Vista

GardenGroveVW

GardenGroveVW

USS VIN NUMBAH?!?!
Executive
Joined
Jun 15, 2007
Messages
9,217
So i put vista on one of my hard drives

i played with vista and my game lags like crazy frame rates are down to 30

When i play on xp i get 80 FPS

System Specs

Manufacturer: System manufacturer
Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 6400+, MMX, 3DNow (2 CPUs), ~3.2GHz
Memory: 2046MB RAM
Hard Drive: 150 GB slave 250 GB WD
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GT
Monitor: ViewSonic VX922
Sound Card: SB X-Fi Audio [9C00]
Speakers/Headphones:
Keyboard: G15
Mouse: G5
Mouse Surface:
 
At this point? Go back to XP. Every few months I boot up Vista and update all my drivers to see if the situation has gotten any better. But every time a driver update makes one game more playable, it breaks three others. It is easily the single most infuriating OS I've had to deal with.

On a side note, monitor your processes and tell me if your Windows Sidebar task randomly spikes 99% CPU usage every once in a while. I can't imagine what is causing it, but even with all of the widgets removed it still periodically does it.
 
Unfortunately, most of the issues gamers have will not be addressed by SP1. And really, it's not even Microsoft's problem, it's NVidia and ATI that are still playing catchup. I have no doubt DX10 will ultimately be prettier and faster than anything done in DX9, but we've got a ways to go both on the driver side and on the game development side.

Although, Microsoft's decision to limit their WDDM system to homogeneous systems only has completely fubar'd my setup. Currently I run a pair of EVGA 8800 GTS in SLI, with a cheapo ATI x1050 running my second monitor. To take advantage of the new WDDM architecture, and thus DX10, all of my VGA devices need to be under the same WDDM driver. So until NVidia releases drivers that can handle more than one model of video card at once (which they've been promising since SLI came out and the DualView addicts went ugly on them) I'm stuck with the choice of SLI and one monitor or no-SLI and two monitors if I want DX10.

Hopefully, everyone will have their junk sorted out around the time true DX10 games start coming out.
 
Not to double post... but DOH! I just noticed you're running an X-Fi card.

Check out: http://connect.creativelabs.com/alchemy/default.aspx

Vista scrapped DirectSound which most modern games used (as I believe the HL2 engine does) and they dump down into software sound when it fails to initialize hardware audio. You'd be amazed what kind of game lag that causes. ALchemy fixed two or three of my games that were just unplayably laggy in Vista.
 
I had a similar problem when i built the new machine, luckily I caught it semi early, so didn't lose anything, and just reinstalled XP and have vista on my other machine for word processing and music/movie playing.
 
[quote1193780577=GardenGroveVW]
So i put vista on one of my hard drives

i played with vista and my game lags like crazy frame rates are down to 30

When i play on xp i get 80 FPS

System Specs

Manufacturer: GardenGroveVW
Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5200+, MMX, 3DNow (2 CPUs), ~2.6GHz
Memory: 2046MB RAM
Hard Drive: 250 GB
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GT
Monitor: ViewSonic VX922
Sound Card: SB X-Fi Audio [9C00]
Speakers/Headphones:
Keyboard: Logitech G15
Mouse: Logitech G5

What do i do?
[/quote1193780577]


Garden,

I play with similar specs as you on 32-bit Vista Ultimate. The thing that is different is I use a 7600gt, which out-performs your crappy 7950 (no offense). The 8800gt's just came out, and it would be a nice upgrade if you went to that.
 
Ive had Vista on my main box at home now for about two months. Its a Pentium D 3.2Ghz with 3GB ram, a geforce 8800 gts video card and sb xfi audio. 2x Samsun 19 inch lcds.

It is slower than XP however I have not had a single prgram lock up or the machine hang. Everything works though all the games I play currently are TF2, DoD and Eve online.

I'm in the IT department where I work and we have all been instructed to load Vista on our primary workstations so we can all begin learning it for the start of our mass deployment around the middle to end part of next year. We are holding off on deploing it until all of our 5000 or so computers have good enough hardware to handle it and Microsoft fixes a few issues.

What I have foound..2GB of RAM is not enough. You need 3 or 3.5

Readyboost works. Get a fast USB flash or sd card equal to the size of your ram and configure it for ready boost.

Exclude all your game files from antivirus scanning.

Turn off user account control unless you like clicking and entering the admin password a lot.

Manually set your swap file to 1.5 times the size of your physical memoery.

If you have two hard drives keep your swap file on a different drive as your OS and game files (different hardware chanel too)

At first I had aereo turned off. I turned it on and stuff started to run better.. go figure.

I've spent the better part of the last two days installing Vista on my laptop for work. I have pretty much everything working now.

Now the funny part... we have to run our primary OS at work as Vista but we have to also have access to an XP Workstation with Office 2003 and IE6. So.. we all have Virtual PC 2007 running a VM of Windows XP so we can support the rest of the enterprise.

Another funny... I am reading Microsofts self pased study guide for the Windows Vista MCTS exam. All the exercises start by saying "go into the control panel and swith to classic view...." Nothign quite like making your new operting system look like your old OS I guess.
 
Wow thanks scragg. I might be asking some questions later. so if you could keep checking back it would be a big help.

Also im upgrading my ram to 4 gigs. <---- This is next


I just got myself a new processor. amd 64x2 6400+ Helped out alot
 
[quote1193956530=ShaneHD]
...The thing that is different is I use a 7600gt, which out-performs your crappy 7950 (no offense)...[/quote1193956530]

I will assume you are joking.
 
