Better performance? Nvidia 8800GTS

[Agrajag]

I have an EVGA 8800GTS and I'm getting what feels like more sluggish response from it than I'd gotten on my older ATI Radeon X800 card.

This is on a Quad Core Extreme CPU and an Intel D975XBX2 motherboard with 2GB Mushkin Performance RAM so I'm a bit surprised at what I'm seeing.

Scrolling is nowhere near smooth and it produces sort of visual waves of delay.

I'm wondering what sort of optimized settings I might need for this. I'm new to Nvidia after MANY years on the ATI side.

Like I said, the above setup had an X800 card in it until the 8800 showed up and Civ4/Warlords was pretty damned impressive with it. That card is easily 4 years old so I must be doing something wrong.

[Solver]

Sounds like a driver issue.

You wouldn't see much improvement over the X800, however, with the GF8800. Civ4 isn't intensive enough as far as video card usage goes. But obviously, your current situation isn't right either.

[Dale]

You on vista or XP? 8000 series is designed for Vista, the 7000 series for XP.

[Agrajag]

I wasn't aware that the 8800 series was considered to be a poor performer on XP. Is that accurate?

I'm on XP SP2. I've been holding off on Vista for many reasons. Performance is one of them.

Civ isn't a DX10 game so I'd be a bit surprised if it would run any better under Vista with DX9 emulation than it would under XP natively.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Agrajag
I wasn't aware that the 8800 series was considered to be a poor performer on XP. Is that accurate?

Not AFAIK. The 8xxx just have DX10 support, which is Vista-only. But the 8800 is a great DX9 card too.

Plus, it can't possibly have ****tier XP drivers than Vista ones (speaking from experience).

[Agrajag]

That was my take. The 8800 is a 7900 with additional DX10 support.

Based on this issue and an FSX issue, I'm really thinking I might go back to ATI. Both have issues but I seem to have been more covered with ATI.

[onodera]

It's definitely a power/driver/temperature problem. Or not even the vid card problem. Try some fresh FPS demo to test your configuration.
I have a 8800 GTS myself, and it's a blitz.
Try getting the latest drivers and use them to check the voltage and the temperature of your card.

[Wittlich]

Agrajag, what is the wattage of your system power supply? The 8800GTS requires a minimum system power supply of 400 watts. Most PC's are only 320 watts, so that might be your problem.

Oh, and I concur with onodera's assessment.

[Agrajag]

I'm running 162.18 drivers (current). Where are these items shown? I don't see them here.

The power supply is a PC Power and Cooling 750 watt supply.

The one issue I see here is the quad core CPU is out of this world hot (like 170 degree Farenheit hot) but Intel says that's normal.

What bugs me about this thinking is that with the exception of one odd bug with FSX (haze that flashes) every other game is excellent. No Company of Heroes problems, no Quake problems, no Silent Hunter Problems, no Guild Wars problems.

[Kuciwalker]

Well, I'm running it right now with the same card (actually two of them, but I think I have SLI disabled right now) with no problems whatsoever (and, needless to say, very fast).

[Agrajag]

Any chance you could list your driver settings so I could match them to see if that solves it for me?

Here's mine:

Aniso filtering: Off
AA Gamma Correction: On
Antialiasing Mode: Override
Antialiasing Setting: None (Hmm, override none?)
Antialiasing Transparency: Multisampling
Conformant Texture Clamp: Off
Error Reporting: Off
Extension Limit: Off
Force Mipmaps: None
Single Display
Texture Filtering Aniso: Off
Texture Filtering Negative LOD Bias: Allow
Texture Filtering Quality: Performance
Texture Filtering Trilinear Opt: On
Threaded Optimization: Auto
Triple Buffering: On
Vertical Sync: Force Off

[Sebster]

I'm also using an 8800 GTS / WinXP. I've been very pleased with the performance in CIV IV , regardless of the drivers I've used. Right now I'm using 6.14.11.5822

Settings:

Aniso filtering: App controlled
AA Gamma Correction: On
Antialiasing Mode: App controlled
Antialiasing Setting: blank
Antialiasing Transparency: Off
Conformant Texture Clamp: Use hardware
Error Reporting: Off
Extension Limit: Off
Force Mipmaps: None
Multiple display performance mode
Texture Filtering Aniso: Off
Texture Filtering Negative LOD Bias: Allow
Texture Filtering Quality: Quality
Texture Filtering Trilinear Opt: On
Threaded Optimization: Auto
Triple Buffering: Off
Vertical Sync: Use 3D App settings

[Kuciwalker]

I have all the graphics settings default to application settings, IIRC. I have the in-game graphics settings at maximum.

[Agrajag]

Well, already the above is dramatically better. I still must have an issue as the scroll isn't silky smooth. It's smooth most of the way but a busy screen will cause it to stutter just a bit here and there. No more waves and pauses thought.

[Willem]

Originally posted by Wittlich
Agrajag, what is the wattage of your system power supply? The 8800GTS requires a minimum system power supply of 400 watts.

Not true. The 8800 series requires much more than 400 watts. The Ultra at least needs a 640 watt supply. Even my 7950 requires more than 400.