Choppy 2D

ShinMagus

Junior Member
Dec 9, 2004
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Hi. I'm not sure if this issue is indeed related to video, since it happened even with an alternate video card (my old one), but here it goes. Most 2D applications I run from time to time are choppy on my PC - namely CPS-2, Neogeo, Genesis and Snes emulators, except for Final Burn Alpha (CPS-2 emu). I'm sure as hell my PC is way more powerful than what's necessary for emulating all those platforms, and my old processor already was. I'm not confident the issue showed up when I switched processors though.

Here are the specs of my PC:

Athlon XP 2800+ (Barton) @2.19 GHz
1 GB RAM DDR400 2-3-2-5 (PDP)
ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe (nForce2 Ultra 400 chipset...)
Radeon 9800 Pro 128 MB

I use SoundStorm for audio (I used to use a Sound Blaster Audigy, but some time ago I read SoundStorm is superior). Not overclocking the cpu doesn't make a difference regarding the aforementioned problem.

I switched to my old 512 MB RAM DDR266 and the problem persisted. I uninstalled the Radeon drivers (I know both Omega and DNA drivers), rebooted and reinstalled them; it was no use. I don't intend to move back to my old mobo and my old cpu though.

I currently use the latest nForce drivers (6.14 beta I got from Guru3D) and the DNA drivers based on Catalyst 4.11. Using the latest official nForce drivers doesn't make a difference, nor does using the official Catalyst 4.11 (the one directly from ATI).

I tried switching back to SB Audigy (and disabling SoundStorm on the BIOS with that "onboard AC97 controller" option) too. It didn't make a difference.

On a side note, I get really horrible performance with DOSBox when attempting to run Warcraft 1. The common factor between this and the choppy 2D (actually, you could say DOSBox falls into this category...) is that in both cases you can tell something is wrong just by moving the mouse pointer around.

I suspect something's making my cpu go into full load unnecessarily in a number of situations... Take a small utility like Joy2Key, for example. The choppy mouse pointer effect happens just by having it run in the background, even with the lowest process priority.

So, can you help me? Thank you very much.