Could something be wrong with my machine?

OK, this is starting to bug me, if only because I've seen it before and I know it could be a sign of a technical problem. I've spent some time complaining about how much Ultra Mode lags for me, but I have reason to believe switching over to my new setup might have something to do with that. See, I switched over from a machine with a GeForce 9800 GT to a machine with a GeForce GTX 285, and I'm seeing the following problem:

Textures seem to load slower on my new card than they did on my old card. Before when I ran City of Heroes and selected a character, the entire model would just pop up on screen in an instant. Now every time I load a texture, I get to watch my character being "built," as it were. I see the model pop in piece by piece as low-res textures are loaded, then I see each low-res texture swap to a high-res version, all of it in the span of around 2 seconds.

In addition to that, I've been running Final Fantasy VII for a while, both before and after the upgrade. Before at least as far as battles go, the game never slowed down at all. Right now, the game gives me these odd 2-second freezes every time it has to load a texture on a new-spawned object in the world. I'm I'm talking serious pause, on the order of 3-4 seconds just staring at a frozen picture with the music running, waiting for my system to load a texture in a 13-year-old game.

This has me concerned. Greatly. It's possible whatever is causing this is leading to reduced performance in-game in other instances, as well. Last time I saw this was when I switched from a 6600 to an 8500, actually grabbing a card that was WORSE than what I already had, despite being a newer generation. Is there any possible explanation why a brand new system with plenty of RAM, a decent processor and a serious video card should stumble on something as simple as loading not too large textures? Could it have something to do with the fact that I'm running Windows 7 x64? I mean, at this point I'm starting to wonder if any of my feedback on Ultra Mode even matters, if my machine is not performing as it should.

I'm in the process of updating my DirectX components as those might not have been installed, but since the game actually uses OpenGL, that shouldn't really make a difference anyway. Is there anything I can do to fix this? Because I was the impression that a GTX 285 was a major step up from a 9800 GT, yet the speed gain isn't what I would have hoped for.

*edit*
In my search for DirectX 11, I found a few odd things on my system. My dxdiag tells me that my version of DirectX is 11, but Everest Home tells me it's 9.0c, and I don't know which one to trust. Furthermore, Everest doesn't seem to be able to detect my motherboard name, chipset or bios type (they're listed as "unknown"), so I'm starting to wonder if I actually have the proper drivers for everything. I was under the impression that Windows 7 would find and install its own, but I can't be sure it even recognises them. It did the same thing with my sound card, recognising it as a generic D3D Sound Device, when in fact it is the crappy PCI-Express X-Fi Xtreme Audio card from creative. Could somehow missing drivers be causing a performance hit? Is there any way to track down what I have in the box if my operating system won't recognise it? I mean, I could hunt down the receipt, I believe, but I didn't exactly put this machine together, myself, so I don't know much about it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Not sure if it is remotely related to your issues but I recently played around with some videocards and at one point missed connecting the extra power cable to the card. Performance was absolutely horrible as the drivers automatically reduced features/quality. Might be something worth checking out.

By "completely fresh machine.... out of the box" do you mean OS installed, plug in the power cord/keyboard/mouse and you're ready to go?

If so then you still need to uninstall the Windows video drivers, run a Driver Sweeper, and install the nVidia drivers.

To provide more info to those with more technical knowledge, run CoH Helper and post the log.

Windows will prompt you to install the video drivers, make sure you click no, so that you can then run the nVidia drivers.

As an aside, there may be a setting for Window to 'Prompt' rather than auto-install, but I'm not certain and am currently on the Mac at work so I can't look.

Edit: It also appears that the CB forums are going to get locked, I'd PM Avatea or TheOcho to move this down to the Tech forums, rather than re-posting.

OK, suppose I have my video drivers currently installed and I want to reinstall them. Can I remove JUST them without messing up something else? Specifically since PhysX drivers seem to come with the nVidia package. How much would I need to reinstall? What else would I need to touch up?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Here's an excerpt from Bill Z Bubba's Performance Guide, granted his is the for ATI but the same thing hold true about cleaning out any drivers/software. If I remember correctly je_saist is an nVidia guru.

