F.E.A.R. Performance Slowdown? Did You Install New USB Peripherals?

By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews

A recent review over at C|Net produced a mystery … why such a major frame-rate drop in F.E.A.R. when using the mouse and keyboard supplied by the manufacturer of the system? Turns out, swapping out the mouse and keyboard fixed the issue.

From what we’ve seen, if you have either a USB mouse or keyboard connected to your PC while playing F.E.A.R., you’ll get a major frame rate drop on even the mightiest of gaming PCs. We’re talking from 150 frames per second down to 13 fps or so. Using old-school devices appears to fix the issue. We found big performance hits with Logitech and Saitek hardware, although there’s a world of USB devices that we haven’t tested. We found that the Creative-made mouse and keyboard that come with Velocity Micro PCs don’t seem to cause as much trouble, but they still show a measurable decline in performance, by roughly 10 fps. Source: News.com

We Say: Apparently this has been reported on the F.E.A.R. forums as well. It’s unclear from the article if they installed the manufacturer’s drivers or stuck with the OS drivers. I try to keep as little extra software running on my gaming system as possible, so I don’t install those, and haven’t seen this problem (I have both a Logitech mouse and a Saitek keyboard). However, it’s possible that it’s also related to the hardware in the PC, as the Velocity Micro didn’t see as much of a drop-off. Finally, it’s also unclear if this is restricted to the Logitech and Saitek peripherals, as well as F.E.A.R. (one comment at the news site indicated it had been seen on WoW). At any rate, if you install a new USB keyboard or mouse and see a sudden drop-off in a game, it’s something to keep in mind.