Huge increase in PO after upgrading to XP

HI
I just upgraded to win XP home this past week from win ME

i have an AMD 1ghz, 768 mb sdram, ATI 9600 PRO using 3.10 Omega catalysts

now before i upgraded to win XP,i was getting around 50-60 PO at 23 fps,with custom graphics settings (cant remember all the individual settings off hand)
i was using 4x AA and 8X AF..and everything was running fine in the game ,well except at race starts at the back of the grid.overall i was happy with the performance (speed wise) of my game.

but i upgraded to winXP and all of that performance seems to have disappeared

i should mention- i had 2 hard drives,and i have GP4 installed on the slave drive.
when using win ME,both master and slave drives were in FAT32 format
when i upgraded to XP,i formatted my master drive in NTSF ,but the slave drive (where GP4 is installed) is still FAT32. could that have made any difference??

im still using the same 3.10 Omegas,exact same graphics settings (for GP4 and my gfx card)

but now when i go in for a practice session,my PO is around 150

well it keeps changing from 90 to 150 very quickly.
but overall its impossible to drive with such a tremendous slow down

does anyone know any working fix around this...or what couldve caused this?? i tried running GP4.exe in compatibility mode for WIN ME but even that didnt solve the problem

i turned off AA on my gfx card setting,and even that didnt change the PO
im at a complete loss guys...any advice would be useful.i cant revert back to win ME now,so i really hope someone has any tips for me,because i definitely do not want to stop enjoying this great game

thanks in advance guys





Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/16/2004 08:12PM by Karan19.

make sure you have your soundcard drivers up to date - that made a big difference to me in xp, cos it takes a lot of stress off the processor and puts it back on the soundcard.

go to the control panel, sounds and audio devices, and then you will see at the botom of that window advance button, next to the speaker volume. Click on the advance and you will have to choices at the top of the window, which will open. Speaker settings, and Performance. Go to the Performance, and set sample rate conversion from best to good. This will solve your problem.

Alos. If you dont car for XP's Fancy graphics (i do :-P) you can make the OS look like ME again and it will increase the overall performance on your PC. To do this press the windows Button + Pause/Break (or right click on the My Computer icon) then clikc the 'Advanced' Tab then in the 'Performance' Tab clik the 'settings' button then check the 'Ajust for Best Performance' tab. This will take away XPs fancy graphics and effect. You could leave some of the options checked like shadows under mouse pointer and 'Use drop shadows for icon labels on the desktop.'

Also maybe try upgrading sound drivers that a digitally signed there will be some available from the manufactures Site.

I find that to get a really smooth game I turn my AA off and AF to 2x but i have a Nvidia GeForce 4 4600Ti 128mb so it will perform differently on your card. Hope all this helps..

Post back with some results...

Regards

Will

hey i tried both solutions and none of them worked

first i tried reducing the sample rate conversation
that didnt help

then i installed the latest drivers for my sound card (SBLive) from creatives site
that didnt help either
could it be anything else?
im stumped

If the PO didnt change once you'd changed AA and AF- its nothing to do with graphics. So it must be CPU related. Try disabling your soundcard, and enabling on board sound in the bios. Then post back, it could be as simple as that

-----------------

She says brief things, her love’s a pony
My love’s subliminal

In my experience GP4 is always much slower under XP no matter how much you optimise the OS. I found something on the net the other day (which sadly I've since lost) which had a technical GP4 FAQ, and it stated that this was a recognized issue. Having said that, some folks get really good performance with XP, so there are no hard and fast rules. I believe if I went back to Win 98 now with my current system, I'd be getting 40FPS with everything on highest without any trouble. As it stands, with XP, 30FPS is the best I can get, no matter how much hardware I throw at it, and no matter how intricately I configure the operating system.

well i give up guys

i did a fresh install of gp4 and ran a couple of laps in a practice session

i was getting around 70-90 PO (using same graphic settings as before)

as soon as i put in my updated car and track wad files ,and restarted the game,the PO jumped back to 150+
guess ill have to wait to reinstall the game till i upgrade my motherboard and CPU,and possibly my soundcard too. ive heard other problems about the SB Live card causing application slowdowns
can anyone recommend a good soundcard,which delivers good performance (sound) and doesnt slow down the system that much

did u try my suggestions up there... about turn xp's fancy graphics offf.

Also Try Resizing ther Virtual memory...Do it manually dont let windows do it.. Im not sure how big iots summposed to be but i got 512 meg proper ranm and 728mb Virtual..

Also am i rite in believeing u have a good vid card...wat about AGP Aperture size in the bios???.. Have a fiddle but b carefulk in the bios...dont change something that you dont know what it does..

Did you try onboard sound? Because that would tell you if it is the sound card or not.

-----------------

She says brief things, her love’s a pony
My love’s subliminal

well i did try one of the ideas and it seems to work.well partly

i went into control panal,system and device manager and disabled my soundblaster live card temporarily. after restarting GP4 then my PO's had dropped to around 65-70 in a practice session as opposed to 150 when i was using the soundblaster live,but now ofcourse i have no sound in the game. is there any way around this?
since know we that the soundblaster card is hogging up all the cpu resources

You might also want to try more agressive RAM timings if your system is able to take them. I just tried them (in desperation) to get more performance out of my system and it worked miracles... so far they holding. If it crashes try more moderate settings until you get a stable system.

just a thought but when you upgraded to xp, you did do a clean install and not an update over me ?

Caelen Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> just a thought but when you upgraded to xp, you
> did do a clean install and not an update over me ?


lol... i'm sorry but that's just to funny... Caelen i didn't know you were a computer..

"over me" LOL!!!

Karan19,

I just noticed you're using a Soundblaster Live. This is what I had before I got an Audigy, and the on-board sound had a smaller PO hit than the Soundblaster Live. I ditched the soundcard altogether until I got the Audigy. That Live card was very resource hungry for me too.

HitchHiker - how do you modify ram timings? im not familiar with the procedure

caelen - yes i did a fresh install of XP. reformatted my C drive before installed XP onto it,so its a fresh install. after that i just downloaded all the windows updates from microsofts website,installed Omega 3.10s,and downloaded latest soundblaster live drivers from Creatives website

Hal - thanks for the tip.ive heard many people point this out in the past,and now im convinced i have to get rid of this Live card. im hopign to upgrading to Audigy 2 LS in a couple of months. until then i dont think ill be able to play gp4

i think its just xp dont like low powered cpu, with my old p3 i gig xp was about 50 % slower than me, but with my 3 gig there apperars to be no difference. why not dual boot and play games from me/98, thats what i do.

When you create a partition using disc manager in XP, how do you set the partition up to run 98/ME and how do you choose which OS to boot from?

*skips entire thread... blablablabla...*


if u upgraded instead of formated then installed then thats why i got a huge po increase i allways recommend to do a clean install

---