Question about older game(F.E.A.R) and hardware

[fourthman]

A friend's old P4 crapped out (bad caps) so I rebuilt it with some old spare parts.His "new" old pc now has a P4 Prescott 3ghz ,WINXP newer m/b,onboard sound,1 gig ddr ram and an ATI Radeon AGP 1650 pro,faster than what he had and it's ample for his needs and old games......
Anyway,he just finished HL2 and it ran smooth as butter,now he's playing FEAR,it plays great but after 3-4 missions it begins to slow down,gets laggy,choppy etc...is this a software(game) issue?His pc is well cooled ,it doesn't seem to be a hardware issue.I've done some googling on this issue ,others seem to have had the same problem,but I've yet to see a solution.In the meantime he copes with it by
saving his game,exit and re-enter and he's good for another couple of missions.I thought it was a heat issue but other games play fine and the pc is well vented.Any ideas?Thanks.

[ilya]

Have you checked memory usage? I know some games can eat up a lot of RAM over time for no particular reason and then end up on the page file.

[Varroa]

FEAR use to run just fine on my old hardware but I had 2GB ram at the time.

[BobLoblaw]

I'll second the RAM being the problem. I seem to remember FEAR not playing nicely with ATI back in the day unless you had a goodly amount of ram.

[fourthman]

Hmmm,I'll see if I can bump up the ram,I have two other vid cards,a radeon x850 pro(faster but no sm 3.0??) and a geforce gt7300 ,thanks guys.What should I try first?

[_dangtx_]

minimize the game and check task manager



also right click on my computer,advanced,best performance.

then disable services not needed etc..

[fourthman]

Ok thanks,I'll try that next time I'm at his place.

[Shadowmeph]

on my p4 system that I used to have when ever I gamed on line I used a .reg that shut off all unnecessary services I had it so that when I double clicked on the a bat file I had it( called gaming) would run the reg file then log off then all I had to do was log back on with only 15 services running which included teamspeak , after I finished gaming I would double click my Normal.bat file and it would turn on all the services I normally would have running and log me off my pc again.

another thing is that he might have a memory leak ?

[On2wheels]

Originally Posted by fourthman

A friend's old P4 crapped out (bad caps) so I rebuilt it with some old spare parts.His "new" old pc now has a P4 Prescott 3ghz ,WINXP newer m/b,onboard sound,1 gig ddr ram .

1gb ram? Ya I'd bump that to at least 2 and try again.