Windows Lag driving me insane! What's my bottleneck?

Hey all,

I'm running an AMD64 s754 2800+, 1GB pc3200, and a 6600GT, and on every game I can play full detail no problem, but there's an ever so slight lag-problem in every game I play. It's not so bad on some games like HL-2 but in GTA Vice City I get lag every so many seconds that it's annoying. It might only be a few milliseconds of lag but it's disturbing my gaming experience and it's a pain. I know my GPU is fine, but I'm wondering if s754 might be my undoing. Or do I just want a faster CPU?

Thanks in advance

 

Sounds like it might be a driver issue. Try grabbing the latest drivers for your hardware (chipset/sound/gfx/etc..) and give that a go.

 

Do the above first, but yeah it sounds like the s754 may be giving you greif.

 

I'm running the latest nForce drivers, and forceware 71.84, as 71.89 was crashing EXPERTool. I have a 6600GT with a really noisy fan so I need expertool to keep the noise acceptable. So far both Forceware drivers have the same problem. However, playing SWAT 4 showed no problems today. Bugger, sounds like I'll have to get a 2nd hand CRT (and thus no TFT) and get a 939 board.


edit: Double bugger, 939 is expensive! It'll cost me at least 250 euros for the mobo and proc alone! Looks like I'm stuck on 754 then.

 

this sounds like a memory access problem -

fire up the task manager, and shut down EVERYTHING that you can (except for explorer.exe and the svchost's) - especially virus scanners, hardware monitors, anything that accesses memory or the hard drive regularly.
make sure DMA is enabled.
do a full spybot and adaware scan.
if you arent using it, turn off steam.
for gta:vc, make sure vsynch is on. turn on the frame limiter in the video options. anything over 30fps in a gta game takes away from the overall feel.

oh ya, disk cleanup and defrag. regularly.

i run VC at 1280x768@32 and get a butter-smoth 30fps, no lags (except when entering/exiting buildings) on a xp 3000+ with 2x512mb corsair value and a 9600 pro with 6xfsaa and 16x aniso turned on.

 

doubt its the CPU causing you greif, iv got my 2.8 celeron with a 9200se playing it with no problems. the 754 is easily enuff to run the game.

either driver issue or accessing the game files

 

Hmm. This is a 3-week-old windows install I'm running off, I formatted the disk before that. I'll give defragging a try. However, It's now 1:30PM and I just got up so I'm gonna eat some breakfast first

Oh and one thing: What's DMA and how do I turn it on?

 

DMA = Direct Memory Access

Basically allows the computer component direct access to the memory without going through the Processor.

It could be drivers, i doub't it's your hardware as i have a very similar setup. The other thing you could to is try decresing your draw distance ro checking for any incompatabilityies between the geforce 6 series and vice city.

You can normally set DMA functions either through the system item in control panel or through your motherboards bios settings. Also i would check to make sure your, crap i can't remember but it involves your videocard, in the bios to the same size as your videocard unless it is a 64mb card then set it to double.

 

My AGP aperture is 128 MB, I'll take a look at those BIOS settings in a sec.... I'm copying some big files right now. I'll post (no pun intended ) back when I know more

 

k, and thanks for removing that brain fart i had, burning AGP Aperture into brain, crap now i don't know engrish.

 

I cant see it being your s754 setup, ive got a similar setup only with a barton mobile and I never have any problems. Sounds like drivers to me.

 

Have you tried 64MB? I have seen this make a difference on some systems.
Strange as that seems

 

I was getting some seriously low framerates with the latest drivers and my 6600GT. I installed a slightly older version, I think 66.xx. Give that a go.

 

Hmm. I'm using one forceware revision back (71.84) so expertool works properly... And my games used to run fine with these drivers... EDIT: I think you meant forceware, you're talking about the videocard drivers right? Cos my mobo drivers are version 5.10

I checked DMA and ran a speed test, I'm running my hdd at UDMA 133 (as it should be) but the speed test revealed my harddisk's a liar Burst is max around 107MB/s and sustained is no higher than 58MB/s. Bummer

 

Don't delete the old ones when you update, keep the installers

I have tonnes of older versions, want me to send you v66.93? Add me to MSN and I can send it over.

 

I added ya, I hope this works

 

HDDs are like that. The external bus speed is usually nothing like the speed that the drive can read the platters at.

It's all just a marketing scam, show the big flashy numbers and hide the bottlenecks.

What drive is it you're using?

_C

 

Wait a minute, wasn't there that problem for loads of people with the GTA engine before? I could've sworn i heard about a few people having problems with massive slices of lag every few seconds when they were playing GTA3. Maybe it's resurfaced with VC?

 

I'm using a Maxtor Diamondmax 9, 80GB version. And it's getting full

Krikkit, I haven't noticed the lag before, maybe it was there all along and I've got more demanding since the purchase of my 6600GT

 

If it's really full (i.e. less than 15% space free) that might be the problem. Try backing some stuff up. Also, there was a fix for some people (can't remember whether it was for GTA or GTA:VC) whereupon if you copied the music folder to the game folder on the HD, it didn't lag as much when you got in and out of cars. Might be worth a go (or a google).