Gaming performance in Vista

Hey everyone,

I installed Windows Vista 32-bit recently and seem to be having some
problems running some FPS games.
Especially Half-Life 2 and CounterStrike, when i play the games are very
slow and sometimes "crushes" and comes to the desktop. In Win XP i've played
in very high resolutions very well, in Vista its much worse. Is it a drivers
issue?

I have a P4 at 3.0 with 2GB DDR memory, with a ASUS ATI Radeon AX800 with
the latest drivers of ATI (ATI Catalyst 7.1).

One other thing, after i installed the latest ATI drivers when i run
CounterStrike on STEAM, it gives me an warning message saying that my video
drivers are out of date. How? If I have the latest drivers installed?

Hope someone can help Thanks.
Regards,
Filipe

 

Well, first I'll let you know that it shouldn't be doing that. I played a
fair amount of Half-life 2 episode 1over the weekend under Vista 64 bit and
I had played under Vista32 bit as well. I run the ATI x1900XTX and I use the
7.1 drivers as well. I'll have to go back and check, but I was only getting
the drivers warning under HL2:EP1 under Vista 64. though maybe that last
update changed that.
It's possible valve is reading something wring with their code.

So the good enws, is that everything should be working good. The bad news
is, you seem to have something special going on and so figure out that
problem could be a trick.

Do you have any other games that are not steam related ? It should matter,
but did you try also running the game in XP mode and run as administrator ?

Did you do the usual updates of sound card and motherboard drivers ?

 

First of all, thanks for the reply.

Yes, i've made all the updates in my motherboad, all except BIOS update. My
soundcard is onboard.
I have tryed to play Quake IV and gave me the same problems. Usually the
game crashes in the beginning while Loading to the start menu.

And no, i havent tryed changing the EXE of the games to XP compatible. Can i
try to do that in Quake, CounterStrike, HF2 or even Steam?

I have red in other forums that Vista is still very "recent" for gaming.
Probably this is going on with other people.

Thanks again.
Filipe

 

I dunno, there are bugs and different hardware is reacting different. Nvidia
card had some issues,creative cards are still in beta mode. So different
people are going to have different results. Overall, I can't say that gaming
under Vista is any worse than under XP. It's slower, but when you're already
getting over 100fps in a game dropping down to 90 isn't that big of a deal.

I have played any Quake 4, but I did play around with Doom3 for about an
hour. No problems there and they released a Vista update patch in 1.31. HL2
and CS play just fine. I played some CS 1.6 for about 35 mins the other
night to try and reproduce a problem for someone. I mostly play battlefield
2 and 2142 and no complaints there.

I did have a bug with the G15 keyboard and certain games like FEAR, but
that's also a problem under XP, just not as bad.

I also have 3 other PCs I've been playing with, An AMD 3800 with a X850 card
and 2GB of ram, A P4-3.2 northwood with a 6800GT card with 1GB of ram and an
AMD 3400 with a nVidia 6600 card with 1GB of ram. I've only played a little
with the last two, but they play doom3 and FEAR well enough ( they have
weaker GFX cards, so it's expected to be slower), they both completed
3Dmark06, I don't have any sound issues. The AMD3800+ is the Girlfriend's
system and I ran the Doom3 benchmarks on there and she just finished playing
The sims stories, which isn't on par with Quake4, but it's pretty taxing on
a system.

On all these systems, I did a clean format of the drive and then installed
Vista. I think upgrading system is just a sure fire way to run into
problems. Each of these systems also has a dedicated games disks, which I
also push the pagefile over too.

Anyways, back to your question, You don't change the EXE, just the shortcut
to the game. It's safe and simple.

If you have onboard sound and it's a realtek, they have released Vista
drivers for it. check out www.realtek.com. I'd actually suggest going into
the BIOS and disabling the sound card altogether just to see if that's the
problem.

Also, if there is any other hardware, like IDE\SATA controller cards you can
take out, unplug any joysticks, heck try plugging the KB and mouse into the
PS2 slots if you have the adapters. Knowing that the games should work,
tells you it's something specific to your config, just gotta figure out
what.

