Stuttering on dual cores? (worse in Vista)

[rhaenaan]

I'm having a problem since I upgraded to dual cores. Under XP SP2, I just get a lot of "Please Waits" and the occassional 1/4-1/2 second pause every few minutes. It's not a network issue, since the single-core machine right next to me doesn't experience the issues. Also, if I disable the second core, the problems go away.

It was a minor annoyance under XP. But, under Vista, it's a serious problem. The pauses are 1/2-3 seconds and they occur every 15-30 seconds.

I've turned down all of the graphics settings to the bare minimum and it doesn't appear to make any difference.

Power management is completely disabled (no cool'n'quiet or other nonsense). Not overclocked. 2GB of physical dual-channel RAM. Paging file on a nice fast drive. Nothing else runnning other than Windows itself. I've tried the Ryzom client bound to either core and there's no difference.

It looks like some sort of interrupt issue. But there are also no irq conflicts and I've tried removing/disabling all non-essential hardware to debug the problem.

Athlon 4400 X2
2GB Dual Channel DDR
eVGA 8800 GTS video

Any suggestions? (no...running out and buying a quad-core Intel MB is *not* a viable suggestion

Oh....and avoiding Vista for a while is viable, but since the problem exists (to a lesser degree) in XP, I want to get to the root of it. I multiboot right now, so I'm not completely dead in the water. It's just bugging me that I can't seem to get any traction on the problem.

[rushin]

give this a go
[EDIT] sorry that was link for FX cpus, this is for X-2 (although i have a feeling its the same app)

micro$oft also have a solution (for xp at least, havent looked for vista), although i just used the amd thingie and things seem fine

[Phelan]

just read that Vista has serious problems with nvidia.. guess that is the source of your problems.

[eadwig1]

nvidia is aware of the problem. The article concludes with the opinion that gamers should
hold off on Vista until more stable drivers are released.

____________
Gilmar

[amitst]

this may sound noobish, but have you tried moving the ryzom process to the second core?
one of my computers pauses for half a second when i open the map, someone else i know pauses for a few seconds whenever they get a tell.... such randomness

[rhaenaan]

Thanks for the suggestions, folks.

Yup...tried binding to both and either core. Not having a whole lot of success. It does look like it's related to the Nvidia drivers though. From what I can see, it's video and directx drivers jumping across processors that's causing the issues. Unfortunately, I can't see any way to bind them to a single core apart from disabling one core altogether.

I'll keep at it for awhile. But I think that I'm likely going to hop back to XP for the short term.