Quote:

Update your Video Card and Sound Drivers! Step one is to download Driver Cleaner from here. "But why do I need that, Bill?" Probably because you keep installing drivers on top of drivers and haven't properly cleaned up anything ever. Step two is to get the latest version of your video driver. Head back into Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs and Uninstall every listing you find of your video driver. (ATI now makes this simple by adding the ATI Software Uninstaller. This yanks everything and prompts a reboot.) Reboot your system. As it comes back up, *it may tell you that it is reinstalling your display adapter. Cancel out of this, twice if need be. Now run Driver Cleaner and clean every instance of your video components that you see listed. If you are uncomfortable choosing, read the help files within the application to get comfortable. Important! If you do run a persistent antivirus solution, DISABLE IT NOW. Install the latest version of your video driver. OEM vendors don't want you laptop users to have a good gaming experience, so they force the video card manufacturers into not letting you get updated video drivers. Then the OEM vendors stop updating their drivers about 2 months after the release of your systems. To get around this: If you are unable to use video drivers from ATI or Nvidia, go to omegadrivers.net and use his drivers, as they have been tweaked to install properly on ATI Mobility and Nvidia Go cards. Check the manufacturer's website for your sound card and see if they have anything new. If they do, grab them and get them installed the same way, unless all you are downloading is a patch to your existing driver. (Driver Cleaner can also be used to strip out Creative drivers.)

*Normally, you would run a driver sweeper in safe mode, which is accessed during system reboot by pressing F8. At least that's what I've always. I mis-spelled it once or twice, but I want to be sure that you understand that a 'driver' sweeper looks for and removes video/sound driver chaff that may get left behind after an uninstall, it's not actually wiping your hard drive.

Alrighty, I'll see about trying that. I still have to ask, though - if all I ever did was install my manufacturer's drivers and then install nVidia's and nothing more, is it really likely for this to have something to do with bad drivers? I mean, I wasn't under the impression that drivers were that fickle. I did have a problem with my sound card drivers last time, so I guess I can't discount that, but still...

*edit*
We're talking about video drivers, right? Not chipset or sound or what have you?

I'm still not sure what that extra two-pin slot on my video card is that looks like a power plug. I've searched around, and everyone talks about two two-pin cables, and a few people even mention leaving one two-pin extension hanging.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Thank you Ocho!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Neo Shadowdream That could be either, a aux fan connector, or a SPDIF-IN connector for sending audio over a HDMI cable to a TV.

The plug in question is actually on the inside of the PC case, and it's the same kind of plug that I can put a power cable in. I have two outlets coming out of my power unit that I'm confident could fit in there. The problem is that I don't know what I'm doing, and I don't feel comfortable just sticking wires into holes without knowing what I'm doing and why I'm doing it.

I was actually surprised that this GeForce actually required two power cables, but given how much real estate it takes up inside my case and the fact that it has a radiator grill on the back of my PC, I guess that's to be expected.

I lack a digital camera, or I'd show you snapshot of the inside of the case to see what you mean. Incidentally, the inside of my case looks like the inside of my abdomen, with tangles of chain mail wrapped cable bundles looping around each other thick enough to keep me from getting my fingers in to pretty much anything. Worst PC parts arrangement I've had to date.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Huh... OK, I followed the link that said "download Driver Cleaner," but it seems there's a bit more to it than that, such that Driver Cleaner costs $10 to actually buy. I was under the impression it was free software. Am I missing something? Is there an alternative? Because I don't really think I can spend $10 right now.

*edit*
Having looked around a bit, Google seem to have plenty of suggestions for "free driver cleaner," but I don't really want to just go ahead and download the first thing an online search spits out, specifically since I'm looking for something to tinker with my drivers. I know this makes it sound like I'm cheap, but I don't exactly have money to burn on my end. This whole machine was a gift, as I may have mentioned.

*edit*
Here's something interesting, as well. At first when I tried to run an AVI file on my PC soon after I'd started it up, it stuttered, skipped and generally slowed down. A while later, about long enough for me to type out an edit to this post that ended up being false, it smoothed itself out without any difficulties. And I don't know what happened between then and now. Could this be related, or does it mean I have crappy codecs? For the record, I tried an MKV file at the time, and those never slowed down.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

This should work for you and it's free. http://www.guru3d.com/category/driversweeper/ Driver Cleaner used to be free IIRC, guess not any more.

Realistically, the best idea I can suggest at this point is to try a clean install of the game. You can salvage your binds and such for later if you salvage those files before deleting but it's the best way to be sure it's not your local game client causing the issues.

If that still won't fix it, contacting Support, your manufacturer and/or whoever sold you the thing may be the only option. Because if the client isn't it, given everything else is brand new and fresh, then I'd almost have to say the problem is your network somehow or the PC itself. I suppose the network is something you could look into as well. Make sure you're getting a consistent fast connection to the server. I think the in-game command is /netgraph 1 or maybe /shownetgraph 1. Something like that anyways. It should give you an idea of how good your connection is. If you're seeing a lot of lag spikes and such, that could be at least partially the problem.