Knqui

I recently got a new computer in January, the specs are as follows:

AMD Phenom 9600 2.3ghz (Quadcore)
2x ASUS 3850, 512mb each in CrossFireX
8gb Crucial DDR2800 Memory
2x 7200rpm Samsung HDD's in Raid 0
Vista 64bit Business

Now, I 3DMark at a good rating, at the upper-end of similar systems to my own, nothing appears to be wrong with my system, I have all Windows Updates, the latest Catalyst Suite (8.5), SP1 installed and no benchmarking tool can show me anything is wrong with how my PC is running.

My issue is that some games simply run like a dog on this system, whereas some run as smooth as a dream, it's a strange thing but I'll try to explain it.

A game like Call of Duty 4 runs at full settings with full aa, all the bells and whistles at 1680x1050, I get extremely good fps at all times, I can tell my PC is ramping up to support it as fans start to spin faster, the computer heats up (well within safe levels btw) and it runs beautifully.

Now, a game like Battlefield 2142 runs like a dog, I'm lucky to get between 10-30 fps and have huge dropoffs/choppiness when lots is going on, rendering it almost unplayable. Here's the interesting part; my PC doesn't seem to even be attempting to run it, my system doesn't heat up, it doesn't make fans speed up or make any attempt to "tax" my system for it's resources. Also, changing settings up and down barely has any effect in my fps increase/decrease.

Obviously a game like BF2142 should run without a second thought on this system, with how old it is, how is it possible CoD4 runs 10x better than it?

At first I thought maybe it was a case of my technology being too new (maybe that's impossible) and that CoD4 made more use of my multiple cores, better shader models and PCI-e 2.0, but I decided to test further.

Here is a list that may help:

Games that run really badly, and have all the symptoms of the PC not trying to run it properly:

Company of Heroes (both DX9 and DX10 modes)
Lineage 2
Battlefield 2142
Age of Conan
Resident Evil 4

Games that run smooth as hell and tax the system:
Command & Conquer 3 (and expansion)
Call of Duty 4
Crysis
Oblivion

There are some more but that's a decent pool to pull from, as you can see it's hard to make sense of it because on both lists there are brand new and ancient/old games.

Any help or advice is greatly appreciated, it's hard to put the problem down to hardware since some work and some don't, am I the only one ever to experience this? Each Catalyst update improves it a TINY bit, but I may be imagining that as it's hard to measure.

TIA

Tipstaff

At the moment I can only suggest a couple things:

1) Try updating your sound cards drivers with the latest official ones off of the manufacturers site. So, if the sound card on your system is Realtek HD, then try HERE for the latest driver. If you can post the motherboard you are using, or the sound card I can post specific locations to get the updated drivers for you.

2) Be sure to have either all the latest patches for Vista that are relevant to performance improvements, 1 is specifically for multi-GPU (or LDA setups as Microsoft wants to call it), or upgrade to SP1 (which includes those improvements) if you haven't done so already.

3) Try running the game in single, non Crossfire mode. While this won't solve your issue, it will tell you if it's those games just don't like being run in Crossfire mode.

Of note, I remember other members mentioning there being issues with Crossfire on Vista, however I'm not sure if this is a general Vista issue, or specific to x64 Vista, so it might be worth doing a search in the forums for this.

__________________