Vizard suddenly running slowly

[JMOwens]

Hi,
I have an HP laptop [2GHz Intel Core2Duo, 2GB RAM, NVidia GeForce Go7200, Vista Business] that has recently started running Vizard 3.0 Development very slowly. That is, when I display an environment (even a very sparse one) in full-screen, it is quite choppy, even though it claims a frame rate varying between 50-100 fps. This in itself is a bit odd, as the desktops in our lab run at a rock-solid 60 fps with no downward or upward variation.

The obvious culprit here is that I installed Vista two weeks ago. However, I tested Vizard right after the install, and it ran just fine, as it did previously with XP Pro on this machine. When I check system resources while running fullscreen, the CPU usage seems kind of high (~55%, compared to <10% with Vizard and Firefox simply open), though I have a gig of available RAM.

I'd appreciate any ideas that you have about what could be causing this slowdown, or ways I can go about diagnosing it. I have the most recent drivers for the video card; does anybody know of any secret NVidia settings that may have changed? Thanks so much for your help.

[farshizzo]

Hi,

That's a very strange problem. I'm not sure what's going on, but the most likely problem is Vista. Last I heard, OpenGL drivers for Vista are not as good as XP. I looked on nVidia's driver download page, and it seems that they haven't released Vista drivers for the Geforce Go 7 series. Where did you get your drivers from?

[JMOwens]

Hi farshizzo,
Thanks for your reply - I agree it's a strange problem! Good question about the video card drivers; the reason nVidia doesn't post them (according to their website) is because each laptop's manufacturer uses different settings for special buttons, etc. They recommend downloading Geforce Go drivers from the manufacturer's website, which is what I did here. There were a few card driver "updates" that ran at various times after I installed Vista - I wonder if one of them could have actually impaired performance, as I'm pretty sure Vizard was fine right after the OS upgrade. I do have the most recent drivers according to HP's website.

This was the thinking behind my question about secret settings - I was thinking maybe the newer driver changed some settings under the hood that I could change back without too much drama (like rolling back drivers).

[farshizzo]

Hi,

You can try playing around with your drivers 3D settings, but I don't know if that will work. Is it possible to uninstall HPs drivers and revert to Vista built-in driver?

[JMOwens]

I have played with the 3d settings, and unfortunately didn't accomplish much. As far as I can tell the HP drivers ARE nVidia drivers, so I don't know that it would be such a good idea to just uninstall them.

I just tried rolling back my video card driver to the previous version, courtesy of HP. The problem still exists, though the CPU usage seems to be all over the board - from 10% up to 55% and back. Weird. Any more thoughts?

[farshizzo]

Hi,

Sorry, there is not much more I can suggest. Unfortunately we don't have a GeForce Go 7200 running on Vista here, so I cannot recreate the issue. Hopefully nVidia will release better drivers soon.

[JMOwens]

Rats, well, thanks for your help. I really liked having Vizard running smoothly on my laptop for demos. If any other readers have suggestions, I'm all ears. Thanks again.

[JMOwens]

Just as an update, if anyone's interested...I uninstalled the nVidia drivers and tried running Vizard off the standard Vista driver. Unfortunately, the jittering choppiness remains. As always, I appreciate if anyone else has ideas about what could be happening. Thanks.

[farshizzo]

Hi,

Just a thought, do you have the Aero desktop enabled? If so, does disabling it affect performance?

[JMOwens]

Another good though, but no, disabling Aero doesn't seem to affect vizard performance at all. Though you'd think that it would if it's a system resources issue. Hmmm...

[farshizzo]

Hi,

I'm not sure if you solved this problem yet, but there might be one more thing worth trying. I recently had some strange performance issue on a computer and found that disabling "Threaded optimization" in the 3D settings fixed it. You might want to give it a shot.

[JMOwens]

Sorry for the slow response, I'd stopped checking this thread! Actually, the problem seems to have cured itself, for the moment at least. Very weird. I don't know if some windows update contained a hidden patch, or what, but I'll take it.

If it starts acting funky again I'll check out the threaded optimaztion thing. Thanks!