Okay... this is annoying the crap out of me. Maybe you guys can help.

[Dark Pulse]

I love Borderlands. I love playing Borderlands.

What I don't love, is what happens after a few hours of playing Borderlands.

When I start playing, the game will be wonderfully smooth. Everything is nice and zippy, no frame drops, etc. This is what I expect.

Within an hour or two, the game's performance will get utterly horrible. Choppy, stuttery, etc.

Why? Simple. Process Explorer says that DPCs are taking up about 30-40% of my CPU time. It's not enough to cripple the machine, but it makes the game act like it's constantly undergoing pageswapping, causing hitches and breaks in the audio - and the framerate.

Closing the game cleans out the DPCs, and restarting the game immediately afterward gives me the same smooth performance I'm expecting... until another 2-3 hours of gameplay passes.

Now, I know what DPCs are, and what they do. I cannot for the life of me figure out why it'd start after a couple hours of playing Borderlands.

Here's what I've eliminated so far.

• It's not the videocard overheating. The GPU core rises up to maybe 50C, tops, due to me having the fan at 75%. (I could reset it to auto, but that'd plunk it to 40% and the fan on a GTX 285 is seriously ineffective until it hits 55-60%.) Plus the DPC problem clears up as soon as I quit Borderlands - if this were heat related, it'd begin again almost immediately after I relaunch it, and it doesn't.
• It's not the CPU overheating, either, as I'm sure it'd happen in a lot more games than just Borderlands if this were the CPU getting too hot to handle it.
• Does not seem to be video driver related. I actually updated my drivers to see if that'd cure it - nope. As an aside, AVOID THE 191.07 NVIDIA DRIVERS LIKE THE PLAGUE - I don't know WHAT they did but I went from over 100 FPS to under 30 FPS at 2048x1152. Reverting to the previous ones (190.68 I believe) restored my framerate.
• I had a similar problem once before, when Fallout 3 was giving me extremely bad performance. I ran some diagnostics via RATTv3 and XPerfView, and in this case it told me my problem was with my Firewall. So naturally, when this popped up, I tried that again. The answer? Whatever was causing the DPCs came back as "Unknown." Frustrating.

I'm a pretty PC-savvy guy, but I'm completely, totally, utterly stumped here. I'm not one to usually say to the devs "OMGPLZFIX" but unless I can eliminate SOMETHING, I don't know what else to say.

Anyone giving me help would be very appreciated. It's ****ing frustrating to have to quit Co-op with Brizz and Hal because the DPCs are robbing CPU time from the game.

 

[Rambowjo]

Sounds like buggy RAM to me. How much RAM do you have? Ordinary and VRAM.

What exactly is DPC?

 

[haarg]

Last time I had problems along these lines it was caused by my sound drivers.

 

[Dark Pulse]

Sounds like buggy RAM to me. How much RAM do you have? Ordinary and VRAM.

What exactly is DPC?

4 GB in the system, 1 GB on the videocard. An extra 640 MB if you count my 8800 GTS in a PhysX role.

DPCs are Deferred Procedure Calls. I'll toss you over to Wikipedia for the nitty gritty.

Last time I had problems along these lines it was caused by my sound drivers.

Sadly, I have the latest driver for the soundcard. There is a newer one, but apparently it's a beta driver for Windows 7 RTM.

 

[haarg]

The only way I ended up fixing the problem was getting a separate sound card.

 

[-Jes-]

I got this as well ... When I was running textures on high.
It got worst around Fyrestone after an hour of play.

Setting texes to medium upon start of play resolved it.
Eh, my lappy's getting old, and there's a new, blingin' one for sale for only 1400$ these days..

 

[Dark Pulse]

I got this as well ... When I was running textures on high.
It got worst around Fyrestone after an hour of play.

Setting texes to medium upon start of play resolved it.

Hmm. My details are on high as well.

Are any of you running on High with no such problems?

 

[Capt.Toilet]

I get the same issue as you DP. Basically everything maxed at 1920*1200 and it's pretty random. I don't completely quit out though, just quit to the main menu and that usually fixes it for me. I tried lowering the resolution a notch or two and that didn't matter much either. Bottom line is it has to be something with the games optimization because no other game has ever done something like this to me. Hell Crysis never had random fps drops like that.

 

[Darkdrium]

So you guys too get random lag for a few minutes then it goes back to running normally?
I have the same problem.

 

[Sjosz]

I have been having this sporadically after a 3-4 hour session. Everything's on max settings at 1680x1050, and sometimes the framerate will just go down from an otherwise solid 50-60 fps to about 25-30. Pretty sure mine's because of the video card heat, though.

 

[Kantham]

I love Borderlands. I love playing Borderlands.

What I don't love, is what happens after a few hours of playing Borderlands.

When I start playing, the game will be wonderfully smooth. Everything is nice and zippy, no frame drops, etc. This is what I expect.

Within an hour or two, the game's performance will get utterly horrible. Choppy, stuttery, etc.

Yep. I have the same problem and there's many threads about it on the official forums. ennui answered, she suggested to put the CPU affinity to one core in the meantime. That didn't do it though, but they are aware of the issue.

It's some sort of memory leak issue. Hopefully it gets addressed in the first patch.

 

[Capt.Toilet]

It's some sort of memory leak issue. Hopefully it gets addressed in the first patch.

To those who doubted me when I stated this on TS a few days back, I say good day

 

[Dark Pulse]

Yep. I have the same problem and there's many threads about it on the official forums. ennui answered, she suggested to put the CPU affinity to one core in the meantime. That didn't do it though, but they are aware of the issue.

It's some sort of memory leak issue. Hopefully it gets addressed in the first patch.

Good. It's nothing weird with my system, then. A memory leak is what I suspected, but one can never be too sure with such things.

I do hope it gets addressed in the first patch. It just really sucks to go from 100 FPS to 25-30. And a STUTTERY 25-30, not even a steady 25-30.

If they've acknowledged it's a legitimate issue, I suppose there's nothing to do but wait and see.

 

[Slainchild]

I get this too. At first I thought it was just the game being intense (lots of AI and stuff happening at the time), but I got it again in a fairly quiet area.

 

[KaL976]

It's the other way for me. Starting a game or when travelling between areas the game takes anything up to a minute to rez up the textures & apply all the effects.
Once it's done that though it's fine until the next travel/load.
1280x1024 8xAF everything else high/on. [email protected], 1GB DDR2, 8800U/768, XFi Fatality [shut up]