Game Performance

[JMann Veteran]

Hi everyone, me again. ;) (Hopefully for the last time!)

Ok, so today I decided to install just a few games and see how close I can get back to my normal playing like I did on Windows XP; first off I installed World of Warcraft and after the 2gb's of patches I launched it and loaded up my character and boom, lag. Just a quick thing to say, my old Windows XP could run WoW with every single setting on the highest possible and looked brilliant without any lag spikes. But now in Windows Vista with everything on the lowest setting and at 1024x768 resolution I still get lag making the game litterally un-playable.

I was expecting a performance decrease from XP but nothing like this...now a few things you should know which doesn't seem right from my thinking:

• I have gone onto the nVidia website, and downloaded the Windows Vista x86 drivers for my card (nVidia GeForce 6600GT 128mb) (infact it is these ones from this link: http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x86_97.46.html - and installed them and after restarting a got 3 errors can't remember them exactly but they were to do with some missing DLL files. (I will look them up when I can and bring them here.)
  
• In the nVidia Control panel, you can look up like a Appearance thing where you can change setting and view what a 3D nVidia logo looks like, on my computer, its pretty much impossible to tell any colours; its just black. (Now that is not right.) *
  
• My PC runs the Windows Vista games perfectly, no problems.
  
• Computer specification: AMD Athlon 64bit 3000+, 1.25GB RAM, 90GB Hard Drive, ECS Motherboard, Windows Vista Home Premium.
  

I am believing it's a Driver problem, but I must be missing something or doing something wrong considering WoW ran at full on everything in Windows XP and in Vista it still runs incredibly laggy with everything on the lowest settings. :/ But I am open to every single suggestion, why is everything so rubbish when gaming?

Help me people of the Neowin Community! :)

JMann

P.S: I am in the middle of installing Counter Strike Source, I will let you know how that one runs...

Edit: * In regards to the shabby looking nVidia logo attached is what it looks like at the moment, and on XP it use to look lovely and smooth. :p

Edited February 4, 2007 by JMann

[bOingball]

I would try this newer driver is you want to play games :)

http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/nvidia/100se...10059_vista.exe

Don't worry it's not just for laptop's, They always have the latest releases on there forums.

I've got a 6800GT 256Mb AGP and CS:Source ain't half bad on it :)

Regards

bOing

[JMann Veteran]

I would try this newer driver is you want to play games :)

http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/nvidia/100se...10059_vista.exe

Don't worry it's not just for laptop's, They always have the latest releases on there forums.

I've got a 6800GT 256Mb AGP and CS:Source ain't half bad on it :)

Regards

bOing

Thank you, I will try that in a matter of minutes and let you know. :)

[SMELTN]

same card as bOingball, and I got the new 100.59 drivers, my WOW works fine with them. I DO have a lower FPS than I did with XP but only by around 10fps.

They will get it running smooth over time.

[JMann Veteran]

same card as bOingball, and I got the new 100.59 drivers, my WOW works fine with them. I DO have a lower FPS than I did with XP but only by around 10fps.

They will get it running smooth over time.

Could you give me a link for those drivers? (100.59) The link given to me just takes me to the main page..;)

Appreciate it.

[bOingball]

http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index....showtopic=12728

is a link to the 32-bit ones.

[JMann Veteran]

Thanks, I have installed them will check for any improvements now. :)

[JMann Veteran]

Ok a update for you all: I installed that Driver release (100.59) and Vista still works like normal, but World of Warcraft yes runs a little better but is still pretty much damn laggy with an average (not moving) of 12FPS and moving around 9-10FPS. On XP over 40+ FPS constantly etc. :blink:

Still waiting for Counter-Strike Source to decrypt and update so I can have ago and see what that play's like. So far, nice one nVidia & Microsoft on Vista working terribly for me at least! :D

JMann

Edit: If you want to have a giggle, and see what I mean:

Edited February 4, 2007 by JMann

[zecold]

If you don't have a laptop, you can download nvidia 100.59 drivers directly from their website, no need to take them from laptopvideo2go

[JMann Veteran]

Ok a full-update for you all, after installing the 100.59 drivers from the Laptop site, I then re-downloaded the same drivers off the nVidia website as it might of made a difference and then uninstalled the previous drivers and reinstalled the newest 100.59 from nVidia. I then consistently went into CS:Source and World of Warcraft and on both got extreme lag.

Also for notice is that I made sure I set all Graphic settings to game defaults which in Source is 1280x1024 4x AA on everything and so on and pretty much everything on Max plus 4xAA in World of Warcraft still continuing to get tremendous lag. But two things too add are:

- In the nVidia Control panel, when adjusting settings for that 3D nVidia logo it now looks smooth and good unlike what it did before. (Making some progress?)

- I previously inside my computer had a 1GB stick of DDR3200 RAM and a 256mb stick of DDR2300 I think in, and my index base score was 3.7; I removed the 256mb RAM stick and the score has gone upto 4.1. (Difference in the RAM speeds then! ;))

Also I don't know if this is useful, but anyone who plays World of Warcraft should understand; when loading the screen where you enter your username/password credentials the sounds laggs a lot and so does the music I have on etc (becomes jumpy) and then when I get to my character list my actual graphics on the characters look perfect and fine its when I actually load and get in the game it lags! (Same with CS:Source to.)

