Upgrade to Vista from XP = stuttering on 4850?? help!

G

GenTarkin

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 14, 2005
Messages
436
My games were running perfect without stutter in 3d on XP, I decided to give Vista a try installed the upgrade to Vista ultimate. After the upgrade...I uninstalled all drivers using their installers, rebooted to safemode and used DH driver cleaner pro to clean up all left over driver files / entries and the like.
I rebooted and then installed the newest drivers for my motherboard, video card and sound.
I have DFI Ultra LP NF4 SLI motherboard with Opteron 165 clocked @ 2.8ghz default voltage.
RAM is 2GB PC4000 DDR1 running @ 234mhz (stock its rated to 250mhz).
4850 @ 720/ 1125mhz

This system was running like butter in XP.
Since the vista upgrade everything runs beautifully, no issues except in 3d stuff. Most noteably in 3dmark 06 and 3dmark vantage and in FarCry 2, there is hitching every ... 10-20 seconds, the FPS dips by 10 and its a sharp hitch and then it picks back up. Its really annoying. There is no HDD activity when this happens. so its not thrashing the HDD.

I tried different catalyst drivers. 8.10 8.10 FC2 hotfix several times.
Uninstalled motherboard drivers several times and clean install of those.
I even downloaded AMD's fusion utility to shutdown a lot of un needed vista services and ran the machine with no sound driver installed to ensure that wasnt the issue.
It still was stuttering!!! the same way.
I tried declocking the system RAM to 200mhz, declocking the GPU and Video RAM to stock and SAME stuttering =(
tried changing PCIe frequency between 100-110mhz and back and no change.
Raised voltage on system ram and chipset and LDT further and no change in stability.

So, Im at a loss....
Is there anything else you guys can think of I can try?
Im trying to avoid doing a clean install of vista at all costs, I have so much settings and stuff in current installation of OS and games I really dont want to reinstall and configure.

I have no spyware / viruses on the system at all.
I went through services and drivers registry hive entries manually and deleted all old and unused services / drivers not needed anymore.
Inspected windows event logs and they are perfect from a scratch boot and forward.
I even disabled NIC once to test it and that had no effect on it either.
Can anyone give me some tips?
Thanks
 
2GB of memory in Vista is not enough. Might want to check that out since I am on Vista Ultimate and at Idle it eats well over 1gb of memory.
 
Well, I know that if it was starving for memory in the traditional sense say in 3dmark06 ... I would see the HDD light active when the hitch occurs...but it does not.
this is not traditional limited amount of RAM hitching, when I run Crysis GPU benchmark, I can tell that is normal HDD thrashing limited amount of RAM because it does do its hitch to load textures.... and such from the HDD.... I can see the HDD light go on and do its thing, but this is not the hitching Im talking about.

but, this occurs like I said every 10-20 seconds... and the FPS for a total of say half a 1/8th of a second will drop 10fps and then immiediatly "hitch" foward resumeing normal speed. It does not stop it just like glitches very shortly. but its a slowdown, immediatly fast pattern type. Its so hard to describe. But, it cant be a RAM issue... cuz, the HDD light is not active when this occurs...if it was I would definitely point my finger at RAM limit but... I cant

Plus, running AMD's fusion utility which shuts down like over 30 services unneeded....really makes vista not use much RAM at all..... but it still does it while fusion is enabled and vista not using much RAM.
 
grrrr, I dont wanna have to do that ... well I guess one way to test and see if I gotta do that, is make an image of my current vista installation, then wipe drive and install vista from scratch and see if performance improves and hitching gone. If not, then its not my installation, if it is gone then...yeah probably clean install is needed =(
 
2gb..............i lol'd


i have almost no services programs running and vista takes up 1.5GB RAM....playing Crysis eats up a whopping 3.5GB of my RAM in vista :mad:
 
how does your vista eat up that much just sitting there?!?! normal services running, I open up resource monitor and its only eating up 650MB of my RAM..... something must be wrong with your install lol.
 
I think I found my issue, and at this point Im pointing it towards CCC.exe which is the catalyst control center.
For the test... I ended this processes and started up 3dmark06 and all hitching was COMPLETELY gone...I exited 3dmark and started CCC.exe back up again and same hitching is back!!!
So, what to do now....
 
Heh, I run 2GB in Vista Ultimate with no issues whatsoever. I pretty much had the same setup described above, 165 @ 2.7, 2GB DDR500, x1950Pro and never saw a hiccup in Vista, though it was a tad slower than my current rig. Never a dip in performance like described by the OP.

It's not the 2GB of ram. 2GB is more than adequate to run Vista.

I would suggest a complete, fresh install of Vista. Something is dicking with CCC that you're not seeing or driver cleaner is not removing.
 
