Strange performance fluctuations

[Rider]

I've been replaying Prey today and noticed something odd... I'm having some pretty radical performance fluctuations. In some areas everything runs fine, but if there's like 2 or 3 enemies on screen (or glowing decals) things slow down to a crawl. I tried disabling all the graphics features, but to no avail.

I have the following system specs:
GeForce 8800 GT (512 MB)
AMD64 3800+
2x 512MB DDR Ram (at 400MhZ)

I don't see what the problem is. Anyone got any ideas?

[Deep-Space Warrior]

Have you tryed to patch the game with latest patch?

Do you have the latest drivers installed?

[Rider]

Yes on both accounts. Running Prey 1.4 as well as the latest (Beta) GeForce drivers. I tried going back to the current official pack, but that didn't do a lot of good (it made it worse actually) so that's probably not it...

I do find it quite strange though, that when I open the Options menu, I get bad framerates as well... I mean... I checked with fraps and when I open the options menu it drops from a nice round 60 to 10FPS!

I'm Running WinXP btw, maybe that helps some.

[Deep-Space Warrior]

Hmmm... that is a tricky one... Your spec. seem to be supported by the game. It says Geforce 7900 SE or higher, and AMD processors, which you have...

My game runs fine, even on high, with 1.4 patch (or without), but with the newer graphic drivers:
ATI Rdeon 9600 SE
Intel Pentium 4, 2.8 GhZ
2x 512MB DDR RAM

Sorry, but nothing comes to my minde, what could the problem be. I wish you more luck in finding the answer, then you had so far...

[Hudson]

Are you running retail or steam?

If steam, try deleting your local content and download the release again.

[Rider]

No I'm running the Retail. I like the look of having that Prey case standing on my shelf

Would there be some way to check which process inside of Prey is taking the longest to complete? I might be able to narrow it down to the troublemaker that way...

[Rider]

Oh well, finished the game regardless.

Good times

P.s. If anyone figures out what the problem might be, be sure to drop a line or something... it might help other people with the same issue (if there are any)

[Alterum]

Disable your second monitor ;-)

[fast-1]

You could lower your screen resolution so you get more speed. I see you have enough ram it might be that your too high on the system requirements.

800 x 600 32bit maybe you got Windows XP 32bit or 64bit ?

[Rider]

Originally Posted by Alterum

Disable your second monitor ;-)

THANK YOU! That solved everything!

Alternately, in the Nvidia control pannel one can set 'Multi Display/Mixed-GPU Acceleration' to 'single-display performance mode' to get the same result!