bad 2d graphics adapter performance?

[QED]

Ok... I have an AGP ATI Radeon X800 Pro and for as long as I can recall, I've had pretty sucky 2d performance.

Screen redraws/refreshes are slow, and moving or scrolling windows with content in them causes by CPU usage to jump to 70 to 80%. This is especially noticable when scrolling through a news website (such as MSNBC) in IE.

Another thing I noticed about IE is how it uses 7 to 10% of the processor when it's doing absolutely nothing-- just sitting on a non-flash non-animated gif website. Seems kind of high to me...


Drivers are the the latest version, recent scans by MicroTrend, AVG, AdAware, HJT, and Microsoft Anti-Spyware Beta 1 are all negative.

Any ideas on what I should check for or possible culprits?

AMD Athlon 64 3.2 Ghz
512MB of SDRAM
Dual Seatech 300GB drives
Windows XP Pro

EDIT: CPU Usage also spikes to 90+% whenever I copy or an unzip large files-- which is unusual since my IDE drivers are set to use DMA

 

[tk11]

You may be able to narrow it down with a utility called process explorer.
http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/ProcessExplorer.html

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: MathMan
Ok... I have an AGP ATI Radeon X800 Pro and for as long as I can recall, I've had pretty sucky 2d performance.

Screen redraws/refreshes are slow, and moving or scrolling windows with content in them causes by CPU usage to jump to 70 to 80%. This is especially noticable when scrolling through a news website (such as MSNBC) in IE.

Another thing I noticed about IE is how it uses 7 to 10% of the processor when it's doing absolutely nothing-- just sitting on a non-flash non-animated gif website. Seems kind of high to me...


Drivers are the the latest version, recent scans by MicroTrend, AVG, AdAware, HJT, and Microsoft Anti-Spyware Beta 1 are all negative.

Any ideas on what I should check for or possible culprits?

AMD Athlon 64 3.2 Ghz
512MB of SDRAM
Dual Seatech 300GB drives
Windows XP Pro

EDIT: CPU Usage also spikes to 90+% whenever I copy or an unzip large files-- which is unusual since my IDE drivers are set to use DMA

Reinstall your motherboard's driver set - find your chipset, then go to THAT vendor's WWW page and grab the latest drivers, then install them.

In DXDIAG, confirm you have 9.0c of DirectX installed. Confirm on the Display tab that the 3 bottom directx features are all enabled. Post your results.

 

[QED]

Okay...

Installed VIA's Hyperion drivers for my chipset-- and there is a slight improvement-- I can only get CPU usage up to 50-60% by quickly scrolling or moving an IE browser around. Maybe this is as good as it gets.

Also, using process explorer I found that IE is running two threads that are using CPU even when the browser is just sitting there... they are "GetVersion" in DHDOCVW.DLL and "DLLGetLCID" in IEXPLORE.EXE . Not sure what they are doing, but at least I've narrowed it down.

Dxdiag confirms I have DirectX 9.0c, and all 3 options on the display tab are checked. When running the DirectDraw tests, none of them stress the CPU except for the final full-screen test.

Thanks for the ideas so far...