ati radeon 9550 problem

[aces170]

i have a friend who is facing a problem.he has p4 1.9Ghz,256 mb ddr ram,club 3d ATI 9550 (non-se) 256 mbvram.i installed nfs underground the game is not smooth like it keeps on stuttering it works smoothly for 10 seconds and then ther is a sudden drop in fps for a couple of seconds this keeps on going on.i installed quake 3 and i am facing the same problem.i tried catalyst 4.10,4.2 and latest omega drivers.i also tried disabling fastwrites but no difference.
when i press ctrl-alt-del swchost is running.i tried to end the task and play but no difference.could that be causing a problem ? he has win xp sp2 OS.

 

[Peter]

Pretty obviously the system has some background task running in those intervals. 10 seconds is not a stretch of jerkiness that could be caused by the graphics card.

 

[aces170]

one more thing i had just formatted my drive and installed win xp sp2.also when i add up the ram used in task manager it is around 70 mb but task manager shows only 120 mb free whereas the total memory is 256 mb

 

[daveybrat]

He needs the latest motherboard chipset patches installed as well as the ATI catalyst 4.10's.

Also, 256MB of ram is not enough for most of today's games. The lag or stuttering you are getting is probably excessive hard drive caching which can be alleviated by doubling his ram to 512MB.

Good luck

 

[sdack]

It must be a memory problem. Your grahpics card has just as much memory than the system itself. Games usually hold as much memory for graphics in main memory as is available on the graphics card. If your game does that and is even only using 128MB, you are experiencing memory swaps. Add atleast another 256MB to your main memory or find a way to decrease the amount of video memory used by your game.