cpu spikes in games and flash video

[jamez707]

i have just been scratching my head latly trying to get my comp up to par
...for all that dont know i have recenly been having computer problems. after a new graphics card, psu and a damaged stick of ram i am backl up and running. but i was still having problems with big cpu spikes wile playing flash video and during cpu intncive games (3d). the spikes where %100 cpu usage for about 5 seconds every 30 seconds...quite frustrating. after a =fair bit of investigating i fixed the problem by uninstalling AVG (FREE VERTION) and know i am not getting any spikes at all. hopefully this should not start happening again i just thought i should share this info because i was under the impretion that avg was not verry intrusive but this was quite a bother .it was a far bit of stuffing about to solve the problem.

ps i cant spell for bannanas incase you couldnt tell and my spellcheck isnt workingi atm

[Speedie]

Maybe you should have gotten a bigger graphics card or more ram.

[blade888]

Any form of Antivirus will cuase more CPU usage whenever it needs to parse through any form of infectable file.

With the recent outbreaks of picture and video based trojan viruses, Anitvirus software will start to affect things it previously didn't. So sadly this problem isn't going to 'go away' easily.

In the case with games, games have a lot of 3d Texture files it parses through RAM, if you have your AV on, everytime a new 3d object appears or gets cached on into RAM, your AV will spike your CPU cycles and end up chewing CPU usage will then in turn cause your spike.

As for Flash video.. Flash video when running fullscreen has always spiked CPU as it is a software driven video decompressor stream, video cards don't process that. But now in light of recent outbreaks as mentioned before, even at half screen, your AV scans the stream as it comes through, hence a little more CPU usage than it used to.

You may also notice when browsing through folders with a lot of media is slower as well and your CPU spikes more than it used to.

As hardware gets faster, and AV software becomes more optimised with scanning CPU spikes and slow downs will gradually go down. But don't count on it extremely soon.