GenTarkin said:
Well, I know that if it was starving for memory in the traditional sense say in 3dmark06 ... I would see the HDD light active when the hitch occurs...but it does not.
this is not traditional limited amount of RAM hitching, when I run Crysis GPU benchmark, I can tell that is normal HDD thrashing limited amount of RAM because it does do its hitch to load textures.... and such from the HDD.... I can see the HDD light go on and do its thing, but this is not the hitching Im talking about.

but, this occurs like I said every 10-20 seconds... and the FPS for a total of say half a 1/8th of a second will drop 10fps and then immiediatly "hitch" foward resumeing normal speed. It does not stop it just like glitches very shortly. but its a slowdown, immediatly fast pattern type. Its so hard to describe. But, it cant be a RAM issue... cuz, the HDD light is not active when this occurs...if it was I would definitely point my finger at RAM limit but... I cant

Plus, running AMD's fusion utility which shuts down like over 30 services unneeded....really makes vista not use much RAM at all..... but it still does it while fusion is enabled and vista not using much RAM.
Click to expand...
To the OP I had the exact same issue with two 4850's. In XP everything was fine an dandy. But in Vista in almost every game I had this stuttering. It was very weird. If you look at my sig I never figured it out. Your problem is not a ram issue. The only thing I would look at is how did you O/C your card and how did you flash the bios.
 
GenTarkin said:
I think I found my issue, and at this point Im pointing it towards CCC.exe which is the catalyst control center.
For the test... I ended this processes and started up 3dmark06 and all hitching was COMPLETELY gone...I exited 3dmark and started CCC.exe back up again and same hitching is back!!!
So, what to do now....
Click to expand...


then its a driver issue!

have you installed the 8.10 hotfix?
 
mista ting said:
2gb..............i lol'd


i have almost no services programs running and vista takes up 1.5GB RAM....playing Crysis eats up a whopping 3.5GB of my RAM in vista :mad:
Click to expand...


Vista uses what it has available. My Dad's PC runs Vista with 2gb ram and Vista itself usually uses 600-700mb.
 
yes, I have tried official 8.10 8.10 hotfix and 8.11 RC1 version of drivers, both same thing.

Here is my next idea and will test it out when I get home.
Im thinking of 2 things currently.
I never uninstalled old versions of .net...maybe uninstalling .net and reinstalling .net will work?
Does CCC run on the newer version of .net in vista that comes with vista or does it still require and installation of .net 2.0?

2ndly
My card was flashed above the hard set limits of CCC's overdrive portion. I notice that overdrive dissappears and keeps trying to refresh to start that part of CCC back up so the clocks show up. BUT, it doesnt. Im wondering if in the CCC for vista...the refreshing of overdrive or attempt to ... is causing this hitch with the card when its in 3d? perhaps?
In this case, I would try to do an overdrive BIOS flash hack...so I can up the max limits of overdrive...that way CCC can properly show the overdrive clocks rather than sitting there tryin to initialize forever.
OR, is there a way to shut overdrive off completely in CCC? so, it doesnt even attempt to use it?

So, thats my next 2 things...somethings messed up with .net installation OR overdrive polling the video card while its in use is causing the hitch.
 
Well, I figured it out, turns out it was the overdrive trying to poll clock frequencies of the video card that was above the max clock threshold of overdrive for CCC....so I rehacked the video card BIOS with a hash of a higher clocked overdrive settings...to lift the max limits. Since doing this the polling has stopped.
The hitching is completely gone now. WOOT!!!!
 
Even though you fixed your problem more RAM will definitely help a ton.

You need at least 3Gb for Vista and gaming. Launching any memory intense app in vista will quickly eat through your RAM. When using Prime95, Vista, and 2GB of RAM my PC would have 0% free RAM and would lag for ~3 mins after closing Prime95. Now with 4GB of RAM the ram usage while running Prime95 is 2.8GB and everything is sliky smooth. :)
 
ClearM4 said:
Even though you fixed your problem more RAM will definitely help a ton.

You need at least 3Gb for Vista and gaming. Launching any memory intense app in vista will quickly eat through your RAM. When using Prime95, Vista, and 2GB of RAM my PC would have 0% free RAM and would lag for ~3 mins after closing Prime95. Now with 4GB of RAM the ram usage while running Prime95 is 2.8GB and everything is sliky smooth. :)
Click to expand...

Prime 95 Blend tests do that with EVERY computer, no matter how much RAM is in it. it brings my sig system below to its knees when I run a blend test.
 
Go back to XP problem solved. MS knows Vista sucks, why do you think they are pushing Windows 7 out the door asap?
 
dnottis said:
Go back to XP problem solved. MS knows Vista sucks, why do you think they are pushing Windows 7 out the door asap?
Click to expand...

Vista is not that bad of an OS. for goodness sake, Vista 64 is the most stable OS i've ever used.

