Poor windows performance when alt-tab a game?

Lyon85 · 13 May 2007 at 09:21

On my old system (6800GS, AMD Athlon 64 3200+, 2Gb Ram) I used to be able to alt-tab games and use windows with very little performance loss. On my new system, when I alt tab I get horrible jerky performance. It has nothing to do with how quickly apps open, but say I'm in firefox and I use the scroll bar down a page, I get what looks like 2fps.

Does anyone else get this? Is there any software tweaks I can do to get similar performance to my old rig?

Thanks in advance

Lyon85 · 13 May 2007 at 09:32

That probabaly makes sense, but I'm more interested in an explanation as to why it does it in the first place, when my previous inferior machine had no trouble at all.

I'l give it a try anyway, thanks.

Lyon85 · 13 May 2007 at 12:07

Nope, WinXP SP2 (32bit). Same as my old rig.

Lyon85 · 13 May 2007 at 12:27

Yeah I'm on ATI X1900 XT, C2D E6300 @ 3Ghz, 2gb RAM (all in sig).

So far it happens with every game I have tested.

Jokester, when you say a few seconds, does it return to normal performance after that period?

My alt-tab is instant, I can get into Windows in about a second, but the performance remains consistantly low while I am in windows.

Lyon85 · 13 May 2007 at 14:53

I thought I might be better off showing you guys. I've just realised though that it actually isn't all games. I just alt-tabbed Splinter Cell Double Agent and it was fine from the moment it minimised.

Most games though, like BF2 do it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78sy9uOHIFc

Lyon85 · 13 May 2007 at 14:59

The Halk said:
To be honest I'd worry more about your aim than anything else. You wasted loads of ammo there and hit nothing!

Left hand!

Lyon85 · 13 May 2007 at 15:02

Jokester said:
That reminds me of Windows performance when you've using the default VGA drivers when you first do an install. Did this system previously have a Nvidia card in it, or was it a clean install with only ATI drivers installed?

Jokester

Yeah it does look like that, I should have used that comparison. This ATI is the only card that has ever touched this mobo though.

Lyon85 · 13 May 2007 at 17:35

The Halk said:
Does no harm to uninstall the drivers, boot to safe mode and driverclean them away.

When you get back to normal windows reinstall them.

Probably won't solve it, but it's quick and easy.

I probably should anyway, I haven't used driverclean on this install of XP yet.

I guess it's no huge problem, I'm getting "a good few frames" in game