Acer Laptop with ATI Radeon Xpress 1100 - Choppy / Laggy Grahpics

I recently purchased a laptop. It's not top end or anyhing, but it should be able to handle older games.

Specs: AMD Turion 64 MK-38 (2.2GHz), ATI Radeon XPress 1100 (256MB allocated), 2GB total system RAM, Vista Home Premium 32-bit

I have successfully run C&C 3, Pirates!, Defcon, and Half-Life2 and on it without problems. Granted with lesser graphics settings, but runs well nevertheless.

I want to run Civilization 4 and a flight sim from 2000 called Enemy Engaged: Comanche Hokum. Both of these games result in choppy graphics. It's not like it's low fps, but it's smooth for a second, then pauses, then smooth, then pauses, ad nauseum. I have the latest drivers from the ATI/AMD site, and have closed all open programs when running, without any difference. I have bumped all graphics settings to lowest, and dropped to 640x480 resolution but still has the choppy graphics syndrome.

Anyone have any suggestions on how to improve this? Thanks!

 

I am not sure but my best advice for you is maybe to update drivers?
sorry for my lack of knowledge for this question

 

Thanks for the response. I have updated to the latest drivers (7.7) without any improvement. I wish it were something like that.

I'd be curious to see if it has anything to do with Vista. I have a license for XP Home, but just don't feel like going through all that headache. But I may be happier in the end.

 

It's an integrated card, there's not much you can do. It wasn't really meant for heavy gaming.

You can try and OC is a little with winclk, but it wont net you much.

 

But he's not trying to do heavy gaming. The 1100 should easily be able to handle Civ 4 on the lowest settings.

I would recommend making sure you're plugged in when you play those games, make sure your power settings are turned all the way up, make sure your games have the latest patches, and failing all of that, I guess you could see if they run better in XP.

 

try installing different games and see if its the games that are uncompat. with the video card.

 

Yes, try installing different graphics drivers:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=64910

Are any of the games you are running OpenGL? If they are then that's your problem; the Radeon X200/X1100 series graphics cards have abysmal performance in OpenGL applications and unfortunately there's no remedy for that.

 

Drivers and games patched up to latest. I'm plugged in the whole time. I have tried other games as noted in my original post and they run fine. It does seem that OpenGL may be the culprit. If that's the case then I'm disappointed. I will try the different drivers as pointed out by Chaz, and if no luck there, I may go to XP anyways because I just abhor Vista. Sorry, I've tried on both my desktop and laptop and it does nothing more than frustrate me. But XP may not fix the issue either.

I went with this laptop with the ATI 1100 chipset because I figured it was better than the Intel 950. Maybe not.

 

Even in OpenGL apps, the GMA950 wouldn't perform significantly better. And in any DirectX apps, the GMA950 would be crushed by the ATI 1100, so you definitely made the right choice.


Also, Civ 4 isn't OpenGL, so while that may be the culprit in your flightsim, Civ 4 should play fine on your card.

 

So I'm wondering what the issue is? Maybe I need to fuss with system performance settings to make sure cpu isn't throttling back and forth for some reason? Is there an AMD driver out there somewhere I should have installed?

 

I think I'm onto something. I realize the stutter is in sync with my hard drive light. I know Vista does file indexing, and actually have a 2GB SD card in my PC for readyboost.

I noticed just in Vista desktop, my CPU is running at 25-35%!!! WTF? And my hard drive is constantly being accessed. Is there a way to prevent this? WHat's doing this? Stupid Vista!!!

edit: Nope, not it. Seems to be a little more smooth at 640x480. I just find it hard to believe that even though its integrated graphics that it can't even handle 800x600 on a game from 2000, and actually just an add-on from a game released in 1999!!! Especially since C&C 3 and Half-Life 2 run fine on it, even at 800x600!

 

If the gaming stutter occurs while the hard drive's being accessed, that generally indicates that you're having to access the page file. How much RAM do you have? Civ IV and flight sims can be highly RAM intensive, so make sure that you have plenty of free RAM when you're playing them.