More Vista Tips
1) It seems the socially aware programmers in Redmond set the default power saver plan to only give the CPU 50% of the power it should have for optimum performance. Select the High Performance power plan and make sure the power settings for Processor power management are set to 100%.

Right click on computer, select properties, select Performance from the lower left, select Adjust power settings from the upper left, click the High performance Radial Button. Customize the plan settings to fit your needs by selecting Change plan settings and Change advanced power settings.


2) Having problems recognizing a piece of hardware or getting a driver installed? Making an addition to your registry might help. In this key
HK_Local_Machine\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\DevicePath
Windows XP the default entry was %systemroot%\inf however, for some reason the default in Vista is C:\inf if you append the value data to read C:\inf;%SystemRoot%\inf you will find drivers load with greater ease.
 
Page 3:

Speed up your SATA hard disk. Right click on computer, select properties, select device manager, expand disk drives, right click your hard drive, open policies, check Enable write caching and Enable advanced performance. Click OK.

On warning here... if you have power problems or your PC is prone to restarts and lockups you could end up with corrupt or lost data. This feature activates the buffers in your hard disks which means there is a brief delay before data is written. Thos buffers have gotten quite large over the years to increase drive performance so if you lose power and the data in them has not been written to disk you could have a problem. I've got a UPS can can't rememeber when the last time was I had an unexpected shut down so i turned this on.
 
I really dont know where to begin. I check the DOD site tech talk and tech help forums all the time and come here everyonce in a while. Its hard to cathc up but there is so much to post here that I have to just give up.

I have a system with XP and Vista and get the same FPS in DOD on both OS's. If you are nto then you have bad drivers - dont blame vista.

#2, correct me if I am wrong, but the information that goes into a page file will only be information which is from the drive or partition being used. So what is the point in making your page file on a different drive than the one you want to be paged? other than to decrease the life of your hard drives. I will assume that you meant to advise that people have apage file on each drive or partition used while running the os.

#3 - How can anybody in the IT field reccomend to turn of UAC. Oh wait - you probably think that UAC only asks you to cancle or allow dont you? Its not even worth typing the correct information here. If anyone really wants to know why UAC is important then come to the DOD site. Or even better yet, read about it online - you will find that UAC was apart of XP and without it you invite problems. Good times.
 
The page file has nothing to do with which drive or partition it is on. It is space that windows unloads information from RAM that it has not been used in a while, regardless of where it is located. I generally suggest that it be in its own partition if not its own physical drive.

Edit: Also, it isn't always bad drivers that ruin gaming for Vista. Everything from how much RAM it gobbles up just idling to the idiot amount of processor spikes the side bar shoots out. On the slower end of machines, Vista will get lower FPS no matter how good your drivers are. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a Vista hater- DX10 and the architecture of the new WDDM is going to eventually be a huge boon to the gaming industry, just not yet.

Also? Getting rid of DirectSound support was just blatantly uncool. Games designed when DirectSound was almost a given provide very little backup for when it's not there. Before Creative's ALchemy really got off the ground I had to disable my soundboard in a lot of games to keep it from killing my FPS. The games were dumping the sound into software mode and that just eats processor cycles like candy.

UAC really does need more flexibility than ON and OFF.
 
Well in all fairness.

Important: Turning off UAC reduces the security of your computer and may expose you to increased risk from malicious software. Microsoft does not recommend leaving UAC disabled or running with scisors.

On my work computer where I am a domain admin... UAC is on. When I'm logged in doing normal work I don't even log in as an admin.

On my home computer... I fly a little lose and turn off UAC. I accept the risk I could booger things up, if I do I fix it or I reload. If you are not willing to accept that risk by all means leave UAC turned on.
 
Vista needs more RAM to run at normal speeds, and most games you have already were made for XP, so they wont run as good on vista
 
[quote1195000035=Lafinass]
Unfortunately, most of the issues gamers have will not be addressed by SP1. And really, it's not even Microsoft's problem, it's NVidia and ATI that are still playing catchup. I have no doubt DX10 will ultimately be prettier and faster than anything done in DX9, but we've got a ways to go both on the driver side and on the game development side.

Although, Microsoft's decision to limit their WDDM system to homogeneous systems only has completely fubar'd my setup. Currently I run a pair of EVGA 8800 GTS in SLI, with a cheapo ATI x1050 running my second monitor. To take advantage of the new WDDM architecture, and thus DX10, all of my VGA devices need to be under the same WDDM driver. So until NVidia releases drivers that can handle more than one model of video card at once (which they've been promising since SLI came out and the DualView addicts went ugly on them) I'm stuck with the choice of SLI and one monitor or no-SLI and two monitors if I want DX10.

Hopefully, everyone will have their junk sorted out around the time true DX10 games start coming out.
[/quote1195000035]
Dual 8800 GTS's...

You are set for all the games being released in the next 15 years.
 
Video games are pretty much my only hobby other than tinkering with photoshop. I was fortunate enough to marry a woman who doesn't mind that I come home, sit down at the computer, and likely will not get up again before bed. So I tend to keep my computer near the edge, I want my games to be both pretty and functional.

I play TF2 in 1680x1050 with every in game setting maxed and several forced into higher settings yet from the control panel. I am, in fact, a geek.
 
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