Ridiculous video card lag

Evil Multifarious

I have an ATI Radeon 4800 series, and lately it's been giving me tons of shit. When there is nothing running besides Firefox, clicking on a tab takes about half a second to register. When I maximize the Steam window, the whole display slows down and I get a slideshow for about ten seconds. Right now, as I'm typing, there is lag in displaying the characters I input.

So I check the ATI Overdrive utility, and it shows the "Activity" percentage shooting up enormously whenever I do anything involving moving windows, let alone playing games - it should normally be at 0% when nothing graphically intensive is happening, but it will shoot up as high as 99% and the computer will immediately go to three or four frames per second just with a browser or even Explorer. Sometimes the problem goes away for a while, but it always comes back, and right now it's being really persistent and making me really fucking angry.

This is not an issue with my computer's other guts, as far as I can tell, because I have a pretty meaty system, and this problem pops up for other people. Supposedly the 11.4 driver update fixed this problem, but I just installed the newest drivers (11.7) and the problem remains. Earlier I was playing the Bulletstorm demo and it was fine, until all of a sudden it dropped to 2 fps and never recovered.

One of the solutions that was proposed was to disable the HD audio devices in the device manager (one of two). I tried this and it worked initially, but now it has no effect.

I can barely use my fucking computer because of this and it is driving me crazy. Help?

Nylonathetep

The only options I got for you right now is to update your driver.

Check this link for details.

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=344093

Great Scott

This happened to me with a perfectly well working GeForce 8800GTX. It turned out to not be heat (as I suspected) but a dying/failing card. One way you can check this: use the Catalyst tool to underclock the video card by 50% or so. See if the behavior changes.

Evil Multifarious

@Nylonathetep I updated my drivers and it had no effect, unfortunately.

@Great_Scott really? ugggghhhhh, if my card dies that is a lot of money for a pretty low lifespan (I've only had this computer for like...two or three years? if that). What should I be looking for when I underclock the card - what behaviour change would indicate that my card is failing?

AgentBryant

I would think that if heat were a problem, the card would throttle down gpu clock speed. I would look into gpu temperatures if only to eliminate the case.

Skeezicks

Is anything hogging the cpu? Open up the task manager (ctrl+alt+Esc) and check off "Show processes from all users". Take note if anything is using a lot of the cpu.

Have you run a virus scan yet?

If you're comfortable enough, open up your computer case and have a look at the components inside. Does the motherboard or video card or anything else have leaking or bulging capacitors? See pics.

Also, while you're in there, make sure that the video card fan is turning.

As far as temperature goes, you're probably okay if your card is running idle at around 50C. ATI cards are build to handle temperatures up to 100C.

Evil Multifarious

I used to have a video card that went up to 110 C when I played GPU-intensive games and eventually caused my computer to mildly explode, so I definitely checked the temperature. It's usually idling around 60 to 70, which is a bit high, but is apparently not uncommon?

The fan speed shows up in ATI Overdrive as well, which is the monitoring/overclocking utility that comes with Catalyst. The fan does seem to be working, although I should open up the case and give it a really good dust-removal job just in case.

I run virus scans fairly regularly, and they haven't shown anything since this problem began. I've also checked for CPU-intensive processes - even googling some of the ones i don't recognize - and nothing out of the ordinary seems to be going on. Is there any utility that can measure GPU usage in a similar fashion, process-by-process?

If I open it up to clean it out, I'll take a look at the capacitors as well.

Thanks for the responses, guys. The problem didn't manifest yesterday, but as I said, it comes and goes intermittently. I'm considering just formatting soon, anyways, and if that doesn't work I'll know it's a bona fide hardware problem, I guess.

Soggybiscuit

Evil Multifarious wrote:

I used to have a video card that went up to 110 C when I played GPU-intensive games and eventually caused my computer to mildly explode, so I definitely checked the temperature. It's usually idling around 60 to 70, which is a bit high, but is apparently not uncommon?

The fan speed shows up in ATI Overdrive as well, which is the monitoring/overclocking utility that comes with Catalyst. The fan does seem to be working, although I should open up the case and give it a really good dust-removal job just in case.

I run virus scans fairly regularly, and they haven't shown anything since this problem began. I've also checked for CPU-intensive processes - even googling some of the ones i don't recognize - and nothing out of the ordinary seems to be going on. Is there any utility that can measure GPU usage in a similar fashion, process-by-process?

If I open it up to clean it out, I'll take a look at the capacitors as well.

Thanks for the responses, guys. The problem didn't manifest yesterday, but as I said, it comes and goes intermittently. I'm considering just formatting soon, anyways, and if that doesn't work I'll know it's a bona fide hardware problem, I guess.

60-70 is pretty high for a 4800 series card. I think my old one idled around the mid-40's. Definitely clean the card and the case.

Essee

Yeah, since you say you think it needs a good cleaning, it probably does. Grab a can of compressed air and go to town. Even if it doesn't fix the problem, it can't hurt and might still help a little, especially since it's summer so the ambient temperature is probably making your computer a little more unhappy. And yeah, IDLING around 60-70 doesn't sound very good. My laptop has a Mobility Radeon HD 4650, and having just had WoW up for a few minutes and then alt-tabbing out to check, I was still only at 65 myself. Having it minimized in the background for a bit (so still running, but at a very low framerate) I'm only at 54. Granted, it's a laptop card, so it probably puts out less heat/oomph, and it's a bit weaker than yours even if it weren't a laptop card, but I think you can probably do better than the temps you've got right now.