Swapped Video cards, now game performance down 50%

[Bumrush99]

I was playing Quake 4 a few nights ago when my video signal crapped out and died. My 6800GT was replaced several days later with the exact same model and brand. I did not place any cheap video cards in the my system during the downtime, I just waited until my new 6800GT was installed..
Drivers were uninstalled and updated, and now my games run like crap. Half Life Coast, which ran anywhere from 26-35 fps in the opening sequence now runs at 10fps. Quake 4 DM, which never dipped below 30FPS, now hovers and dips in to the 20's very often. Game setting s and NV control panel settings have remained the same, nothing has changed except for the video card.

Does anyone have a clue as to what the culprit may be? Could the drivers be corrupt? If so, what do I need to do to clean my system? I DO NOT want to reformat

EDIT: Also, is it possible that the AMD All in One AGP drivers got corrupt, thus causing the slowdown.. Just thought of that

 

[Markbnj]

Reinstalling drivers will have reset everything to defaults, so a cruise through the control panel would be worthwhile. Also, swapping cards may have caused the BIOS to reset the AGP aperature to the default 32 megs. Depending on how much ram you have might be worth opening that up to 128 or 256 if it got reset.

 

[Bumrush99]

I'm getting very frustrated now, my gaming performance is still down around 50%, FPS wise. Image quality is fine, but every game runs like crap. Loast Coast hovers between 10-12 FPS, before I swapped cards it was running in the high 20's.

Here is what I did:
Removed all nvidia drivers and used driver cleaner in safe mode.
Re-installed VIA all in one AGP drivers
Checked BIOS and verified AGP Aperture size was correct
Did a system restore.

I'm out ideas, is a reformat my only option?

 

[orangat]

Bizzare. The simplest explanation would be the quality settings are not the same. Try driver cleaner and ctzap to purge the old settings and drivers.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Then you did do the the 4in1's update first? I have seen numerous problems in by-gone days with Via chipsets when the vid drivers were installed before installing or updating the 4in1's. Is it possible the card is overheating? The fan not spinning up correctly?

 

[Bumrush99]

Originally posted by: orangat
Bizzare. The simplest explanation would be the quality settings are not the same. Try driver cleaner and ctzap to purge the old settings and drivers.

Quality settings are identical Even HL2 video stress test runs around 40 fps slower thann normal... I'm at my wits end trying to figure this one out.

 

[Bumrush99]

Originally posted by: DAPUNISHER
Then you did do the the 4in1's update first? I have seen numerous problems in by-gone days with Via chipsets when the vid drivers were installed before installing or updating the 4in1's. Is it possible the card is overheating? The fan not spinning up correctly?

I tried it both ways, to no avail.

The fan is spinning fine and the temperature settings are identical to what they were with the defective card.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Only other thing I can think of, is run the DXdiag and see if everything passes, then maybe reinstall DX9c for shats&giggles anyways. Other than that, I got nothin'

 

[velis]

You need to pay attention to the quality settings in driver AND in the game itself. It is quite possible you have 4xAA set in driver which wasn't there before. That would surely explain the problem.
Also, check out the overclocking tab in the driver. I had a strange problem with my Gigabyte fanless 6600GT. The initial card was faulty (artefacts when above 420MHz). Replaced with identical card, didn't even reinstall the driver, but the new card was set to 100MHz Core (or was it 200) instead of 500 as it should have been. The time difference between first frequency check (faulty card) and the second (new card) was less than 5 minutes. Ridiculous!
Checking AGP aperture size in BIOS is also noteworthy. If you have a very small window, your performance will be killed. 64MB is a good size unless you have heaps of RAM to waste.
Other than that i can only suggest you take a spare disk and test install win + drivers + game to see if that helps.

 

[Bumrush99]

Velis, I'm certain that game and control panel settings are identical to what they were before. Those settings were the first thing I looked at..
AGP aperture is set at 128, so I don't think that could be the problem...
I will manually set the clock to stock speeds. .Thanks for that tip, I did install coolbits but I have not used it.

 

[Bumrush99]

Now it gets even weirder.. The card will run fine now if I hard reboot and leave the machine off for a while. The first few rounds of benchmarks in CS Source run like normal, as soon as the card is worked they drop back to the lowest levels!!! Is that indictive of some sort of memory leak or do I have a bad card?

 

[velis]

That would imply a bad contact between GPU and it's heatsink. Suggest replacing the card.
Did you check the card temps? You should see that this card gets much hotter than your previous one.