one day its perfect, the next its pitiful, rainbow six 3

[apu95]

i got a new vid card, the 9600 xt. it came bundled with 3 games, one which was rainbow six 3. i installed it two days ago and it ran perfectly with overdirve turned on or off, everything in high detail at 1024x768 res. today i started the game up again and it worked like crap. everything would load fluidly until the point where the actual mission started. as soon as i start looking around, it starts playing really REALLY choppy. ive no idea why this happened, ive tried both 4.1 and 4.2 cats but same thing happens. i also updated the game with the latest patch (1.53) but the problem is still there.

im not sure what else to try....ive defragged the hard drive, searched for ad/mal ware and for virii as well.
any ideas on fixing this?

thx!
Apu

 

[Not Bman]

I think this sounds like more off a hardware problem then game problem, ie "Games" section is wrong

 

[LeeJend]

Sounds like it's not on line gaming right?

Heat - is the card throttling back because the room was hotter today? Hot air heat can really mess up your internal temperatures and varies with time of day and how cold it is outside.

Background tasks - Kill all non essential processes and see if the problem goes away. Physically disconnect your internet connection and try again. Check under my computer properties, advanced, performance, advanced - set Processor scheduling to Programs (as opposed to background tasks).

BTW my 9500 PRO started doing the same during on line gaming. It just started recently. Gaming performance got choppy all the sudden. I did a bunch of stuff (same as you, plus closed router DMZ) finally setting the "force network card to fixed speed instead of autodetect" appears to have cured it.

And then there is always the big ugly. Been doing your MS Critical Updates every 2 days? They have put out bad ones in the past. One brought my gaming system to its knees for a week before I found the Help artical about it and removed it.