PC Upgrade leads to SL Hell

Hi people,

After some assistance from anyone who might have had a similar issue......

I was previously running sl happily with an Athlon XP and a Geforce 7600gt on Vista Ultimate 64 bit - good frame rates, no crashes and so forth and have just upgraded to an Athlon X2 4400 and Geforce 8800 gts.

Running sl normally it's ok for about 2 minutes then the frame rate drops to about 2-3 unless I'm looking at water where it jumps back up to 50+.

Running in XP SP2 compatability mode gets the frame rate to average about 15 so sl is just about useable but a bit frustrating when any 'proper' game runs at full speed with the highest detail settings turned on.

I've researched this for ages and tried every hint I can find, i.e. run in XP mode, the whole CPU affinity thing even though I know this shouldn't be necessary, enabled/disabled VBO and multiple threads from the client and graphics menus, and played around with all sorts of other settings but nothing makes any difference.

I've seen some other similar threads especially relating to the 8800 gts and the best solution so far seems to be the XP SP2 trick if you're a Vista user, but surely there has to be a way to get this to run normally......

I'm using the latest drivers for all relevant hardware and getting a bit fed up with it now

Any suggestions welcomed.

Thanks

You aren't running dual monitors? I have run SL with a 4400+ and a 8800 GTX and had it getting 40-50 fps with high AA settings no problem on Win XP SP2. What are you getting if you move to a near empty sim? Your motherboard drivers may not be up to the task of running Vista 64 bit, you have the latest beta driver or regular driver? Vista drivers are generally a train wreck, the 64 bit are even more so.

Motherboard drivers are fine as was running it on Vista before the upgrade - I know my join date is only last month but have been using SL since January, and running Vista since february, and it always worked perfectly with SL until the 'upgrade', and I use just the one monitor.

I might be wrong, but i think its your videocards driver. there seem to be quite some issues with the 88xx line of videocard drivers on Vista.
I'd suggest youd get the latest beta driver for your OS (nvidia 163.16 right now), which you could get from here:
http://station-drivers.com/page/nvidia%20forceware.htm
Good luck ^_^

-Asriazh

Consider your ADSL? what is your internet connection like..?

i use an Intel X6800 core 2 Extreme,2048 MB Corsair DDR2 800Mhz,1024MB GEFORCE 7950GX2 and a 10000 RPM Raptor HD.

Its no slouch, even though not the fastest, but even so, my BT internet connection still determines how well SL runs. I am towards the end of the line, regarding the connection, even though i can see the exchange, 4 doors away from my house.. im at the end of the piece of string, so to speak.

If your internet rate isnt brilliant, from demand, or availablity, then everything after that suffers. one suggestion would be to switch off your router for a minute and then reconnect, forcing a new connection, isp addy, on the cleanest available server..

i wont touch Vista..probably never, already MS are looking to circumvent/ bypass it..
and XP has at least had compatability problems addressed properly, and will be running another five years.. at which point, my current PC will be very old hat.

i recently had SL 15 running on a 1000 Mhz CPU and plain 64MB graphic card.. with 256 MB ram, the frame rate sucked.. like a garage security monitor.. but it ran..

Well here's the latest developments.....

It seemed like the beta drivers helped initially (thanks for that) - no matter where I went everything would run at 50+fps, 0 packet loss for 3-4 minutes and be wonderful and then.......well then it just turns ugly. FPS drops like a stone to 2-3 and then randomly jumps all over the place - I can stare at a building at 3fps, turn around on the spot and suddenly it's at 40.

I'd love to be more specific with this but it's hard to - it's almost like it all runs great while bandwidth is being used and as soon as an area is loaded the graphics card thinks 'what the heck is this stuff' and packs its' bags.

Packet loss is not an issue and nor is the connection generally (4mb down, 1 up) and as previously stated, the only things that have changed after 6 months of trouble free sl are the CPU and graphics card.

I know some of this probably sounds like normal sl slowness/lag and so forth, but it's the same symptoms for each and every place I visit and it seems ridiculous that it loads so quickly then grinds to a halt.

To any other 8800 users out there - what driver version are you using?