System slowdown with Radeon 9550

[Justin Z]

Hi all,

I am re-outfitting, if you will, the machine that I originally used to run MAME about three years back when I was new to the hobby and had just bought a control panel.  Well now I'm about to start work on a full cab and decided, based on what I read on the forum, to switch out the video card and do the ATI component dongle trick.

I received the Radeon 9550 yesterday and hooked up the dongle to it, then the component cables to my Toshiba 27A34.  Set the resolution to 640x432 to prevent overscan, then loaded up Missile Command for an example of horizontal and Ms. Pac for vertical -- both looked excellent.

I noticed when I loaded up Football Champ, however, that I was skipping frames, something which I had never encountered while running it with the old card, a Radeon 9200 and S-Video.  After digging around a bit, I realized that when I checked the performance tab on the Task Manager that CPU Usage was hovering around 70% with no programs loaded!  Stranger still, nothing in the Processes tab on Task Manager showed any activity at all, except System Idle which was at 99.

So I can only imagine that for some reason the Radeon 9550 is pulling 70% of the CPU power.  The CPU, incidentally, is a first generation P4 2.8GHz, one of the lower end ones.  Also have 256MB of PC2100 installed, which I would hope wouldn't be a problem because I'm using TinyXP.

Just thought I'd check and see if anyone had similar problems and a solution in mind.  Thanks in advance!

~Justin

[ahofle]

I realized that when I checked the performance tab on the Task Manager that CPU Usage was hovering around 70% with no programs loaded!  Stranger still, nothing in the Processes tab on Task Manager showed any activity at all, except System Idle which was at 99.

Hmm I'm not sure how that is possible.  Was MAME running when you saw the 70% CPU usage?  The CPU usage percentage is supposedly just a sum of all the processes' CPU usage minus the System Idle process.

Do you know what resolution you used to run Football Champ at before the card upgrade?  If it was a lower res, then that could explain the performance degradation (the higher the game resolution, the slower it runs in MAME).  You may get more answers for this in the software forum FYI.

[TOK]

I'm running a similar setup to yours... Toshiba 27AF42 (27" flat screen CRT) with 9550 and component dongle.
My PC is a 2ghz Athlon XP. Didn't notice any performance disparity between when I set up the machine on a PC monitor with VGA to when I went to the TV, so unless there is a physical problem with your card, I don't think it has to do with the component connection.

The first thing I'd be wondering is if you have a conflict with the old video drivers.

[Justin Z]

Hmm I'm not sure how that is possible.  Was MAME running when you saw the 70% CPU usage?  The CPU usage percentage is supposedly just a sum of all the processes' CPU usage minus the System Idle process.

I thought the same thing!   It was bizarre.  But no, to answer your question, I rebooted the PC just to make sure and immediately upon its loading to the desktop I checked task manager and sure enough, it was floating around 70%.

Do you know what resolution you used to run Football Champ at before the card upgrade?  If it was a lower res, then that could explain the performance degradation (the higher the game resolution, the slower it runs in MAME).  You may get more answers for this in the software forum FYI.

I am not absolutely positive, but I believe I was running MAME at 640x480 on the old setup and now it's at 640x432.  From what I can tell, though, the frameskip is just a symptom; since something else seems to be eating 70% of my processor, I don't think MAME is the problem.

I appreciate the tip and will definitely repost this in the software forum when I get home from the office.

The first thing I'd be wondering is if you have a conflict with the old video drivers.

Well I'm glad to know the setup may end up working well.  Although I don't think I have an old driver conflict, I will check.  I also used the OEM CD to install drivers last time, so I'm just going to completely clear everything out and reinstall with the drivers from ATI's site.  Hopefully that'll bear some fruit.

Thanks for your thoughts, guys.

[Silver]

If task manager is showing 70% CPU utilization, there WILL be a process listed in the processes tab that is using that much (or several processes adding up to that).

Boot PC, run task manager, then look at processes, then click on 'CPU' to order by that list (perhaps click twice to order so its top usage at the top). This list will update and reorder in realtime, showing you whats chomping on your system.

Sounds like a hung driver/spyware.

[Justin Z]

If task manager is showing 70% CPU utilization, there WILL be a process listed in the processes tab that is using that much (or several processes adding up to that).

Sounds like a hung driver/spyware.

Thanks for the suggestion, but as it turns out, I have just figured out the problem, and believe it or not, it was not a process utilizing the CPU usage.

Somehow when I installed the Radeon in the AGP slot I didn't quite get it down all the way into the slot.  I was going to take the card out and test my CPU usage using the onboard video but when I went to reach for the card I nudged it and it seemed to slide down into place a bit tighter.  Thinking to myself, "No, it couldn't be," I powered the computer back up anyway, and sure enough, CPU usage is now at 0% after Windows loads.

I have no idea how in the world the card and the motherboard could've interacted while only partially connected to produce this 70% CPU usage phenomenon, but they did.  Computers are funny things.

~Justin