Help with game performance

[gonff]

When i play the game Sacred, my computer gets a little choppie and laggy sometimes. It's often enough to be an annoyance.

My computer is basically brand new, with a new video card, so i don't understand what the problem is. What's worse is that my mom runs the game smoothly with almost the exact same system. We're both running the same version of the game too.

Here are my specs:

Sony Vaio
Pentium 4 2.80ghz
512mb ram
Ati Radeon 9600 xt video card

My mom's computer is exactly the same (same computer) except she has a ati radeon 9200 card in instead. I've tried updating to the latest drivers and it didn't help.
If anyone can help out with some info or a solution, I would be grateful. If you need any further information, just ask.

[Nova]

try taking the graphics down in windows, set the to performance or whatever, and maybe u have aa and af on

[PCgeek]

nova thats ur answer every time someone asks a slow graphics question :P

Try reinstalling older drivers, long shot but it might work.
Your computer might also have spyware and/or viruses

[Nova]

You would be surpised at how many people actually have everything up on high, especially if it was made by a business, older drivers don't do much maybe a 5% improvement at max but thats about it, but then theres always overclocking and voltmoding :)

[PCgeek]

sometimes newer drivers have glitches which cause ultra slow speeds, sometimes older drivers do. You should always do your own testing to decide which drivers work best for you.

[therealwesty]

Your 9600 should be able to whipe the floor with the 9200. If the display properties look OK you may want to runa scan for spy/adware using something like Ad-Aware 6. If you have some advertising stuff going in the back ground it could be loading up your CPU. You may also want to make sure you have the latest video card driver and make sure you have the latest motherboard chipset driver. The chipset driver controls the AGP port and the default WinXP driver sucks.

[speedy11309]

do you have a firewall running? if you are getting random spikes, and you have one running, thats the problem. if youre trying to play a game like counter-strike with a firewall on, forget about it, youre gonna get horrible spikes. i know from experience.

[Ace]

Firewalls work fine with all games for me :confused:

I'd try what everybody else has suggested, but I'd also add - do a Ctrl + Alt + Del and bring up the task manager. If you look in the performance tab you should be able to see the amount of Physical Memory (RAM - given in KB not MB) that's free and also the CPU Utilisation. Just check that the CPU Utilisation isn't sitting at 100% or something, and that you have a reasonable amount of Physical Memory free. With 512MB, you should be seeing at least 256000KB without any games or programs other than background programs running.

If you can see a SMARTGART tab in control panel - display properties - settings - advanced, check that it's set to 8x and fast write is ON.

[SSL]

u said you pc is a sony, what software did it come installed with, im assuming its brand new like u said and might have alot of stuff running in abckround that u may or may not have disabled yet, have u run msconfig yet and disabled some of that stuff? i would also run routine cleanup if its a couple months old, maybe adaware if u've been browsing the web alot on it. aside from that, what everyone else said, try different drivers

[Doc Timbo]

i just like the idea of Fragging my mom lololololollolol wish my parents were cool :-(