Windows 11 and FPS drops

[rtcwet]

Hello!

 

I recently upgraded my system to Windows 11 and I really enjoy the new operating system!

 

Whenever I play a few minutes of the game, the frame rate drops to around 20-30 FPS and I have no idea why it's doing this. The strange thing is that the frame rate drops, becomes good again, and then drops again and the cycle continues like this. However, when I play newer games such as VALORANT, the game runs fine with no problems at all. I never seemed to have this problem on Windows 10.

 

I also use MSI Afterburner's program called RivaTuner. RivaTuner reads that it's constantly at 250 FPS, but the framerate drops without RivaTuner reading that it dropped which is also a strange thing.

 

I am using ET Legacy as my ET client to run the game.

 

Troubleshooting steps I've taken:

• Restarted my computer
• Turned off GameDVR on Windows 11
• Turned of sending diagnostic data
• Run compatibility mode to Windows 7

 

Would anyone have any insight of what exactly is going on? Thanks for the help!

[the cake is a lie]

It could be something else but my best guess is that some background process is periodically hogging your CPU, like Windows Update or similar.

 

Modern games like VALORANT are able to run in parallel on multiple CPU cores and offload most of the rendering work to the GPU. ET is single-threaded so it (more or less) only runs on a single CPU core at a time and barely uses the GPU.

 

The FPS counter in ET is redrawn every frame based on how long it took to draw the previous frame. I'm not familiar with RivaTuner but it may be showing the average over a period of time. For example, NVIDIA settings lets you overlay your FPS onto the window but it used to only update once a second so brief stutters wouldn't show up.

 

A few things you can try to eliminate potential causes/find the issue:

- record a short demo and then play it back: if the FPS drops at the exact same time every playback it probably isn't a background process issue

- run around in a localhost map for a few minutes: if the FPS drops you don't have a networking issue

- open system monitor and run ET in windowed mode: watch for any processes that appear/disappear or use a high CPU percentage.

 

If you can't locate the cause, a few things you could do to (maybe) get around the issue in the meantime:

- run ET at a higher priority

- run ET on a single CPU core by setting the affinity

- if your CPU has hyperthreading or virtual cores try turning that off in BIOS

- set your CPU and GPU to stay in performance mode if that option is available to you

 

I don't think this will help with your FPS issues but, if it's still available, you may want to use Windows XP compatibility mode since the game engine ET uses was mostly written around 1999.

[rtcwet]

Ok, so I think the problem was really stupid!

 

I was messing around with the settings and and I noticed Fullscreen was off and the game was playing on Windowed mode. I told myself: "Hmm, this is weird. I always play my games on Fullscreen." So when I turned on Fullscreen, the problem went away!

 

When I first installed ET Legacy, I went through all the ET Legacy settings and making sure Fullscreen was on, but when I went to the F|A Jaymod server, I noticed it's actually off because Jaymod has its own settings under the hood. Upon turning this on, the problem went away!