New monitors, new video card, slow scrolling

[mugs]

I just bought two 20" widescreen LCDs (1680x1050) and a Radeon X1650 PRO. When I scroll through a long page in Firefox or IE by dragging the scrollbar (i.e. when I try to scroll quickly) it stutters - it'll scroll partway, then the screen will freeze for a second before scrolling the rest of the way down. Is this video card insufficient to handle two monitors @ 1680x1050?

This is a fresh install of Windows Vista Business. I've pretty much only installed Firefox and drivers.

 

[xtknight]

It's probably a CPU/OS thing (images or Flash are loading into memory as you scroll), unless this happens in other text applications as well. Adjusting "smooth scrolling" options in IE/FF may help. It could be a video driver problem. I usually have these problems until I update the video drivers but it sounds like you've done that already.

There is nothing that indicates to me that your X1650 PRO should not be able to handle two LCDs. Is your video card a dual DVI or a DVI-I+VGA? In my experience dual DVI ones are able to deliver better bandwidth. However, symptoms of bandwidth starvation tend to be flickering or static on DVI (and blurriness/ghosting on VGA).

 

[mpilchfamily]

So 2 monitors at such a high resolution wouldn't be a burden to that video card? It would seam to me like the card would be taxed a little bit from all of that.

Have you tried with only one monitor hooked up to see if you get the same problem. At least then you could rule out any suspicion of the 2 monitors being too much for the card.

 

[mugs]

It is a dual DVI card.
Turning on smooth scrolling did not help.

I'm thinking it probably is a CPU thing. I assumed it was related to the video card at first because this started happening when I got the new card and the new monitors. Now I'm starting to notice the stuttering happening at other random times - when I'm just moving my mouse around the screen will freeze briefly. This isn't a really old/slow system though - Core Duo 2.67 GHz, 4 GB of RAM (of which the system only recognizes 3.25 GB). I had been watching the performance monitor in task manager when this started happening, and I did notice that CPU utilization would usually jump when the stuttering occurred - but usually not to 100% (of 1 core). Usually more like 50% (of 1 core). Now I just looked again and Firefox is running consistently at 25-30% (of total CPU utilization, so 50-60% of 1 core). That shouldn't be like that. I have 1 window open with about 8 Anandtech forums tabs. That's it. I closed Firefox entirely and started it up again, and before too long the CPU utilization had jumped to a consistent 30% again. The thing is though, I've verified that the stuttering happens in IE when Firefox is not running.

 

[mugs]

Weird - as soon as I posted that last post and closed this tab, Firefox's CPU utilization went back down to ~0%. I'm going to have to keep an eye on that and figure out why it's jumping. BUT the freezing while scrolling still happened when the CPU utilization was low, and I didn't see any other processes jump at the same time. Is there a program that will plot the CPU utilization of every process that is running over time? Vista's Resource Monitor will show me average CPU utilization - that might help, but I think I'm looking for something that is peaking, so it might not have a relatively high average CPU utilization.

 

[xtknight]

WinXP has perfmon.msc (Performance Monitor). I thought you could track a specific process with that and maybe Vista has it in admin tools also.

 

[n7]

I have no suggestions for fixes, sorry, but i will say that is not normal.

You should have no trouble handling dual displays with that card.

 

[mpilchfamily]

I highly doubt the CPU is to blaim. When you installed the card did you completely remove the old video drivers before installing the latest drivers for the card?

 

[mugs]

Originally posted by: mpilchfamily
I highly doubt the CPU is to blaim. When you installed the card did you completely remove the old video drivers before installing the latest drivers for the card?

Fresh install of Vista, so yes.

The card arrived a few days after the monitors, so I had been running the same setup on a Geforce 7300GS and had the same issues. But like I said, I did a fresh install of Vista.

 

[mpilchfamily]

So you downloaded the latest Drivers from ATI/AMD's web site and istalled them right? Or are you running off the drivers that Vista decided would work best for the card?

 

[mugs]

Originally posted by: mpilchfamily
So you downloaded the latest Drivers from ATI/AMD's web site and istalled them right? Or are you running off the drivers that Vista decided would work best for the card?

Yes, I downloaded the driver from here: http://ati.amd.com/support/dri...32/common-vista32.html

 

[lament]

doesn't Vista do some indexing when first installed? Try turning it off.

I lasted about 6 hours on Vista, then went back to XP after it cut my FPS in half when gaming.

 

[mugs]

Originally posted by: lament
doesn't Vista do some indexing when first installed? Try turning it off.

I lasted about 6 hours on Vista, then went back to XP after it cut my FPS in half when gaming.

Not a bad theory... although this issue also happened prior to reformatting/reinstalling Vista. I'll give that a try.

I'm seriously considering going back to XP too. So far I haven't seen a whole lot of benefits of Vista. The search feature is nice, and the filtering of files in a directory based on any of the categories in the detailed view is really nice, but other than that I can't think of anything I really like about it. If I didn't get it for free I never would have upgraded.

 

[lament]

well you can always dual boot.. install XP first, create a new Vista partition.. get everything up and running on XP, format that other partition, then install Vista.

 

[cruse]

Originally posted by: mugs

I'm seriously considering going back to XP too.

Don't!!! I have exactly the same problems on XP, similar configuration dual DVI Radeon 2600 XT and 22" Widescreen with 1680x1050 resolution.

I think it's the gfx card driver, i used the onboard graphics with the same monitor before, without any problems.