Framerate issue for videogames

[Ares_God_of_War]

I have a GeForce 8500 and recently my framerate for videogames has become horrid. I notice it more with games like WoW and other MMORPGs. This just happened today and if I turn off my comp for like 15 minutes and turn it on it works good for about 5 minutes then the framerate is unbearable. Is this the video card? I have downloaded new drivers also reinstalled the game completely and messed with ingame settings but nothing seems to help. Any ideas would be helpful :(

[Lunarman]

I've got the 8800 GTS and I've had no problem with any game save Crysis. GW and WoW rack up 75 fps most of the time only dropping to maybe 30 with a lot of enemies on the screen.

I don't know enough about graphics cards to suggest a solution but the best idea would probably be to ask Blizzard and Nvidia. Also, look at the rest of your system spec and performance metres when you're framerate drops. If your processors getting overused then it might be that.

oh, btw. what does it actually drop to?

[Ares_God_of_War]

drops to about 3 to 8. this wasnt normal it just happened yesterday. My buddy thought it was the ram so I used some out of my other comp and it worked for like 10 minutes or so then the framerate dropped again. I had the computer for about 5 months and until now WoW was playing smoothly.

[stumpy]

Shot in the dark: could this be an overheating issue? Maybe dust build-up or something is preventing adequate cooling to the video card... Could there be something causing a bad connection where the card connects to the motherboard or at the video RAM?

I don't know if there is a good way to tell if a card has gone bad. There may be diagnostic tools you can download somewhere.

[HumanTon]

Yeah, given it runs OK for a bit, I'd look into overheating.

Get a flashlight and inspect the fans on the video card and on the motherboard--look for anything that might be obstructing the fan.

(Just a couple of months ago I had a problem where my computer would mysteriously crash every so often, and the problem turned out to be a solid mat of dust just *behind* the CPU fan. The fan could turn just fine, but it wasn't doing any good because of the dust mat.)

[Ares_God_of_War]

How easy should the video card fan turn? I actually pulled it out and used the compressed air stuff on it but it didnt turn. I could fine nothing obstructing it and could manually turn it but the blower wouldnt spin the fan like it does my other ones