Wildly erratic performance

[GotNext]

I have a good system, but Darwinia seems to alternate between silky smooth and barely moving. It seems completely random when it does this. I tried setting the affinity to one processor or the other as well as changing the priority and while it might have made some difference, the game is still pretty much unplayable.

My specs:

Core2Duo E4300
GeForce 8800GTS
2 Megs RAM
Windows XP SP2

Any ideas how I might fix this?

Oh, and I'm playing the Steam version.

[frenchfrog]

Update video drivers, sound drivers, and directx.

Try turning down some visual options.

[GotNext]

Yeah, I keep the drivers up to date, and Windows installed 3 weeks ago. Changing visual settings did nothing.

I finally figured it out. I turned down the sound setting memory use and set the hardware 3D sound on and now it's ok. I'm not sure which one did it, but it seems fine now. Some kind of issue with the mixer I guess.