 

I have 2GB of RAM. This flight sim has a foot print of only a few hundred MB. I also have a 2GB ReadyBoost SD card in this laptop as well.

Just as a test, I ran the flight sim on my wife's PC which has Radeon Xpress 200 chip, with an AMD Athlon 64 3200+, 2GB DDR333, and it ran smooth as silk at 1280x1024, same options enabled. My laptop actually has slightly better specs with the Turion 2.2GHz and faster DDR2-5300 memory.

Something tells me it has to do with Vista. I have to go out of town on business this week, hence the want for adding some games, but will probably install Windows XP next weekend and see how that goes. Was hoping to get it resolved before then, but oh well.

There is just no good reason why it shouldn't run well IMHO. Until I get XP installed to test, I reserve my judgement against Vista...

 

HAve you tried turning superfetch off?

 

Get rid of Vista...

I have a feeling the game will run OK when you go back to XP.

 

When you say you recently purchased your laptop, does that mean you have been using it just for the past 1-2 weeks? Windows Vista uses its highly aggressive "Superfetch" protocol to accustom itself to what programs you usually use, and load often accessed files into system RAM when not in use. During the initial period of use (2 weeks on my dad's Vista laptop) RAM and CPU usage will be unusually high because of Vista trying unsuccessfully to guess what programs you are likely to use. After it "learns" your habits, Superfetch will guess correctly more often and your performance will increase. In addition, during a similar period of time (also 2 weeks) the indexing service will kick into high gear and locate all your files for the Windows Vista search engine. After all existing files have been indexed, your CPU and RAM usage will drop and performance will increase.

 

Yes, I just purchased this laptop a couple weeks ago with mild use so far.

Hmmm, maybe I will try to turn "superfetch" off, if I can figure out how...

 

Superfetch is a huge performance drainer, if you google it I'm sure you'll find several explanations on how to turn it off.

 

Hmmm, turned off many unneeded resources, and had to do a regedit to stop superfetch, and that helped quite a bit, at least can bump resolution up a little bit with all options enabled.

Still get the pauses at higher resolutions, but just starting to prove that it is related to Vista more than anything. Will definitely do an XP install this weekend when I get a little time.

 

Also no matter what OS you use, the X1100 will only bring you so far. It's not going to perform well at high resolutions or high settings, even on fairly old games....

 

I understand that. But 1024x768 shouldn't be unreasonable for DirectX 8 graphics, or even directX 9 with games like Civ 4 for that matter.

Considering both of these games run flawlessly on my wife's PC with onboard Radeon Xpress 200 graphics (256MB shared), Athlon64 3200+, 2GB DDR400, and WinXP, I wouldn't expect it to be a stretch for these onboard graphics to do the same.

It'd be one thing if frame rates were low, but they're not, the games stutter. Could also be just poor driver implementation on the video, south bridge, or other. Who knows. I'll see what the real culprit is once I get WinXP installed

 

Had almost the same problem as you on my Acer 8204. When i was playing certian games it would run great for one second then freeze (where the mouse stops responding) and play fine, then freeze etc. Found out that the default drivers it came with were crap and it was ATI's Catalist control center creating multipal ccc.exe's which caused the problem.
If possible try running your games in a windowed mode and have the Task manager open at the same time

 

Oh no that at all, on the contary I used to have an X200 as well and apart from OpenGL issues any regular dx8 game ran great at 1024x768 full options.

But just due to its puny pushing power, if you were trying to play at say, 1600x1200, or something equally ambitious, is all I meant!

 

Check out this youtube video. Not sure if you can really notice it. I used my digital camera to take the video as fraps slowed it down too much to make real-time video useful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmPZn7mSFgg

First part shows the stutter. Second one shows it without. Basically switching from 1024x768 to 800x600 helped, but why can't it work at 1024x768? Before I turned off superfetch (thanks for that tip by the way), I could only run at 640x480 and even that was slightly choppy.

Thanks to everyone that's tried to help so far.

 

Hmmm, I ran 3DMark03 and something struck me as funny. I still get the choppy graphics, but when it goes to do the CPU test (running in software mode) it is very smooth. Kinda pathetic when software mode runs smoother than with a graphics chip. Why even bother with a graphics chip then? LOL.

