WindowsXP x64 Edition and Games... video is too fast!

[therealwesty]

Last night I installed the x64 Edition of WindowsXP. All my software and drivers seemed to install allright but gameplay has a bit of an issue. The video in any game that I've tried seems to playing too fast. It is like the game is on fast forward, video is going about double-time, but audio is allright. I installed Far Cry with the x64 patches and when watching the cut scenes the video and audio lose sync badly because the video is moving so quickly.

Current drivers...
Catalyst 5.10 but I've tried 5.8 and 5.9
nForce 6.66
Audigy2 Driver 2.03.0004 (not beta)
Logitech SetPoint 2.24

Games I've tried...
Far Cry with x64 patches
Half-life 2
MS Flight Simulator 2004
Battle for Middle-earth.

Hardware specs are listed in my sig.

Anybody else experience this? On 64-bit or 32-bit OSes even? Any ideas?

[Stone Fox]

Oh god. I've got to install windows X64 tonight when I've finished my build... I'll let you know if I get the same problem.

[therealwesty]

Problem solved!

It took a fair bit of searching but I finally found a solution and a bit of an explaination.

Games base their timescale on the CPU clock frequency. So 1 second = X numer of clock ticks. Turns out Windows was mis-reading the CPU and reporting the wrong number to the game engines. When Cool n' Quiet is enable the system runs at 1GHz under low load, Windows was reporting this throttled back number as the CPU frequency. When the game launches though the CPU throttles up to 2.2GHz and this throws of the time-scale calculation that was made when Windows told the game the chip was running 1GHz.

Thankfully the problem can be solved with a simple ammendment to the the boot.ini file. Just add the fallow line to the boot.ini unde the [operating systems] section...

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Pro x64 Edition - Speed Fix" /usepmtimer /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

Initially I added the new line as second entry so I could choose one or the other. This way if Windows failed somehow I could restart and choose the original option from the boot menu. Once I solved the problem successfully I just removed the original line from the boot.ini file.

Anyway that new boot option worked... everything seems fine so far now.