Guys, I think there is something wrong with Vista ..

[Danielsan]

(related to the use of the 8800 within vista, and perhaps the forceware doesnt have all the blame in regard to certain slowdowns)


Please understand that I am in no way a computer expert, thus my findings are to be taken with some thought in mind. Hardware and software seems to be a jungle now adays.



First I found out that vista has been killing my router, some people with a more keen head have found possible reasons in this forum/thread:

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=823654&SiteID=1


For some reason if parts of the network are malfunctioning it can very well spread to the rest of the system, I have experienced extreme slowdowns in vista when my router has "died", every piece of software/hardware which are network related seem to fight to figure out whats wrong and how to reestablish connection.


Today I was playing a 3d game, all of a sudden it went very sluggish ... I tabbed out while keeping the game running and to my surprise saw every single bit of my 2 gb ram used up ... and nothing left in the page file either. I went out for a cup of coffee and when I returned I noticed the memory slowly being recovered while the game was minimised.

I waited about 3 minutes until the memory stopped going down for the game and ... voila, I maximised it and it ran fine again.


I know my neighbour had problems with PREY and another game all of a sudden using up all of his memory. He also has a few problems with slowdowns if the network crashes, allthough he says it has been a rare occurance for his network to crash.


Today I did a test by shutting down my network and running spellforce 2 which is known to create memory leaks within vista, all of my slowdowns were gone .. but this may be related to any given piece of software using the internet .. I suspect my vista to be very hostile towards my antivirus in certain circumstances.



PS: My pc is completely free of spyware and viruses .. even harmless cookies, I have been making sure that while trying to solve the problem of slowdowns in a few games. Perhaps my thoughts/findings may be something some of you can relate to. But as said before .. I may be all wrong.

[j0j081]

hmm...

[DarkOneX]

You do know that Vista caches up your memory so that technically you don't have "free" memory, or much anyway all the time, but you have available cached memory. That's called "Superfetch" I believe. Maybe that's what you were seeing?

I do know that I had issues with Fear Combat doing what you are saying, would work fine then magically just go so dang slow it was unplayable. I went through tons of different suggested possible solutions and alot of experimenting myself, including upgrading to 4GB ram, a new video card (7900GT to 8800GTS), disabling Superfetch, killing off all uneeded processes, disabling HID devices, using different keyboard/mouse, etc and none of it helped. Then when I got ahold of some unreleased 158.10 drivers, it magically fixed everything, things ran great and still do even with the 158.18 or whatever driver.

[Danielsan]

What I have done twice which seems to confirm my theory of bad memory usage when certain applications are running, its the matter of shutting the pc and using the process explorer to shut down a few memory hungry windows tasks ... then the game runs well for a certain amount of time. Its by no means a problem involving all games, only some.

All the antivirus I have tried also cause severe slowdowns in certain games, BF 2142 seems to be affected by this and disabling the AV makes the game run somewhat smoother. The only commercial AV I have tried is bitdefender, since its the only one I have paid for.

The best solution in regard to antivirus seems to be to exclude gaming directories from scan, however the free antivirus programs dont offer exclusion propperties .. at least not the ones I know of.

I turned off indexing, this seems to have fixed some slowdowns in a few demos I have .. another weird solution which could just as well be related to other programs offering services to the files being indexed.


Anyway, I thought it would be healthy to implement a discussion in the driver forum which adresses other problems in vista which people mistake for being driver failures.


So if you do have any hints or findings post them here, it never hurts to look elsewhere for solutions .. its easy to just blame the drivers.


PS: Allthough the 158.10 are decent I am not protecting nvidia´s drivers, they still lack in many departements which I hope nvidia will improve in the near future.

[Dr.Nick]

Can't say I have experienced any network crashes and i'm on a 5 year old, fully loaded 8 port router. Are you using anything like BitTorrent when this happens?
Also using the G15 to monitor mem usage gives me these number for the games you mentioned; Prey: 78%, BF1942: 84%, Stalker(without vista fix): 99%. The only game to give me issues is Stalker and we can see why.
For the AV issue, I have been using Kaspersky internet security and having it enabled/disabled makes no difference in gaming. AVG is also pretty good on Vista and it's free(the only free AV I would even install personally).
You should make sure your system is stable by running Memtest and Orthos overnight. Even if you are not OC'ing its good to be sure. Also paying for a good AV can save one a lot of headaches;)