Problems on Vista

[billkamm]

Hi, I am having problems with AudioSurf on my machine.  The song plays fine, but the game itself will go EXTREMELY slow and then suddenly go into warp speed to catch up to the point where the song is.  It does this throughout the entire song making the game unplayable.  It is not the normal speed up and slow down you experience with the song, but an actual problem.  I have got this game to work fine on my desktop (using Windows XP).

My laptop has Windows Vista Home Premium and a 64bit 1.8GHz dual-core processor.  Has anyone else had any problems with Vista or dual-core processors?  How about 64bit processors?  I'm trying to figure out why this game does this on my Vista laptop and not my XP desktop.  My Vista laptop has over twice the power.  I have 4 GB of RAM and 512MB Video Card. (ATI Radeon Xpress 1100) on my laptop

Thank you for any assistance.

[ViRUS]

Maybe this is what you're looking for?

[Lavos^]

I think it's a clear case of just not being powerful enough. 1.8 with all Vistas services and Aero etc. Audiosurf is a very processor-intensive game, you'll get more FPS from overclocking your processor than you would by your graphics card. Laptops are even worse for it as well. If you benched a laptop and a desktop with the exact same hardware, the desktop will always come out top in performance, that's just how it is.

Audiosurf only uses 1 core, Quest3D hasn't been updated to use both I don't think. I'm using running Vista Ultimate 64-bit and have a fair few cores, so I tick all your boxes, and I don't have any problems.

Still though, after overclocking from 3.2 to 4.0, my FPS in Audiosurf went up around 50 for premium, and around 100 for the others, and chance you could try overclocking? Although it's not great on a laptop...

[billkamm]

When running Age of Empires III it said "Warning your processor of .8 GHz does not meet the minimum system requirements"

Since it is a 1.8 GHz does that mean that some of my games are only using one core and hence it is only using half of the 1.8 GHz?  I was under the impression that having a dual-core would be like having TWO 1.8 GHz processors.

[Lavos^]

You do have two 1.8Ghz cores, but software needs to be optimised to split the loading between both cores for it to actually work. Quest3D (The program Audiosurf is created with) doesn't have this feature at the moment, so it will only use one of your two cores. Most new games now do have support for 2 cores, and 2 graphics cards, including AoE3, which minimum specs says 1.4Ghz for XP, for Vista that number always goes up, but 1.8 dual should be in the minimum range, does it play ok?

What settings are you playing Audiosurf on? Try something really low like 640x480 on minimal.

Also out of curiosity, what are the specs of your desktop that runs it ok?

[billkamm]

The specific AOE3 warning says I have a 0.8GHz processor and the laptop is labeled as having a 1.8GHz 64bit Dual-Core Processor.  The laptop is an Acer Aspire 5100-5023.

My desktop specs (where Audio-Surf and AOE3 run perfect) are
3.0GHz Pentium 3
1 GB RAM
ATI Radeon 9800 All-In-Wonder 128 MB
Windows XP SP3

The laptop specs (where few games run fine at all) are
1.8GHz AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-56
4 GB DDR2 RAM
ATI Radeon Xpress 1100 w/ 256 MB dedicated and 256MB Shared
Windows Vista Home Premium

I figure the problem is in one or more of the 3 areas: processor, video card, or Vista.  Unfortunately the laptop video card is onboard, so that I'm kinda of stuck with it.  If upgrading the processor will help (assuming it is not a Vista or video card problem) I would gladly do that.

[Lavos^]

Well, I don't want to make you go out and pay for hardware upgrades. It's my personal opinion that laptops are terrible for games, and not worth the money trying to upgrade them because the results won't be as great as with a desktop. If you play a lot of games, upgrading your desktop would be more useful.

Your onboard video card doesn't help matters either, as it splits processing with your CPU, putting more burden on your CPU. And on top of that you have Vista and presumably onboard sound. A processor upgrade would help you a lot, but as I said before, I don't want to push you into going out and spending money, when Audiosurf still might not be playable.

[Gamergull]

Hmmm, what's kinda odd is that I myself play Audiosurf on a laptop with a 1.8 GHz dualcore processor, 1 GB RAM, and a low end Intel GPU. I can play it comfortably at 800x600 and Normal settings (although after the update, I can even play Enhanced, but the frame rate is around 10-15).

I dunno if this helps much. Maybe your CPU cooling system isn't that great or something? Audiosurf only stutters for me when I hear the fan buzz.

[Lavos^]

Are you on XP Gamergull? That takes away a lot of the graphic/processor stress, compared to Vista I mean.

[Mincus]

I have a suspicion your problem is Vista. But not because Vista in and of itself is incapable of running on your hardware.

Let me explain:
I've used Vista for around a year on a 2.2GHz laptop. For me, it runs absolutely perfectly (or as perfectly as any Windows OS can, but that's another discussion ). However I switch off around half a dozen services after installing, I also tweak the pagefile and a number of other settings to improve performance.
I've noticed that on some machines (mostly laptops) when I've directed others who are suffering from horrible Vista performance problems to do these same things that it makes no difference. They still get horrid performance.
This surprises me because I'm really impatient and unforgiving with how responsive a system is and I have Vista running effectively as quick as XP, yet others who will generally put up with the crap XP throws at them suddenly struggle with what are appearing at my end to be minor performance differences.

My conclusion: Vista just runs crap on some machines. There's no way to get round this unfortunately.

