Screen Lag help

[Leonthefixer]

Hi,

I am trying to get to the bottom of a problem that I think is affecting the performance of TT on my PC.

When the market is moving very quickly, say inplay I sometimes get what seems to be a lag.

I have attached a screen grab from my PC which shows one issue I get from time to time when moving windows around my PC. You get a kind of 'ghosting'. So in the image below I have been moving the Calculator around quite quickly and it leaves numerous outlines of the calculator on the screen.

These outlines remain until I move something over them. for example minimize and then maximise a window and they will vanish.

Can any one help as to what is causing this? I was guessing it is caused by a lack of power in the graphics cards perhaps - but I am no expert.

P.S. The big black blocks in the image are just blanking out some information I had on screen and are not part of the problem.

TIA.

[nigelbleddfa]

It looks similar to a problem that most of us get when we try to access a very big web page too quickly. I think the problem lies in the speed of your machine or/and the memory. It seems that you are asking your machine to do too much. When you give it time, your problem disappears.

I have never had a similar problem and I've used The Toy on all sorts of laptops. Currently, I use it on a small Medion notebook which has an Intel Atom processor and this is about as "minimalist" as a pc can get.

[kawasaki]

i have similar thing when i open many programs at once, like firefox with several flash/java heavy tabs+excel+video etc, but my pc is old one so i know what is problem and i have no complaints about it seems your machine needs more computing power, maybe more memory or faster cpu, i doubt if graphics card is big issue here, i think more graphics you need when there are heavy video involved like games or movies, but i am no haxor too, so dont bet on mine advice too:Thumbs

[1/4 of a millionaire fund]

Does look like a memory problem, what amount of RAM have you installed on the PC

[Leonthefixer]

Cheers for all the replies guys, sorry for not getting back sooner but have been enjoying a racing free afternoon

I am running the following:

2 x 19" Screens @ 1280 x 1024 connected using VGA, 1 via a VGA port and the other using the DVI port with a DVI to VGA converter

2 x 23" Screens @ 1152 x 2048 connected using VGA, 1 via a VGA port and the other using the DVI port with a DVI to VGA converter

I have it so one 19" screen and one 23" screen comes out of each graphics card with the bigger screen on the DVI slot using the DVI to VGA converter

CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 2.40 GHz

Ram: 4GB Dual-Channel DDR2 @ 333MHz

EDIT: The Ram is 4 sticks of 1GB

Motherboard: ASUSTeK Computer INC. P5N-E SLI

Graphics Cards: 2 x ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO (CrossFire Disabled) 512MB Adapter RAM

Hard Drive: 1465GB NVIDIA STRIPE 1.36T (Raid)

I can get the lag even when I only have one window open but in those cases the outline of the window doesn't remain on the screen as per the earlier image. It happens on any of the 4 screens.

One issue I have been seeing when using The Toy is say in an inplay horse racing market when I have the ladders covering both of the 23" Screens and the Main Info Bar and Grid on one of the 19" with the other 19" screen blank, the problem is that I submit a bet and it seems to take a few seconds before I get the 1 second countdown. This doesn't happen all of the time though, it seems to be when the market is very lively. It isn't an issue with the API response times as they are remaining below 100ms. It is like the PC or software is taking a few seconds to realise I have clicked then it catches up and submits the bet and then I get the 1 second countdown.

Any help/advice is most welcome as I am a bit clueless when it comes to all this and it is starting to get really annoying and also I am keen to replace the two 19" screens with two more of the 23" screens.

[nigelbleddfa]

You seem to have almost as many screens as the Peckham Multiplex cinema. Do you have the "ghost" when you have only one monitor working ?
You must get through a hell of a lot of popcorn if you trade afternoon and evening horse racing.

[flok]

i had this problem (very rarely) when using vector-graphic software (adobe illustrator etc)

did you try to update video drivers and directX?

[Leonthefixer]

Not updated the Video Drivers or DirectX - will give that a go.

Just chatting to someone and they said that the RAM could be acting as a bottle neck with it being 4 sticks of 1GB @ 333MHz

[Leonthefixer]

You seem to have almost as many screens as the Peckham Multiplex cinema. Do you have the "ghost" when you have only one monitor working ?
You must get through a hell of a lot of popcorn if you trade afternoon and evening horse racing.

I haven't tried unconnecting 3 screens thus leaving one connected, I will try it in a bit. I have tried it turning 3 off at the power but I assume the PC is still out putting to them despite them not being displayed.

I keep my local supermarket running just on my popcorn purchasing

[Leonthefixer]

Some screen grabs of the spec.

[Leonthefixer]

And one more:

[Leonthefixer]

All drivers updated and already had version 10 of DirectX but still got the lag

Would it be worth upgrading the RAM to something like this:

http://www.microdirect.co.uk/Home/Product/46031/Kingston-memory-Hyper-X-4GB-1066MHz-DDR2-Non-ECC

Any other views/ideas?

[Leonthefixer]

Well I have solved the screen lag thanks to this thread:

http://www.newtek.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3097

I went into:

Control Panel>Personalization>Window Colour and Appearance>Effects>Unchecked, Show window contents while dragging.

I now just get a dotted outline of a window when I move windows around my screen rather than being able to see the windows contents. Though this does feel like taking a pain killer - I haven't really identified the bottle neck and I don't think it has anything to do with the Toy issue I described earlier.

[Leonthefixer]

With some help from Keefter I think there could be a bottle neck in my system at the RAM. Isn't the internet a wonderful thing for finding things out!

Some useful guides here for anyone who like me doesn't know too much about what to look for in a PC:

http://www.pantherproducts.co.uk/Articles/What_is/What_is_RAM.shtml

At the bottom of the article there are What Is? articles on:

RAM
Motherboard
Graphics Card
CPU
Hard Disk
PSU

All very helpful for people like me.

I also installed a free program called Speccy from Download.com:

http://download.cnet.com/Speccy/3000-2094_4-75181811.html?tag=mncol;1

It seems really good letting you see in great detail all of the spec of your PC as per my earlier screen grabs.

My RAM is 4GB Dual-Channel DDR2 @ 333MHz, 4 sticks of 1GB. So after reading this from the guide:

"Like CPU's RAM is measured in MHz. The higher the MHz the greater the speed of the RAM"

So Keefter found me some RAM that will fit my Motherboard that is 2 sticks of 2GB DDR2 @ 1066MHZ:

http://www.microdirect.co.uk/Home/Product/46031/Kingston-memory-Hyper-X-4GB-1066MHz-DDR2-Non-ECC

So going to order that and swap it out for the old stuff and hopefully that will help matters with TT.

Anyone with anymore advice please feel free to speak up as it is much appreciated!

The more I look at stuff though the more I think it might be time to treat myself to a new PC for Christmas and just use this old (3 1/2yr) one for general websurfing etc and get myself a new spanker for trading with.

[catweazle]

That have nothing to do with your RAM! Seems more that the graphics driver wont run proper with your setup. Putting the dispays on the vga-output isn't a good idea. The graphics signal comes digital from your PC and must be translatet at the output of your graphics card to analog signals. After on the input of your monitors the analog signals must be translated again into digital signals. That's two useless signal translations!
Your operating system is 32 bit and it can't handle the whole 4gb of RAM. And i'm shure you need for GT not more than 512mb RAM inclusive windows