DDRAW vs D3D Poll - Issues with cropped bezels & vector games

[cmoses]

I recently had some issues with a few "higher" end games Shuffleshot and World Class Bowling Deluxe.  The games would start and then have issues, slowness, sound problems, etc.  I did some searching on here and it seems that the preference for video display mode is DDRAW.  I made the change in my mame.ini but really haven't seen a difference in performance on those games.  I am using a Wells Gardner D9200 monitor and a Nvidia graphics card, but it does not run Soft15 so I am always running at 640 x 480 resolution. 

I did notice some other things that changed when I went to DDRAW.  I was using cropped bezels on vertical games to help fill in the "black bars" on the sides.  When I switched the bezels went away.  I could only use them if I was in "Full" mode. 

I also noticed that DDRAW was not good for my vector games.  Asteroids, Asteroids Deluxe, Space Duel, etc, all started to have issues when I switched to DDRAW.  There was sound issues, pausing, stuttering, etc. 

So I have changed my mame.ini back to D3D.  I did not see any performance gains, I missed having the cropped bezels and want to play vectors.  I may change a individual game to DDRAW to test for better performance, but in general D3D seems better.  I have considered giving a ArcadeVGA card a try at some point and try running at authentic resolutions and may need to go the DDRAW route then.

Have others experienced the same issues?  What are most people using?

[Ginsu Victim]

D3D has always given me the best results. AMD dual 2 ghz with 2 GB RAM, 19" PC CRT, and a PCI ATI card (64 MB).

[cmoses]

Forgot to add my system specs

Intel Pentium 4D 2.8 GHz
2GB RAM
Nvidia 9600GT PCI-E 512MB
Windows XP SP3 - non necessary services turned off
MAMEUI 0.127 compiled

[Ginsu Victim]

Intel Pentium 4D 2.8MHz

Found your problem. 

[Hoopz]

What other "stuff" is running on the pc?  Anti-virus software etc?  That may have some affect on it also.  I was running a slower system across the board than yours and didn't have any issues.

[cmoses]

Intel Pentium 4D 2.8MHz

Found your problem. 

Yeah, that would be an issue.  Changed it to GHz in the original post.

It is a very clean system, only have 16 processes or so running, removed all the non necessary services per a post I found on here.  No antivirus, no windows update, etc.

Any chance its all the USB devices?  I have (2) U360 joysticks, the Mini-Pac, GGG Electric Ice Trackball and Wireless Mouse/Keyboard, all of which are USB.  I wouldn't think this would be an issue.