TF2 Stutters

[Jotaru]

Hey all-

So, have googled and such but can't quite seem to find a solution that matches my problem, so maybe someone else here can help me troubleshoot. Recently my TF2 has started 'stuttering'... really the best word I can use to describe it. I'll be running along, and my character will kinda stop moving and the screen will jerk back and forth a little bit- almost as if I'm running into a cloaked spy. It'll do this for 3-5 seconds, then I'll appear back 5-10 yards, almost as if it the server has reset my position to where it was a few seconds ago. I'm not sure if its video lag, sound lag, hardware stuttering, latency... My ping almost always hovers in the 30-60 zone, and I try to avoid servers with other high-latency players. I have also tried it on multiple servers, but nothing seems to rectify it.

What really irritates me is I built this computer last year, and it used to run TF2 at high at a constant 60-100 FPS- I've since upgraded parts (and continually upgraded drivers and such) and performance just seems to be continually declining. I've recently moved all my settings to medium/low, and the framerate will peak at about 100 (when standing in spawn not moving) to as low as 20 in combat, with jerky animation, missing frames and the like. I'm not sure if its related, but its basically rendered the game near-unplayable, as I can't make accurate shots due to framerate issues, and when the framerate is alright, my character locks up every 30-45 seconds and throws me somewhere else.

I currently have an e6850 (3.0ghz Core2Duo) with an 8800GT, 6GB of RAM running Vista64. I've all but stopped all background processes and it continues to run, honestly, like shit. The most annoying part is, although the performance decrease seems to be a continual decline as time goes on, the stuttering issue is new, and I really can't think of anything I've done recently that would cause it. I've done the defrag of hard drive + defrag of TF2 files, Spybot cleaning stuff out, killing background processes, optimizing settings (hard drive settings, vista tweaks, etc) and nothing seems to help. Really grasping at straws here Any help appreciated.

[Dezzimal]

The part where you get moved around seems connection related, make sure there isn't anything putting a lot of traffic over your connection in a short period of time causing you to lag momentarily. This could be things like BitTorrent seeds, auto-updaters or even a trojan uploading batches of screenshots of someone's desktop.

[Kaisha]

Open the console and type "net_graph 3", it'll give a visual representation of what's going on with your network data, and if it is a network issue, it'll be made obvious.

What I typically do in these situations is play the game windowed, and have task manager open (or ProcessExplorer) with the processes shown, listed by CPU usage. If there's something hogging your PC those few seconds every while, it should spike to the top of the list during that time.

[Royal]

Don't ever alt tab while you are in TF2! It fucks up the game alot. Everytime i do it people go invisible and kill me from across the map.

[Jotaru]

Thanks Kaisha, appreciate that, didn't know (and of course, props to everyone for advice)

I seriously am at a loss trying to figure out why its running so horribly, but I'm going to continue to try to narrow it down using what you suggested.

[Jotaru]

So, I did the netgraph, and I can't really tell what anything is I'll post a screenshot in a bit of when it stutters, I guess.

One thing I did notice is that, while playing, my CPU usage is at 100%... is that normal? I figure system idle process taking up the extra.. but I don't know, it doesn't seem right. I have a e6850 at 3.0ghz, I can OC to 3.4... but I don't see how I'm maxing out on CPU usage. My memory usage hovers around 50%. It SEEMS network related, but I'm not really sure if perhaps there's a better way to diagnose that

Edit: With Eve Online running, with windows in the background, notepad, media player, etc, my CPU usage hovers no higher than 55% or so... so the 100% with TF2 seems a bit off.

[Jotaru]

Took some screenshots, Kaisha or anyone, if you have more experience, halp!

http://i39.tinypic.com/2d6mv6r.jpg

http://i40.tinypic.com/zkiag7.jpg

http://i40.tinypic.com/2hezwra.jpg

http://i42.tinypic.com/168925y.jpg

Thanks!