 

Odd way to post a question, but the short answer is. You should be able to
load game and you should be able to play any game under Vista as you do
under XP. Keep in mind the 6400 card is not the most powerful card in the
world, so don't expect to play FEAR on it on max settings.

But short answer is, you should be able to play games on it, without major
issue

 

Dale,

Oh okay, yesterday i've tryed to change the EXE not shortcut

My board is an ASUS P4P800 with the onboard soundcard (Six-channel AC97
codec: Analog Devices AD1985). Can i still disable the sound from the BIOS
and check for drivers in www.realtek.com? I tryed to find those drivers but
i couldn't.

Yes i have a SATA harddrive, and i have the mouse & keyboard in a USB
connection, not PS2.
But can this "game crashes" and slow game performance have anything to do
with soundcard, keyboard, etc?

I have search the web for reasons for the error that gives me in Quake 4 is
that the game crashes right while "Initializing menus". The probable reasons
is the windows firewall bloking the game from accessing the Internet. But the
window is hidden behind the game, and of course alt+tab doesnt work. I can't
put the game running in window mode like Quake 3 so I have to try and give
Quake 4 full access onto the internet.

I tryed yesterday playing Half-life 2 in single game, and in the first
loading (after playing a little and going thought a door) the game crashes
and closes the game.

Thanks again.

 

I guess this is the correct realtek address
http://www.realtek.com.tw/default.aspx

Drivers are here
http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads...&Level=4&Conn=3&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false#AC

Not sure why Quake4 needs to get to the internet to run, but you can always
disable the firewall altogether, that's a easy way to remove that has a
possibility. Just go to your control panel, choose windows firewall and
choose Change settings and choose OFF.

I don't think the sound card is the problem, but when you're having odd
problems you have to start eliminating possible issues, maybe the driver
didn't load correctly and so it causes some games to crash. Disabling the
Audio is a fix to eliminate that possibility. The G5, G7 mice and the G15
keyboard (which I have) causes poor performance in some games. I got bit by
this in FEAR. Some people had success putting the mice in the PS2 port,
since the problem has something to do with certain Game engines and USB.

Try Ctrl+Esc to switch windows, when Alt+Tab doesn't work

 

Dale,

After putting the Quake IV shortcut with XP compatibility the games enter
normaly. I've played with medium quality at 1024* and it plays very well. But
in XP i've played it in High Quality, it's still a little bit worse.

My keyboard it the Revoltec FightAdvanced Keyboard, and when i plug it in
PS2 with the adaptor the keyboard won't work, still after the reboot. I dont
know why :\

Another thing, in the BIOS - Advanced Chipset Settings i have the field
'Graphics Aperture Size' at= 64MB. My graphics card is ASUS ATI RADEON AX800
256MB, can't i put this field in BIOS to 256MB? Can you help me with that?

After i've disable the onboard Audio in the BIOS, i coun't install the new
drivers of Realtek.

I'm going to install the new ATI 7.2 drivers and make the tests again.

Thanks for your help. Do you have MSN Messenger?

Regards,
Filipe

 

It's been my experience that you actually want the AGP smaller. I've gotten
better numbers out of a 32meg setting and worse performance out of a 128 and
256 meg setting.

You can't disable the on-board sound and install the new drivers, you do one
or the other. Since you got Quake4 started, you probably just need to update
the drivers.

Sorry no IM chatting for me. These newsgroups and other game forums take all
my time

 

Hey, no problem i understand.
I'm realy getting tired of Vista... :\ i'm very sad for saying that.
Yesterday when i got home, i played Quake IV only in medium quality at 1024*
and it played fast. After I installed the new ATI Catalyst 7.2 drivers Quake
doenst even work good at low quality :| i realy dont understand what's
happening!!

I also tryed to install the new drivers for Realtek AC'97 that Vista wont
let me, it automatically installs the drivers that he thinks its better.
After a while i did it but there was no sound with the Realtek AC'97, only
with the microsoft drivers. But can it be because of the sound drivers?

In the mean while, i got a lot of "Windows Explorer" errors :-( that the
Windows had the terminate the explorer.exe and load it again...

I'm getting a little bit tired of this, XP never gave me this Video crashes
and problems :\ I will try to get help with Microsoft people too, cause this
is not normal.

Thanks for your help.