Just tried to play a game on Grenade III but about five minutes in my computer suddenly nose dived to 20FPS, but with fairly frequent jittering. It normally runs 60FPS when "quiet" and 40FPS or so average. Since I suddenly became incapacitated with poor frame rates and two of my team where snipers who couldn't even hit blackjacks, the resistance our team had just became non-existant against a full team and we lost. Rather annoying. Playing with a HD 6850. Running UT3 I can run with max settings with only the occasional jitter in a quick deathmatch game with bots. I recently had to rollback my drivers to the ones included in 10.10 and received a performance boost from it besides the above problem in exchange for having black/blue boxes and circles appear in place of smoke particle effects. However, having the latest compatible drivers causes my computer to black screen crash constantly so there's little I can do there.
Previously I was running max settings because I could and it was nice. But now it just seems to be making everything blurry or sharper, it doesn't seem to otherwise increase stability when it's going to drop anyway later on. Starting off and waiting to go back to lobby I'm ALWAYS 60FPS, it just chugs pretty badly a few minutes after the bots start the crunch and doesn't stop until it ends. Some maps seems to have it worse than others, but it seems number of pros on the field have a larger effect than number of Shave Ice/Smoking objects/Bots on the field. Strange really. I managed to join a Blitz game before and the performance wasn't bad at all, though there were some odd problems likely Listen server related which increased ping with intensity.
Would be hard to tell considering I was having problems with this card until I realised it was the drivers, but I guess it wasn't present before. However that just suggests it's inconsistent as the only unplayable state was Grenade III when we were shut out recently, but a few other games of that map were fine before. Besides, if it were increased bots causing a problem then the Blitz game would have been even worse. Played a Season Blitz (to wave 20) with four players, that's probably if anything about as many bots as a crossfire game towards the end, and more turrets too. Steel Peel and Spunky give more "room" for bots to exist in and the latter even more of the buggers, but I've yet to have a game ruined on one of those maps by unplayable performance.
Posting from Steam Overlay This just happened again, dropped on Steel Peel from 40FPS to 15FPS all of a sudden. Stuck like that until time of posting. Next map was Grenade III and it only started at 40FPS, averaged 20FPS once everything started spawning. :/ Update: Restarting the game fixed this issue, for now.
