NVIDIA 6800 Troubleshooting

[G.I.R.]

So I've been trying to help my friend resolve a problem he's had with his video card regarding Source games and several other games. Whenever he looks around in source, the frame rate drops extremely low, but when he leaves the mouse alone, it's fine; keyboard commands work without dropping the frame rate. Last night I tried a number of fixes, none of which worked.

I've had him try the following:

• Disable/Enable VSYNC
• Increase heapsize to 512MB
• Run in DirectX 7.0
• "fps_ max" in Source game console.
• Manual configuaration of screen resolution for Source games (-width #, -height #)
• The obligable "update ur driverz d00d"

I had him collect some relevant information in case it's needed and I'll post it here, if anyone can help out, I would love you. I want to be able to play Gmod10 and other Source games with him, but he hasn't been able to because of this.

[quote="Andrew (My friend)"]
System Information:

Dell XPS Gen 5
Has had a RAM upgrade, 1 GB to 2 GB, and an additional HDD put in, 300 gb.
NVIDIA 6800

Video Card Driver: ForceWare Version 169.21

The Problem:
The problem only occurs when I am in games that use Source, GoldSource, Flash, or games such as Warcraft 3, Starcraft, Rome Total War, Aliens versus Predator 2, Call of Duty, and Flight Simulator 10. Whenever I move the mouse, to make my character look or to select troops, or even to select options in the main menu, the frame rate plummets and the sound gets choppy. When I stop moving the mouse, the frame rate goes back up, and the sound clears up. When I use keyboard based commands, moving or what have you, I have no such problems. And these problems only occur in certain games; Civilization 4, Battlefield 2, Halo, and American McGee's Alice run perfectly. This problem has been more than annoying, I bought The Orange Box for my Xbox 360, instead of the PC, for $10 more just so it would be playable.

The (attempted) Solutions:
I've updated the nVidia drivers more times than I can remember. I've gone into Half-Life 2, in a feeble attempt, and swept the video settings from bare minimum to all the way up, and practically everything in between. And I've swept the video settings in all of the other games that won't work. I've taken out the card and cleaned the contacts, I've gone into the nVidia control panel and fiddled with the settings, I've tried two different monitors, and two different mice. I haven't tried source games on my laptop--it probably couldn't handle them anyway

[galvination]

I'm not very smart in terms of computers but could it be the cards version of pixel shader IE 1.0?

[G.I.R.]

I'm not very smart in terms of computers but could it be the cards version of pixel shader IE 1.0?

I doubt it since I have a card older than his and mine works fine. (GeForce 5500)

[G.I.R.]

Well, bump for the hell of it, I guess.

[Evan]

You might try installing the newest version of DirectX

[G.I.R.]

You might try installing the newest version of DirectX

Way to read the first post.

[Evan]

Guess I didn't see that.

[[cc]z@nd!]

whenever things run slowly for seemingly no reason and the standard fixes won't work, i suggest scanning for viruses/spyware. it's possible that he's got some cpu-intensive things on there he doesn't know about, which could cause the lag, but if other games such as oblivion or BF2 run fine, then that can't be it.

[shadowkhas]

Run a spyware/virus check anyway just to be certain, and maybe update mouse drivers, if you haven't done those already. It might be just some odd mix of hardware and software, too. Unplug/quit everything and start from basics and move your way up until something causes the problem.