ATI and Vista, what's happening?

[Cenotaph]

Okay, i need some suggestions.

i had windows xp professional installed in both my computers, laptop and desktop. When i installed the beta demo i was surprised by how good ut3 performance was. Getting very decent framerates for an outdated desktop (P4 3.0, 1GB RAM, X800Pro 256MB) and a laptop mainly directed at work (AMD Turion MT-32, 1GB RAM & a worthless Geforce Go 7300).

So, i install Vista in both comps, try the demo in both, the laptop seems to perform identical comparing to XP, maybe even better. while the desktop went nuts, completely unplayable at default settings).

First i thought: okay, vista is a memory hog, it could be that, but the memory size is the same in both pcs, setting texture & world detail to 1 in the desktop doesn't help at all, graphics memory is far greater in the desktop and the desktop memory scores better than the laptop's in windows experience index. Vista is not an issue in the laptop.

So, im trying to understand what's happening. Ati drivers in Vista compared to XP could be the problem? Maybe other hardware is creating the problem? any suggestions on how can i fix this?

I'm using Catalyst 7.10. Vista native drivers for ATI seem to perform a lil better actually, but still unplayable, most times lower than 9FPS, while in XP it was at 30.

Thx for reading

[Cenotaph]

After seeing some ppl claiming 7.9 and 7.10 don't work well with AGP cards, i tried downgrading to Catalyst 7.8 and there is definetely a performance improvement, still i think it could be better. Is twice as fast as before though. Any driver suggestions?

[Ghozer]

hate to say this, but I had issues under vista with 7.8 -- 7.6 was the best for me, with least issues... when i was on my x1800... now 7.10 came out and im on a HD2900 XT I dont have any problems with the latest...

[woooo]

I have almost the exact same as you but my frames dont go that low at all mostly above 20. same specs instead of x800 pro I have x700 pro pci express and ccc 7-10.

[Lord_Impaler]

Vista is the Windows ME of 2007, but propaganda is working very well for Microsoft, so it just can't be Vista's fault. Blame your driver-vendor instead, invest money and upgrade or, well, keep XP.

[Cenotaph]

well, after digging a lil bit more into this and other forums, i luckily found about the whole HyperThreading performance issues. So, apparently, my CPU (P4 3.0Ghz) was probably the main reason why it was unplayable.

That said, going to the task manager and setting affinity of the process to only one cpu plus 7.8 catalyst drivers seem to be a good combination for me, its playable again now! will have a look on the 7.6 later.

it's strange that the game was, apparently, so well optimized for multi-core cpus and hyperthreading gets so ruined at the same time, EPIC really need to look at this. this didn't happen to me on XP though, or at least i didn't noticed it... so there are definitely other factors involved here.

thx for the comments, btw.

[DHJudas]

yeah... HT on older P4's don't work so well under vista as vista makes heavy use of dual/quad/++++ core cpus now... and HT isn't very effective for it...