Would fiddling with any compatibility settings or something like that fix these issues? Or not, don't want to fiddle with much more and make things worse than they already are with my 2.0FPS. :p

Thanks for any help, kind of needed right now!

JMann

Edit: I suppose I haven't really put this in yet, now this is the mystery for me. When I do play games, like Source and WoW the graphics look fine, its the just game itself runs slow for example running around etc...

Edit 2: Also, looking at Taskmgr I see that my RAM available out of 1024mb of it is only about 48% is that normal/ok?

Edited February 4, 2007 by JMann

[Aeschylus Maximus]

Try running your game as admin this will prevent any lag from the game waiting for permissions.

[JMann Veteran]

Will try that, and see if it makes a difference. :)

[micro]

Run in Administrative mode - Disable visual Themes and disable Desktop composition - There you go should help you..

[JMann Veteran]

Ok that helps a little, it puts my FPS upto around 20 standing still, then low 10's when moving. Its better, but its still not fixed. ;)

[Aeschylus Maximus]

So your card settings are on Optimal Performance?. As in when you go into catalyst and click just on the 3D thing is the slider all the way to the left? or close to it?

[JMann Veteran]

At the moment it is in "Let the 3D Application decide" and the logo looks nice and smooth; also for some reason now Source seems to be running ok once I am in a game not terribly laggy un-like WoW. So really I think its just World Of Warcraft at the moment which I am suffering the major lag issues with.

[Aeschylus Maximus]

Alright well if you still have problems try click on the 3D part and just move the slider to either optimal or high performance, that should reduce any lag at all.

[JMann Veteran]

I am afraid to say I have altered this just now with low/high settings each tried with no avail. :) Think im just going to have to sleep on this one. Is there anyway I can downgrade DirectX 10 to DirectX 9.0c? Do you reckon it could help?

[Aeschylus Maximus]

I doubt it would help because DX 10 was especially made to be downward compatible with DX 9 games and I doubt you would be able to downgrade. The system wouldn't let you unless you do it manually, which would take years to change registry and etc.

[hagjohn]

Make sure you defrag. Even with a clean install last week, my drive was hugely fragmented.

[JMann Veteran]

Make sure you defrag. Even with a clean install last week, my drive was hugely fragmented.

Ok so DX9 is out of the question, also Defragging my computer now so I will see if it makes a difference. :) Still looking for other help though people if available!

[XPGoD]

Vista is kinda of odd in the respect that with my ATi X700 Pro AGP 256Mb card... the following for me holds true.

If I go into the Catalyst Control Center and put everything on High Quality... not all the way up (e.g. A.I. stuff.. or super high AA), and leave v-sync off... playing games like F.E.A.R.(1280x1024 all min) roll smoother than ever. Games like America's Army, and BF2 responded better when I messed with the AGP Apeture Size in the BIOS. Meaning, the lower I put it, the faster the gaming. If you look at your display properties, you will note that what ever your AGP Apeture size is, this becomes "Shared Memory" and is added to that of the "Dedicated Memory" on your graphics adapter. This means if you have 256Mb on AGP Aprature size and have 256Mb onboard Memory, you will now have 511Mb total Graphics Memory. negative one Mb for some system process...

Reading Microsoft's whitepaper on this explains that drivers using the CAPPED instruction (which Nvidia and ATI are doing) is not something Microsoft supports. Also, they give No 100%'s on the "Shared Memory" being given back to the system or "non-graphical" processes... this may be tying up precious resources should the drivers be improperly written. I will do more testing as well beings that you and I are having the same sort of problem, but within different games... but try messing with the AGP Size in BIOS, and kicking up the Quality settings.... oddly it seems faster to me.

[JMann Veteran]

I haven't ventured into the BIOS yet, but I will look into it later. Let me know if you find any kind of information!

Thanks.

[XPGoD]

I doubt it would help because DX 10 was especially made to be downward compatible with DX 9 games and I doubt you would be able to downgrade. The system wouldn't let you unless you do it manually, which would take years to change registry and etc.

you can indeed install the lastest runtimes for DirectX 9C.... this has helped some people.... but again, who knows what else they've messed with that without the fraction of documenting... we'll never know.

It's definitely not Vista causing the slowdown... I think the drivers are causing this issue. Nvidia and ATI are indeed capping the shared access... this is from the whitepaper from Microsoft.

In addition to per segment commit limit, there is a global commit limit on all aperture segment. This global commit limit is also referred to as shared system memory. This value is computed by the video memory manager but can be reduced to a lower value by the driver using the DXGK_DRIVERCAPS. ApertureSegmentCommitLimit capability bits; however, this is not recommended.

So we need to look into this, and get more information as to what this might be causing.... I'll tell you this much. You can't tell me that my 8800 (if I had one)... performs crappy on Vista? Where's the difference? Drivers? Memory?

[JMann Veteran]

XPGod, sounds good what your coming up with but I am having a time trying to understand it all. ;) Two things:

- Launching a game (WoW in this instance) a minute ago brought up a ! icon in the taskbar (image attached) what does it mean and why did it come up? Any ideas? (Cant rollover it and get a description..)

- Also, it partly seems I am not alone when it comes to WoW FPS problems, I made this thread and we have some information about a possible memory leak, fixing this or if you lot can read it and make some more sense of it than I can: http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?t...245&sid=1#0

Might help somewhat,

JMann