T400 with Discrete, lag in CS:S

I did a clean install of Vista 32bit and tried playing CS:S. My settings are 1440x900 res, 4xAA, High everything. The weird thing is, I get good framerate, around 40-50. But about every 5 secs or so, the game would just skip a couple frames. I reinstalled the ATI drivers from the ATI website, but no fix. I tried lowering the resolution and AA but its still the same issue. I really hope it's either a Vista problem or driver issue, not hardware problem. I normally turn off switchable gfx and just switch in the bios.

Does anyone have suggestions to a fix?

 

Is it in Open Gl in the ingame settings?

 

No, directx 9.0

 

Well, my first impression is that it's probably not a graphics card issue.

If it's something thats being done periodically... make sure that there isn't something running in the background that could be affecting anything. Did you install an antivirus with your clean install? That'd be something to look for.

Also, make sure your hard drive is defragged. It's possible that it's searching for files every 5 seconds or so and then, because the files are fragmented, it could just take extra time to do it.

Finally, look around in the catalyst driver and see if you can find a "triple buffering" option... sometimes playing with that can help with issues like that.

http://www.tweakguides.com/ATICAT_8.html <-- Look there for some tweaking info

 

Hello,

I would suggest to check the temperature.

Regards
Andreas

 

Zshazz, thanks for your suggestion, but I can't seem to find the option. And I'm using directx, so I don't think it'll matter.

The temperature should be fine. The max temp for CPU is 63C while max for GPU is 60C. I dont think that is a problem.

 

Oh, I don't think Source games can be switched to OpenGL. The engine is only strictly Direct3D.

 

did u defrag the game files? u can do that from within steam.

 

I also think its a background program. Windows update, or antivirus, or maybe your disk is writing something. (recovery and backup data). You're best bet is to test programs, and shut them off and then test the game, and then shut something else off...etc. Untill you find the culprit. Probably some kind of update-software.

 

possibly a dynamic power management problem.

M8x graphics cards have this enabled to save power. clocks will going up and down base on gpu activity. Maybe find some utilities to monitor ur gpu clock.
m82xt in particular uses 110MHz , 300MHz, and 680MHz gpu core clock depending on the gpu activity.

I suspect you may be toggling between 300 and 680.

 

I disabled a lot of background services and made it so the CPU does not change clock speed and it seems to be better now, skips are farther between now. It is at least playable during firefights. Thanks everyone.