. 60)
Board MSI G43-Z87
16 GB Ram
ATI XFX 7850 2 GB (temperature max. 50)
Crucial 256 GB SSD (1 month old; nothing else but AoC installed on this drive)
Windows 7 x64

All drivers are up to date.

I already changed the RAM (cause I thought this might be the reason) against brandnew moduls yesterday but the result is the same.

Does anybody have an idea what could be the reason for this problem? It leaves me desperate...

All the best

[kalston]

Was there any AMD drivers update recently? My mate with a similar type of card is having issues as well.

If there is some auto update function in the AMD drivers, you may not have noticed it updated.

[Finja]

I updated the drivers to version 13.12 (before it was 13.8 I believe) on monday but AFTER my fps already had broken down. Thought the old drivers were the reason but neither the old nor the new drivers fixed the issue.

[Shax84]

What does the performance window in Task Manager tell you?

What have you tried in the Age of Conan settings?

Does the FPS only drop when you have a lot of particles or players on the map like in raids?

Does it help to set particles to "myself"?

Do you use SweetFX?

Try to move the game from your SSD to a HDD and see how it works? Since it is brand new, there might be a malfunction on it or even a bad SATA cable or port on the motherboard.

Does any other games on your system suffer from the low FPS?

See if there is a difference of fps while in fullscreen and windowed fullscreen?

[Finja]

What does the performance window in Task Manager tell you?

What have you tried in the Age of Conan settings?

Does the FPS only drop when you have a lot of particles or players on the map like in raids?

Does it help to set particles to "myself"?

Do you use SweetFX?

Try to move the game from your SSD to a HDD and see how it works? Since it is brand new, there might be a malfunction on it or even a bad SATA cable or port on the motherboard.

Does any other games on your system suffer from the low FPS?

See if there is a difference of fps while in fullscreen and windowed fullscreen?

- average utilization around 30% while AoC is running

- I tried out everything, even to settle down the graphic options the absolut minimum. FPS stayed the same.

- no, fps is low regardless of particles or any other settings

- no...

- yes, I do (but I also used it before this problem appeared)

- already did this but the result was the same on HDD as on SSD

- there is no other game installed which could suffer from the low fps

- no, there's no difference...

[Shax84]

- average utilization around 30% while AoC is running

- I tried out everything, even to settle down the graphic options the absolut minimum. FPS stayed the same.

- no, fps is low regardless of particles or any other settings

- no...

- yes, I do (but I also used it before this problem appeared)

- already did this but the result was the same on HDD as on SSD

- there is no other game installed which could suffer from the low fps

- no, there's no difference...

I have the i7 4770K as well and utilization is 22-23% for me. Should not matter at all the small difference here, but seems like something else is putting load on the cpu in addition to the game.

Really weird what you are experiencing. Perhaps try deleting the localy stored preferences of the game in

c:\users\username\appdata\local\conan

[Finja]

Ok, that's a thing I've not done yet. I'll delete it and see what happens than.

Thank you Kalston and Shax for your answers and help.

If anyone else has an idea my eyes are wide open to read about it ^^

[Rathothis]

Did you check whether your game is running on your mainboard's integrated graphics rather than on the ATI GPU?

If that's the case, it is most likely a driver issue. Did you do a clean install when installing your new driver? If not, try that. If a clean install doesn't help, maybe try to deactivate integrated graphics in the BIOS?

[Shax84]

As long as he has got the monitor cable plugged into the PCIe GPU that shouldn't be possible? I thought you needed to connect the cable to the GPU you wanted to use.

[Rathothis]

I honestly don't know. The problem sounded familiar but then my experience with this issue (AoC running on integrated graphics rather than the main GPU) was on a notebook. It is not entirely uncommon there. Not sure whether it can occur on a desktop with integrated graphics.