What you could try is this:
1) Have you reinstalled Vista since you bought the laptop? This should be the first thing ANYONE does with a new pre-made machine from somewhere like Acer, Dell, HP, etc, etc. It gets rid of all the additional crud the company puts on the machine and allows you to cleanly install the newest drivers.
So, head to the acer site, grab the latest drivers and try a clean install.
The services I suggest killing are:
 - Windows Search (even if you search for things regularly, it eats LOADS of CPU power, usually right in the middle of you doing something important. MS seem to have it on "normal" priority instead of "lowest" and with no checking if you're doing things -- This has improved under Windows 7 I note)
 - Superfetch (it's supposed to pre-load DLLs and often used programs into RAM. In reality it just eats CPU power and adds little in my experience, switching it off won't make performance any worse than XP)
 - ReadyBoost (this is optional, but it's likely you'll never make use of it if you have 4GB of RAM)
Additionally set the pagefile to a fixed size of 4GB helps. This stops Windows constantly resizing it, holding it on a single section of the disk (and hopefully all in one section), you do this through Control Panel -> "show all items" -> System Properties -> Advanced tab -> Performance Settings -> Advanced tab -> Virtual Memory Change button -> Untick "Automatically manage paging file size" -> Set "custom size", put 4096 in both "initial size" and "maximum size", hit "set" then "ok" on all the windows.

You could try all that before a reinstall. You can set any of it back if you don't like the effects of losing Windows Search (personally I don't miss it. )


2) Try XP on the laptop.

Hope there's something in there that helps.

[Lavos^]

I actually just disabled search earlier as it was using up 80MB RAM.

It would be better with no pagefile, as long as he keeps RAM usage under 4GB it would increase performance. Unused RAM is wasted RAM.

I haven't disabled Superfetch/ReadyBoost, but I never bothered finding out what they actually do, since MS' description in services doesn't tell you anything. I might disable them and benchmark with Vantage a little. Actually I'm gonna do that now...

[Mincus]

I actually just disabled search earlier as it was using up 80MB RAM.

It would be better with no pagefile, as long as he keeps RAM usage under 4GB it would increase performance. Unused RAM is wasted RAM.

I haven't disabled Superfetch/ReadyBoost, but I never bothered finding out what they actually do, since MS' description in services doesn't tell you anything. I might disable them and benchmark with Vantage a little. Actually I'm gonna do that now...

If he's playing AOE3, he might need the additional RAM. He also doesn't mention if he has a 64-bit OS, so I was playing it safe.
But yes, potentially switching it off may help as well.

Superfetch largely alters desktop performance and should speed boot times a little, theoretically it will drop background CPU usage by Windows and so should help here.

ReadyBoost is designed to speed up pagefile transfers on systems with little RAM. You plug in a fast USB flash drive and it writes the pagefile to there as well as to the HD. Because flash RAM has much faster read times than hard drives, Windows can read the data back from the flash drive much faster than going to the hard drive. It's a good idea in theory, but with 4GB of RAM, even on a 32-bit system there's plenty to go at there, so pointless having it running and it assumes you have a fast (have to emphasise that it needs to be a fast stick, most aren't) USB flash drive lying around, which most people don't.

[billkamm]

If he's playing AOE3, he might need the additional RAM. He also doesn't mention if he has a 64-bit OS, so I was playing it safe.

The specific AOE3 warning says I have a 0.8GHz processor and the laptop is labeled as having a 1.8GHz 64bit Dual-Core Processor.  The laptop is an Acer Aspire 5100-5023.

The laptop specs (where few games run fine at all) are
1.8GHz AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-56
4 GB DDR2 RAM
ATI Radeon Xpress 1100 w/ 256 MB dedicated and 256MB Shared
Windows Vista Home Premium

I assumed since I had Vista and a 64-bit Processor my OS was 64-bit.  Am I not correct in assuming this?

[Mincus]

I assumed since I had Vista and a 64-bit Processor my OS was 64-bit.  Am I not correct in assuming this?

Sadly not. There's 32-bit and 64-bit versions of operating systems.

64-bit CPUs can run a 32-bit OS. It's one of the advantages of the x86_64 model. It's completely backwards compatible.
However a 32-bit OS can't take advantage of the new things in a 64-bit OS, even if it is running on a 64-bit CPU and so can't run 64-bit code.
But! A 64-bit OS (at least Windows and a number of Linux distros) can run 32-bit code.

If you open the System Properties, there should be a field called "System type:" and it will say either 32-bit or 64-bit.
Most vendors have been selling 32-bit versions of Vista to play it safe and reduce support calls since there's still teething problems here and there with the 64-bit versions of Windows.

[Lavos^]

Well, here's my results with nothing changed inbetween runs except Superfetch and ReadyBoost disabled. Both from cold boots, starting run at same temps, first one with Superfetch/ReadyBoost enabled.

                 Run 1                   Run 2
          Test 1    Test 2     Test 1    Test 2

FPS      65.58     63.22      65.32      63.27 
CPU     3378.46  165.65     3398.86  167.60

FPS     65.76      63.41      65.75     63.45
CPU     3398.69  163.60     3373.92  166.33

So, as expected, with Superfetch/ReadyBoost enabled, CPU operations went up by 20, and CPU physics operations by 2 on the second run, most likely due to the cached data. With both turned off, we see a performance increase in CPU operations, probably due to less CPU power going to the caching process for the first run, but a decrease in CPU physics operations for both tests. The second test also dropping in CPU operations, probably due to heat or other factors.

Graphic performance stayed pretty much the same, with Superfetch/ReadyBoost turned off all graphic runs were slightly improved, but not even by half an FPS.

However, svchost RAM usage went from around 120MB, down to 20MB by turning off SF/RB. So, on that basis alone, I'll leave them turned off.