Choppy M2:tw and mods.

[IZob]

I've been 3 days away from my Desktop. Before I had left, M2 was working as normal and while I was away no one was using the PC. Today I started the PC as normal, but now when ever I start M2, or its mods, I get a very choppy screen performance (both in the menu and on campaign/battle map). The cursor, videos and sound seem to be unaffected. Any Idea of what might be going on?

Edit: I made a few more observations and tried another game. I got the same results, choppy or laggy screen. I then noticed the FPS were significantly lower, to be exact it was hovering around 1.2 fps which is really bad for my video card! (NVIDIA geForce 8500 GT)

So I went to help & support (I'm running Vista so it will be on the start up task menu) and went to Hardware diagnostic tools. The HP computer with its HP diagnostic programme loaded all the hardware and stats as if all was fine. So I made a test on the Video Card. I got the same results with 1.2 fps, watching the animation in the background very slowly move. The test covered 3 sections, Fixed Transformation and Lighting, Wireframe Line Test and PCI Express Status Test. The test passed the first two but could never start on the third. Another worry was I kept getting this pop up:

display driver nvlddmkm stoped responding and has succesfully recovered.

Needless to say this was looking very bad.

After I had restarted and played the test again, with similar results as before. I unplugged the computer and looked inside. It all looked ok to me. I replugged all the wires back in a started the PC up again.

Lucky for me the Video card was working again (so it seemed). I tried out M2:tw Americas and noticed almost perfect (normal) fps loading speed. I could also fully pass the video card test in the Hardware diagnostic tools. So all was resolved.

But I'm still very worried why this happened and what could have caused it.

Edit: This popup:

display driver nvlddmkm stoped responding and has succesfully recovered.

has come back.

Edit: I think this issue is mostly M2:tw unrelated so could this post be move to the more general technical thread of this forum?

[irishron]

I'd say uninstall the Nvidia drivers, use Driver Sweeper to clean house, and reinstall new ones.

Hopefully you don't have a layer of dirt on it.