Game causing CPU spikes in system process.

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Hey guys,

So I can get into the game fine. Everything is perfect for about 10-15 min. Then I'll get a large "lag" spike that lasts for about 10 seconds. After the spike, everything returns to normal. It all runs fine now for about 3-5, min and I'll get another spike. They run at about 3-5 min intervals and each spike lasts about 10 seconds.

This makes the game unplayable. If I get a spike while in an encounter, I always die.

So, I popped open task manager and minimized the game to a window. I noticed that the "System" process was spiking up to 50% CPU usage. While, with the game needing 75% of my CPU usage to run, the system cutting into it to take away 25% and bringing my load up to 100% is what is causing the spikes.

I understand that the system process is what controls drivers and other kernals. So I updated my video and sound drivers. All was fine for 30 min, and I thought I solved the problem, but I still got the spike.

Anyone have any ideas as to what I can do to fix this? I'm a intermediate enthusiast, so I know my way around a comp a bit, but I'm stumped. All other games TF2, WoW work fine without any spikes.

C2Duo E6600
2gb ram
Nvidia 8800GT
MSI P6N Diamond with onboard Sound Blaster X-Fi
Running XP SP3


Thanks in advance. If I figure it out, I'll post the solution for anyone else that may encounter this problem.

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Also looking for a solution to a very similar problem to this. Anyone have an idea?

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Well, I found this on a sticky. I think it pertains to our situation.

First up for the performance issues is the extreme CPU usage happening especially while moving but also to some people while standing still. You can tell if this is the problem you are experiencing because changing your graphics setting all the way to low does not improve your FPS (which means that you are CPU bound and your GPU is just sitting idle most of the time). In extreme cases people are getting 1-5 FPS standing still. We have still been unable to reproduce this ourselves but thanks to the information many of you provided we think it was due to the background data loading thread getting into a bad state and constantly decompressing data. We have this fixed (unconfirmed until you guys test it), and the fix should be going up onto the public test shard soon and then it will get pushed to the live shard.

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YAY!! Great news!

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Make sure you go into the Nvidia Control Panel and set Threaded Optimization to off.

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Still getting spikes. Some nights it is great and runs fine, others it will spike like crazy. Haven't worked anything out yet.

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I can't get into the Nvidia Control Panel without it wanting to send an error report.

Any suggestions?

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Yeah and this is bad because there is only a few of us with this prob so its going to be put at the bottom of the list it will be months before this is fixed.... Can we get out money back?:confused:

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It would be nice to know for sure if this is a client side Cryptic problem, or something with our OS/Hardware on our side.

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So, I've been putzing around trying to figure out what the deal is here.

I loaded up Processor Explorer and checked where the spikes were coming from. I noticed the system process spiked while playing, so I went to properties and checked which thread it was in the system process that was spiking.

Turns out it was a kernal named t3filt.sys. This is associated with my sound drivers.

I have onboard sound, so I disabled the driver and went into the BIOS and disabled the onboard sound entirely.

Load up into champions, expecting a spike free experience... But no no no... Now the Explorer.exe is spiking. So I went and checked which thread it was in there, and its the ntdll.dll file that is causing the spikes. Now, I know this is a required system file, so I can't really disable it.

The thread in particular is ntdll.dll!Rt!AllocateHeap+0x18c

I've looked and can't find any info on this and why it would be spiking. I've read a few things claiming that this kernal is related to the Windows Updater... but I dont see how it would affect this game only.

I've formatted and done a fresh install of XP just to see if that would help, and I still get the same problem. It can not be malware or virus, either.

Devs, this needs to be addressed, please. There are others with the same problem. Are there any suggestions for a quick fix? Is it our hardware or OS that is the problem? Or is it a game client problem?


Again, the OP posted the exact same problem I'm having.

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ntdll.dll!Rt!AllocateHeap+0x18c is a known issue with XP SP3. Not sure if it exsisted in 2...

I think you are only noticing it during play, due to the way that this game sends the data between the OS and threads the cores...

Coding is the issue for sure.

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Yep... It only spikes during play. I've ran multiple other programs and watched the cpu usage. This game is the only one that causes any kind of spike.

So, you're saying it coding in the game client that is causing this issue?

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I would wager so. It isn't a far leap of logic to conclude that if all else works fine, and is stripped away from being wrong, then the one thing you are playing at that moment has the coding error.

Error is also a strong word, it may just not play nicely with other 3rd party drivers (intel/amd, microsoft, graphics, etc.).

New code is always buggered at start, thats why there are so many revs that follow...unfortunately..the game had to ship with the buggered code.

Give them time.

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Dil,

Thanks so much for taking the time to respond to thsi thread. I know you can sense my frustration. I'm not blaming Cryptic, as I was just trying to see if there is everything and anything that I can do on my end to make my experience less frustrating. Thanks again for your post. I appreciate it greatly.


Kate