 

That awfully sounds like a driver problem to me. I'd like to see what happens when you install XP, as their are better drivers for it.

 

Yep. And thankfully I only have one more day on this blessed business trip. At least it has given me time to dork around with the laptop and what it can / can't do, at least with Vista.

 

YAY!

I blew away Vista and installed Windows XP Home SP2. Now everything is as smooth as silk. The system boots lightning quick, wireless doesn't drop frequently and engages as soon as system boots (unlike vista which took a few minutes), and games run smooth as silk. Now its running like I would expect.

Damn, wish I had done that sooner. But so far in my experience Windows XP - 2 / Vista - 0. I made the leap of faith when I built my new desktop to install Vista, but ended up going back to XP there too.

So IMHO, Vista is not ready for prime time. Whether it is Vista itself or the drivers or both, it just doesn't give any justification to make the leap just yet.

 

I was encouraged to find your posts and glad that converting from Vista to XP solved the display problem. My situation is almost the same except that I am already using Windows XP and my problems didn't get really bad until I updated the Catalyst video driver on Dec. 24. Then in the event log for ATI I get this repeated error message tied to the file ati2mtag.sys that I have an invalid CRT display type. I am getting crashes and hangs every day now. Was running Google Desktop but uninstalled it after I got a message that it was having problems updating the database. I play Second Life and my view of the world seems to take longer to load than everyone else's who is there with me on different computers.

I know I will eventually get a desktop but can anyone give me ideas in the meantime? Thanks all for helping.

Details -
Acer notebook with an AMD Turion 64 chipset and 2 GB of RAM, with an ATI Radeon Xpress 1100 video card integrated with the motherboard. I am running Windows XP Media Center Edition v5.1 and I just downloaded an update to my ATI video driver on 12/24, after which I started getting crashes, hangs, and errors. The Event Viewer from ATI reports that starting on 12/24 and every day after, source ati2mtag.sys shows an invalid CRT display type. I don't have a monitor connected to my laptop, my screen res is set to 1280 by 800 px, color quality highest (32 bit), DPI setting normal size (96), monitor type is"default monitor", screen refresh is 60 Hz, and hardware acceleration is set to full with write combining enabled.

 

my specs, acer laptop 5100, turion 2.0 gig, radeon xpress 1100 @ 256 mb shared, 1.5 gb ddr2. Ive had the same problem as yours. any game runs well for 40 secs & then gives choppy graphics for 40 secs, the process repeating itself all over again. This was not the problem before when i first bought the laptop. I had lost all hope & regretted buying the laptop after going through all possible forums/helplines. The guys at acer are dumb.
I tried alt-tab and checked all running processes in task manager but all seemed normal. I guessed that minimizing the game relieves its load on the cpu and major processes are shut for the pc to run other applications.
So it was not possible to check the processess running during the game.
Then something struck me. I have a desktop at home. I connected the desktop's monitor to my laptop in extended desktop mode. I first started task manager and pulled it on the desktop monitor. then i started vice city on the laptop screen. It ran well for 40 secs as usual and then stuttered for 40 secs. at the time of stuttering another process started in the task manager. I dont remember the exact name but something like rthda. A wild guess - realtek high definition audio. after 40 secs the 'rthda' process stopped & game returned to normal. So it was the audio driver that was the cause of the laggy performance.
To verify, i uninstalled realtek high definition audio from add/remove programs and disabled the yellow coloured new audio hardware in device manager. Voila - the game played like a breeze (max draw distance & 1280 x 800 32 bit resn) but without sound.
I am now going to download the latest audio driver from realtek & see what happens.
Seems like some part of audio needed to be accessed regularly and the audio driver was not able to cope up with the latest amd/ati driver on my system.
I can now run nfs u2 on 1024x768, c&c generals & fs2004 on ultrahigh with 1280 resn smoothly all without the audio. So now im lookin out for some real good audio driver, will post here as soon as i find one that runs well.
hope this reply has helped people. Bye