Poorer Performance on 32-bit W7 than my XP

Hello all, I've been trying to diagnose my system now for 2 days running and thought I'd post instead of scouring the web for conditions like mine.

First of all, you need to know my specs. I have a pretty old computer that can run TF2 to an acceptable level (around 30 FPS) in XP, as well as games like Heroes of Newerth.

It's a 3 GHz single core HT Intel, 2 GB RAM, RADEON X1950XT 256 MB video card, and a 7400 RPM 160 GB HD.

My symptoms are basically just poor performance. In every game I play, including those with less intensive demands (Q3 engine games), there is a kind of erratic FPS dropping, regardless of what's happening on screen. When the stuttering isn't happening, the FPS is about 10-20 FPS LOWER than my other computer which is on XP that has a far lesser video card (X850), other than that it's identical. My point here is that it seems to me that the problem is not hardware related.

My fragmentation is at 2%, my processor is overclocked to 3.45Ghz, my temps under load are less than 60C, my processor's at 3-10% usage at idle, 31% of my memory is being used at idle.


I have AVG's Resident Shield off, I turned off hard drive indexing, changed TF2's video settings to the bare minimum without hardly any difference (maybe 5 FPS?), used compatibility modes on the .exe's, turned off themes while playing, etc....

My video driver is just the display driver provided from Windows 7, as ATI decided to drop support for my card that is just 2 years old. My soundcard is an X-Fi and it runs just fine. My Windows Experience Index gives me a 4.4 (the lowest score being my processor) so maybe I'm being bottlenecked hard by a single-core processor, and Windows 7 demands more processing power. I'm really puzzled as to what to do next.

According to ATI you could try using the Vista Catalyst drivers

32 bit ATI Catalyst? Legacy Display Driver

64 bit ATI Catalyst? Legacy Display Driver

slow video card, slow HDD and small ram is bad for Win7 - what's your W7 performance index?

I did a clean install. My Windows 7 performance index was 4.4. I suppose I'll try the Catalyst drivers.

Yonder28 said:

I did a clean install. My Windows 7 performance index was 4.4. I suppose I'll try the Catalyst drivers.

the performance index is listing what is weak in your system and any rating under 5 is not cutting it but a rating around 6+ starts to be fun.

yeah in reality W7 is a "new" OS and really needs "new" hardware to shine. Though W7 does /better/ on older hardware than Vista, there is a lot more going on.

I'm using a 3 year old machine but a newer graphics card and it screams. But I won't be putting W7 on my P4 laptop or anything of that era :/

richc46 said:

Yonder28 said:

Hello all, I've been trying to diagnose my system now for 2 days running and thought I'd post instead of scouring the web for conditions like mine.

First of all, you need to know my specs. I have a pretty old computer that can run TF2 to an acceptable level (around 30 FPS) in XP, as well as games like Heroes of Newerth.

It's a 3 GHz single core HT Intel, 2 GB RAM, RADEON X1950XT 256 MB video card, and a 7400 RPM 160 GB HD.

My symptoms are basically just poor performance. In every game I play, including those with less intensive demands (Q3 engine games), there is a kind of erratic FPS dropping, regardless of what's happening on screen. When the stuttering isn't happening, the FPS is about 10-20 FPS LOWER than my other computer which is on XP that has a far lesser video card (X850), other than that it's identical. My point here is that it seems to me that the problem is not hardware related.

.

My fragmentation is at 2%, my processor is overclocked to 3.45Ghz, my temps under load are less than 60C, my processor's at 3-10% usage at idle, 31% of my memory is being used at idle.


I have AVG's Resident Shield off, I turned off hard drive indexing, changed TF2's video settings to the bare minimum without hardly any difference (maybe 5 FPS?), used compatibility modes on the .exe's, turned off themes while playing, etc....

My video driver is just the display driver provided from Windows 7, as ATI decided to drop support for my card that is just 2 years old. My soundcard is an X-Fi and it runs just fine. My Windows Experience Index gives me a 4.4 (the lowest score being my processor) so maybe I'm being bottlenecked hard by a single-core processor, and Windows 7 demands more processing power. I'm really puzzled as to what to do next.

2 GB of RAM is the bare minimum and you are not going to get ideal performance.

2GB is more than enough. I've got Win 7 installations running in 512MB with no noticeable performance issues.

But do you GAME with 512 MB? The OS works beautifully, it's just not performing well in games

Yonder28 said:

But do you GAME with 512 MB? The OS works beautifully, it's just not performing well in games

2D gaming (Pacman) fine - 3D gaming forget it