Heck, I even put it on my sisters Celeron D rig with 2 gigs of RAM and its working great! Overclocks are pretty seemless with it as well.
 
AmongTheChosenX said:
Vista is not that bad of an OS. for goodness sake, Vista 64 is the most stable OS i've ever used.

Heck, I even put it on my sisters Celeron D rig with 2 gigs of RAM and its working great! Overclocks are pretty seemless with it as well.
Click to expand...

QFT . Vista runs perfectly on 2GB of RAM. It handles memory allocation differently than XP, which is why XP users get freaked out when they see almost all of their memory being used while idle.

Will 2GB of ram in Vista limit you in any way? Yes, you won't be able to have 60 instances of explorer open while burning a DVD and encoding a movie. But that goes for XP as well. Will it affect your ability to run any game or application that's out? No, not at all.

Can we drop the "Vista HAS TO HAVE more than 2GB of RAM" crap? It's getting old and people should do some research before spreading around bullshit.
 
HydroBudz said:
QFT . Vista runs perfectly on 2GB of RAM. It handles memory allocation differently than XP, which is why XP users get freaked out when they see almost all of their memory being used while idle.

Will 2GB of ram in Vista limit you in any way? Yes, you won't be able to have 60 instances of explorer open while burning a DVD and encoding a movie. But that goes for XP as well. Will it affect your ability to run any game or application that's out? No, not at all.

Can we drop the "Vista HAS TO HAVE more than 2GB of RAM" crap? It's getting old and people should do some research before spreading around bullshit.
Click to expand...

Vista is definitely a nice OS. Most stable and visually appealing OS yet.

And yes, Vista runs fine on 2GB of RAM, but I did notice a large difference going from 2Gb to 4GB; from shutdown times being cut by a 3rd to hard drive swapping noise.

Too bad it has such a bad rap now. The way UAC works is annoying though and should have been done better. Disabling it is not an issue though; its not like XP has it. If UAC had an auto allow processes setting I would leave it running, but clicking yes 3 times every reboot to have some of my start up programs run was just too much work.
 
ClearM4 said:
Vista is definitely a nice OS. Most stable and visually appealing OS yet.

And yes, Vista runs fine on 2GB of RAM, but I did notice a large difference going from 2Gb to 4GB; from shutdown times being cut by a 3rd to hard drive swapping noise.

Too bad it has such a bad rap now. The way UAC works is annoying though and should have been done better. Disabling it is not an issue though; its not like XP has it. If UAC had an auto allow processes setting I would leave it running, but clicking yes 3 times every reboot to have some of my start up programs run was just too much work.
Click to expand...

True that! UAC sucks. Though, it's good for the mom's and pop's of the world to keep from getting unwanted spyware and such. Anyone on [H] that still uses UAC needs to stop looking at porn so much.
 
HydroBudz said:
True that! UAC sucks. Though, it's good for the mom's and pop's of the world to keep from getting unwanted spyware and such. Anyone on [H] that still uses UAC needs to stop looking at porn so much.
Click to expand...

the UAC is actually rated really well by anti spyware sites. I can't remember when i read it, but it stopped every piece of malware that they tried to infest into their vista machine. it was a legit site too.
 
yeah, vista is running perfectly on my machine now. To tel the truth, like I said...with all vista's services running and a few of my own start up utility programs that reside in lower right of task bar..Vista uses only about 600-700MB of RAM.

The one thing I do notice for sure though is that crysis warhead in DX10...starts thrashing my HDD bad!!! so 2GB is definitely not enough for it ROFL....so I was kinda bummed...I can only image the original crysis running worse yet. BUT, Far Cry 2 runs like a dream with only 2GB with DX10 on vista.
I was pretty surprised about that.
 
GenTarkin said:
yeah, vista is running perfectly on my machine now. To tel the truth, like I said...with all vista's services running and a few of my own start up utility programs that reside in lower right of task bar..Vista uses only about 600-700MB of RAM.

The one thing I do notice for sure though is that crysis warhead in DX10...starts thrashing my HDD bad!!! so 2GB is definitely not enough for it ROFL....so I was kinda bummed...I can only image the original crysis running worse yet. BUT, Far Cry 2 runs like a dream with only 2GB with DX10 on vista.
I was pretty surprised about that.
Click to expand...

far cry 2 is better optimized in general than the original crysis...
 
well, thats true...but they are entirely different engines as well =)
Warhead is better optimized than original crysis as well, and using same engine as crysis...BUT it still uses lots of RAM in DX10 =)

But let me just say in DX10 for Crysis warhead...stuff looks REAL! its such a huge world of difference from DX9. the leaves, the vehicles....like the jeeps for example look like a solid piece of metal, rather than a ton of polygons pieced together to make an object. I was shocked at how much difference there was.
 
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