InC's TC: Extreme video problems

[InCreator]

Well, yeah.
I got this crappy GF 5700LE card.
Well, it works, and I can get most out from games, since it's 128MB card and my system is not the worst neither...
But!

There's damned weird thing: In some cases and places, everything is EXTREMELY slow and laggy. Cases are:

* The main menu screen in Rise of Nations - There's some background picture/animation/intro with people fighting and stuff. Well, with old Riva TNT2 card, it moved smoothly, but now... 5 spf.... no, I didn't make a term mistake -  it's a 5 seconds per frame. I'm unable to move mouse correctly over menu items, I can't click them correctly, everything feels like I'm trying this on ancient 286.
Yet, the game itsself runs at all high display options and stuff and super fine. It's just the main menu that my card doesn't like.

* Main menu screen in Empire Earth 2 - There, ANY kind of clicking and selecting is absolutely impossible. I wasted 20 minutes and finally got to start new game, which itself ran very well, once again. Mouse cursor is frozen! Interesting fact that music plays very fine in the background, it isn't CPU lag... But in main menu... huh. I move mouse, wait 15 seconds and then the cursor finally jumps 100 pixels away. Then I try to move it again, wait, it makes jump, etc.

* The main menu comes up extremely slowly in numerous other games, such as Delta Force BHD. It seems like the problem relies not in menu itself: These main menu screens have always some big image for background and that's what loads so long. In some games, all kind of boundary images, menus, etc come up instantly, but this stupid image stays black for awhile.

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And I'm absolutely positive that games aren't damaged or just in need of need reinstall. They ran well with much older and shittier card...

Of course I have latest patches to these games installed, DirectX (9.0c), Latest NVidia drivers. I even tried to downgrade drivers, because I've heard that it's advisable to use latest drivers with card's serial number, like 56.xx for 5700 card and so on. Tried reinstalling DirectX, everything!

This didn't help a bit - instead, some games that didn't have problems started to fool around aswell.

Everything else works fine! CPU runs fine at 1,8GHz, I have 512 megs of ram and there's no problems neither with modern 3D games that kick hell out from video card or applications. But just... some... games...

This is sooo bad. I paid for card and for game and can't use neither correctly.

Any ideas? Similar problems? Advice? Explanation?

[Ishmael]

For me, Jedi Academy's main menu and all videos ran very slowly, about 5spf, but after I had upgraded, downgraded, upgraded, restored, downgraded, upgraded, restored etc. for a number of times, it suddenly ran very smoothly. I'm not sure which drivers I have, but card is a NVidia Geforce4 Go 420, to which the newest NVidia driver pack even doesn't have drivers -_-

Try finding a driver pack with a few versions higher than the version the games require...

[InCreator]

I very much sounds like driver problem.

I tried the original drivers which came with card...
They installed fine, but It feels like I have 2 sets of drivers for card now, ones from CD and these ones I downloaded from NVidia too...

Is there some way to un-install NVidia drivers?

[Ishmael]

In XP, I think there is a "remove" option in the device properties -> driver panel...

[InCreator]

Thanks.
I got rid of the problem myself, though.

Yes, it was driver problem.
But no, not the video drivers.

Too old NVidia nforce2 motherboard drivers caused the problem, so I updated them.
Quite a surprise-attack, I couldn't even guess such thing, so I just got lucky.
Pity I didn't buy a lottery ticket yesterday...

But machine is about 2x faster now. And this rocks.