Quote from TA;454628:
Reinstalling Windows is a horrible idea. The only time this is a viable option is when things go horribly wrong beyond any possible recovery. Maybe it isn't a "big deal" for you, but for a lot of us it is. I have very particular settings in just about every program I use, and I have a ton of programs. It's hell to have to redo everything. It's been over a month since I had to reinstall my OS and I still don't have everything back to normal, and that's without formatting. Even with old program data, some things are just a pain in the ass.
I find it hilarious that you describe it as horrible. xD Periodic wipes and reinstalls are a good practice. It's not our fault you're so slow and unorganized, to the point where it takes you more than a month to install some programs and re-configure them. Even on my much slower system, the whole process takes me around 2 hours... 3 if I'm lazy. Osayidan's solution is great for simplifying the process, too.
Quote from TA;454628:
It's not gonna be the magical solution you're hyping it to be. If it really is a hardware issue, which it probably is, that's just gonna be one big added "F U" right on top of his problems.
It's a logical procedure, not a magical solution. :P And all steps I mentioned help either improve performance overall, or help with both performance, security, and reliability, in the case of the Windows reinstall. Even if these don't resolve the Vindictus problem, they are beneficial overall. So there's nothing wrong with trying them first, and no "F U"s are involved. Please don't give us advice on how to troubleshoot things. x(
Quote from TA;454628:
And ATI cards do suck. They're cheap for a reason. I'm not gonna give him ****ty advice trying to side step the problem (that won't even work and just cause grief) or crappy hardware just because he doesn't have a whole lot of money to spend.
ATI cards are not cheap. They cost the same and give you more performance. Sometimes they cost less and still give you more performance, because NVIDIA did such a bad job with the Fermi architecture, especially in it's first few revisions. :)
Quote from TA;454628:
If he's having to play on normal to low, even on the previous boats, it's obvious he needs a hardware upgrade. Piling on unneeded junk that won't even be useful in the end isn't really helpful here. Sure, formatting and reinstalling may speed things up for a couple months, but that's it. It's not a long term solution, and he isn't going to magically be able to play on high because of it either.
I don't deny that he'd need an upgrade if he wanted to play on medium or high settings. That's not what he came for help for, though. It was more like, "hey guys vindictus used to work, but now started lagging, y dis happen? halp." Responding to that with a "lol go spend money" without trying to figure out where the problem occurred is pretty bad advice. Updating drivers, or the DX libraries is not "piling on junk". It's called teaching proper system maintenance. And once again, reinstalling Windows helps with more than just performance. It also lasts for far longer than 2 months, unless you're a mess in how you use an maintain your computer.. which seems to be your case.
Quote from TA;454628:
He's gonna have to upgrade his hardware. If he wants to go ATI to save some money, then that's fine. I won't ever tell someone to use an ATI card, but that's their choice I guess. ATI drivers are still horrible, and yes, ATI is horribly inferior to NVidia. They're cheaper because they can't compete. That's why ATI has to make their cards cheaper and target the low end crowd because they can't compete on the high end market with NVidia anymore. They haven't been able to for years now.
Silly miss, your information is outdated by about 4 years. :P If you studied the trends in an unbiased fashion, over the long term, you'd know that the edge NVIDIA had over ATI or ATI has over NVIDIA has been alternating back and forth, on a cycle based on how quick and how well each company can introduce develop and release their next architecture.
It's true that ATI had to compete on price for a while, but they started catching up by the time NVIDIA's GTX 200 series was launched. Granted, the GTX 200 series was still superior at the high-end market at the time, while ATI was doing better in the lower-end market. This quickly changed when NVIDIA had to delay their Fermi launch several times, however.
In the end, not only did NVIDIA delay Fermi (by almost a year or something?), but it also came out as garbage. They were extremely complex GPUs that were difficult to produce, so they all had to be partially disabled when they sold 'em. This resulted in terrible performance at high cost to the consumer. NVIDIA's solution? Overclock them. LOLOL So then they still had mediocre performance compared to ATI, higher cost due to a flawed complex design, and extreme power consumption due to the overclock. They needed huge heat sinks because of this, too, increasing costs further. The result was a product that could barely compete in performance with ATI solutions, but at a much higher cost, and much higher power consumption. If this is what you call "superior NVIDIA quality at a higher price" then I can't help but laugh. xP
Granted, NVIDIA has made significant improvements since then with their GF104 and GF110 chips (which came 5 months late and still produced far from ideal, very expensive results), but ATI hasn't been idle either. It's about 10 months ago, with the GF104 powered GTX 460, that NVIDIA matched ATI in mid-range performance. That card was the first NVIDIA product worth considering in a long time. Later they refined that product with the GF114 chip. The GF114 is what powers your GTX 560 Ti, which is a pretty nice card from a performance standpoint, matching ATI's competing mid-range cards overall. But even then, ATI's products do much better in
power consumption, due to superior
power management. This would lead me to believe that ATI has more room to boost performance through overclocking, if needed to. I really find this to be a lame way to increase performance, however.. which NVIDIA tends to do often. :S
In conclusion, ATI has had a hardware lead on NVIDIA for a while now, and still maintains it.
Where NVIDIA has a lead is on the driver software side. Namely for things like SLI, which scales better than ATI's CrossFire, as well as CUDA support for GPGPU computing (although this advantage will likely shrink due to OpenCL) and PhysX. PhysX is nice if you play games that make use of this library and your CPU is a low-end one. CUDA is not useful to most people. And the SLI advantage is only good for people who want a multi-GPU setup.
But even with these advantages, it does not make ATI's drivers crap. For instance, ATI's stream does a better job at video transcoding than NVIDIA'S CUDA (and Intel's QuickSync is even better--much better). And as far as typical gaming use, those features are pretty much unused anyway. NVIDIA drivers used to have better games support, but this is not the case anymore. Some game devs optimize their games for NVIDIA drivers, others optimize for ATI. Crysis runs better on ATI, while Civ 5 runs better on NVIDIA, for example. (Source, which Vindictus uses, appears to be optimized for ATI).
So... yeah. Don't be so obnoxious about it. xd
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Anyway...
Quote from Micho;455273:
I'll follow Yoorah's step's 1 to 3, I'll see how it goes, I am not allowed to format and reinstall Windows though, mother does not approve. Also here are my new questions:
1) How do you uninstall the old drivers if I'm installing a new one? Which one should I download? Also, do I uninstall NVIDIA PhysX? That's the only program I see that comes close to being the old driver.
2) There are a bunch of options for Multicore Settings which one should I choose? Min Power, Safe Mode, or Max Speed?
Sorry if the questions are a bit redundant.
Too bad you're not allowed to format, but at least you tried. :P
1) You uninstall the "ATI Catalyst Install Manager" or what Ampersand suggested. I'm not sure what they were called in older versions and I don't have access to my home computer atm. :( It should be something ATI-related. If it's not in the Control Panel's Add/Rmove programs list, then uninstalling the driver will become a bit more complex. I've heard that
Driver Sweeper works well, but I've never tried it myself.
You do not need to uninstall PhysX.
2) I put mine on Safe Mode, but you can try Max Speed, since you have 4 cores.