Bizarre DirectX Performance with Windows Vista

[inv...@nospamforme.com]

First of all, I'm not sure whether or not this is a Vista problem.

I'm experiencing low framerates, in particular when running World of
Warcraft. Sometimes the framerates are low (12fps), sometimes they are
excruciatingly low (2fps) and sometimes they are not (60fps). This happens
with the character in the same geographic area of the game.

The problem is not related to CPU activity, disk activity, or memory activity
-- I've watched the task manager and generally the game is the only thing
running. There is no disk thrashing going on, and plenty of free ram.
Sometimes exiting warcraft and restarting will fix the problems. Other times
it will not, and I have to reboot to clear the condition.

I have verified similar performance oddities using 3DMark06.

When the system is running correctly, I get 5742 3DMarks. The 3DMark
framerates are 35fps/35fps for graphics tests 1 and 2, and 0.5/0.3fps for cpu
tests 1 and 2.

When the system is not working correctly, I get 1239 3DMarks. The 3DMark
framerates are 3fps/2fps for graphics tests 1 and 2, and 0.5/0.05fps for for
cpu tests 1 and 2. That's an order of magnitude drop in framerate.

The configuration is as follows:
NVidia 8800GTS with latest drivers
Core2 Duo CPU 2.6 Ghz (2 cores)
4 GB of ram
3ware hardware raid controller

The problem also occurred using an ATI x800xt graphics card (which prompted
me to upgrade to the nvidia). So it's not a graphics driver problem, as two
different cards from two different manufacturers exhibit the same symptoms.

At this point I am thoroughly baffled by what is wrong. I cannot think of any
other test that I can run to get to the root of the problem.

Does anyone have a benchmark that could get me some more detailed data about
graphics performance? In particular, I'd like to know how fast the card is
rendering from on-card memory, and what the bandwidth is sending data from
main memory to the card (i.e. I'd like to figure out if its a PCI-Express bus
problem)

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[Lang Murphy]

<inv...@nospamforme.com> wrote in message
news:fiiai...@news2.newsguy.com...

Well... I must admit I'm not a DirectX SME... not even close. But... one can
only assume that some other process is causing you to get those widely
varying frame rates. If you're seeing the same problem with two different
vid cards, then one must assume some other process is screwing you over. My
son runs CoD 2 on a box with 1GB system RAM without issue. Don't recall the
vid card, but I think it's got 256MB RAM on it.

Good luck,

Lang