Heyas.
I have been rather inactive for a while and I'm trying to get the activity up once again. However, I have a problem that somewhat kills my activity.

The problem:
After around 30 seconds to a few minutes of playing, I get monster-FPS drops (down to zero) whenever I'm pressing the keyboard.
If I keep pressing the keyboard I also get a sound-feedback as a "beep".

Nothing has changed in my setup from when I was active (apart from windows updates, new games installed etc.)
All hardware and drivers are the same.

in_restart seems to "fix" the problem temporarily. But it does come back.
Pressing ctrl will remove the problem completely until I release ctrl. (I have +showteamscores bound to that key, if that matters)
Pressing an un-bound key, such as L, will also cause a beep and FPS-drop.

I am running ezquake 2.1.
sys_highpriority -1 (or 1, whatever is the lowest priority - read somewhere that if QW hogs all CPU, inputs could suffer)
sys_yieldcpu 1 (If I remember correctly - sitting at work right now)
in_mouse 3 (changing to in_mouse 2 seems to fix it, but I don't want this - it has not been tested for very long time either... I want to solve the actual problem)

Mouse connected to USB.
Logitech G15 headset connected to USB.
My mouse rate is 1GHz (Changing it to 500 Hz delayed the problem, but it still occured)
FPS solid stable at 1078 (until FPS freeze)
Using a steelseries 6Gv2 keyboard, through the ps/2 port (to get the multi-button stuff)

Does anyone have any feedback or heard of this before?
It's really frustrating, as most any situation is a bad situation for FPS drops in qw :p

(Edited 2012-10-12, 16:31)

First of all I'd leave sys_highpriority and sys_yieldcpu at their default values and looked if that helps

I have tried different sys_highpriority / sys_yieldcpu back and forth with little difference.

And the most weird thing is that nothing (HW or drivers) changed from last time I played the game.
One year later, I get FPS drops from using the keyboard.

Seriously, no idea then. This is very weird. It seems like some kind of buffer problem or resourse conflict (conflicting IRQs maybe?).

Just throwing out some suggestions:

- Unplug everything but mouse and keyboard
- Limit fps to a really low amount
- Try usb adapter for the keyboard (should still handle 6 keypresses)
- Try different USB ports for mouse and keyboard
- Update all drivers (specially graphics)
- Try alpha ezquake or fodquake
- How does in_mouse 1 feel?
- Format and reinstall OS

1) Start ezquake.exe without autoloading your config (using none/default cfg) and see if the same error occurs,

2) Unplug mice and just do movement to see if error persists

3) Try another keyboard with the same connection, PS/2, with the same windows driver, "Simple" / "Standarad" / "Universal"

4) If you still have errors, use a keyboard monitor software in order to see any potential problems when you click to move in-game.

I just found what it was...
I apparently have a new keyboard layout Chinese (Simplified, PRC) that I wasn't aware of..
Seems like this input method was not liked by ezquake at all.
It kind of uses a string of inputs and then suggests a chinese character to use, so I guess that is what caused the FPS drops.

The keyboard layout changes when using ctrl+space, which happens quite a lot mid-game for me..

So all in all, it was a pebkac.
Thanks for your replies. I will go back to QW, somewhat ashamed of not noticing this earlier...

Haha, this must be the best reason for FPS drops ever!