Ok, so I had to clean my rig of a nasty Ask.com series of trojans and a rootkit. After the cleaning, I noticed that now my game stutters a LOT, especially when there’s a lot to render on the screen.
After a screen’s worth of stuff renders, if I stay put in that area, the game doesn’t stutter at all, but the moment I start traveling again, I get a sudden “jump-freeze” stutter, where the game seems to lurch for a half a second, then everything locks up for about a quarter-second, then game goes back to normal, until I move again.
It’s getting progressively worse it seems, and I have no idea where to begin to look.
Has anyone dealt with this before? Any advice on what to troubleshoot?
You gave yourself the answer here. In this case it likely isn’t just the game responsible for the sudden problems.
GD Before online STD = apparently not so bad.
GD After online STD = so bad you noticed it and created a thread about it.
Avyctes is right. Time for a fresh start since your cleaning method was clearly not effective enough. Honestly it is what I would do if I had managed to get infected that badly. Those types of infections are extremely difficult to be rid of even if using apps that claim to be able to do the job (and quite often the recommended dosage is a tedious cocktail of various related programs that need to be run in a certain order).
Remove all nagging doubt and take the plunge. Back up any files you wish to keep (preferably ones unlikely to be infected, ie… photos, music, perhaps your game saves etc).