Severe slowdown after pausing

[дгthайoѕ]

So i'm wondering if anyone else is experience this problem:

Normally my rig has absolutely no problem with UT3, but if I stay on any menu for more than about 5 minutes my performance takes a huge hit. This will happen regardless of whether I'm sitting at the main menu before starting a match or if I have paused the game to change a setting, go do something else, etc. The really odd thing is that this only happens if I have any menu screen open for too long. I can successfully play through map after map running 60+ fps with no problems or hitches, but then if I pause the game to go do something else I come back to ~10-20 fps tops. And it's not just video performance that suffers. Once the slowdown happens, audio skips and crackles as well.

My Setup:
Asus P5W DH Deluxe Motherboard
Intel Q6600 @ stock 2.4GHz
Dual Sapphire 3870's in Crossfire mode @ stock speeds
4GB Mushkin DDR2 PC6400 RAM
Auzentech Xi-Fi Prelude 7.1 on Logitech Z5500's
Gateway FHD2400 24" LCD through DVI @ 1920x1200
Logitech MX Revolution Mouse
Logitech S510 Keyboard

Things I've tried:
-Since I have a Xi-Fi based sound card that was my first suspect. I tried disabling OpenAL through UT3 to no avail. I also tried disabling the Xi-Fi and using my onboard sound instead. No dice.
-Next I checked all my temps. My Sapphires never went above 60c at any point. Same goes for my CPU (max was 59c)
-I have all the latest drivers for my GPUs, Motherboard and SPU.
-Memtest ran two complete passes (2+ hours) without problems

One last thing to note:
Once the slowdown occurs, the only way to fix it is to quit out of UT and start it back up again. After doing so I am able to play numerous consecutive matches without incident, but if I pause for too long the slowdown happens again like clockwork.

Am I forgetting anything obvious in my diagnosis? Thanks for the help.

[дгthайoѕ]

UPDATE:

The issue is also occurring in the campaign mode. After about 3 levels everything starts to slow down, then by the 5th (consecutive) level the game is so slow that it's completely unplayable. I'm guessing that the issue is so pronounced during the campaign because of the lengthy level select menu time between matches. This also proves that the effect is cumulative since more and more menu usage = slower and slower performance. Can anybody out there reproduce this problem with their own setup?

[Brad.G]

i could be completely off track here.. but id try monitoring memory usage before and after pausing?

[дгthайoѕ]

good call, i'll go try that now and return with an update. thanks for the reply btw!

[дгthайoѕ]

Ok, here are the results of my test:
-Before launching UT3 my memory usage was 1.25 GB (Vista certainly is a hog, isn't it?)
-After Loading the Main Menu my usage went to 1.55GB
-After loading up CTF-Hydrosis and moving around for about 30 seconds, it hit 2.22GB
-I then paused and usage stayed at 2.22GB
-After 5 min of being paused usage actually dropped to 2.11GB, very puzzling

Usage stayed at 2.11GB for another 5 min so I decided to try unpausing and that's when some interesting things happened. The framerate dropped to about 15fps and I noticed that RAM usage returned to 2.22GB then creeped up to about 2.24GB. It held steady at 2.24 while I moved around the map all the while the framerate still at a horrible 15fps.

One additional thing to note. For the first few seconds after unpausing the game, the texture on the weapon I had out was replaced by the very low res version that appears when a map is first loaded. It did update to the proper hires / normal mapped version within seconds, but the framerate stayed at ~15fps the whole time. As usual I had to exit out of UT and relaunch it to recover my normal 60fps. Just for consistency's sake I relaunched UT3 and played a full game of CTF on Hydrosis at 60fps with no problems so it's definitely something with the menus.

[дгthайoѕ]

UPDATE (even though nobody besides Brad.G seems to give a ****): I used stat fps to monitor my actual numerical framerate. Interestingly enough it fluctuated between 45 and 78 fps (on torlan classic) both before and after slowdown. I'm not sure what to make of this...After the slowdown occurs my stat fps seems to think I'm still getting "green" rates yet the actual framerate (that is, the visual framerate) looks more like 5 - 10 fps. Is anyone else in the same boat or am I just SOL here?

[дгthайoѕ]

Come on people, I really need some help here. I can't even pause the game long enough to go to the bathroom without having it slow down to unplayable rates which then forces me to close the program, abandoning the match I was on. This is incredibly frustrating since other than this problem I love how far UT3 has come since release. I'm open to absolutely ANY suggestions at this point.

[дгthайoѕ]

bump, please help.

[дгthайoѕ]

UPDATE (SOLVED): In case anyone has been following this thread, the problem turned out to be a combination of settings in utengine.ini. When BOTH frame smoothing is disabled and the alaudio settings specify more than 32 channels the problem occurs. If only one or the other of those settings is true, the game performs correctly.