Mac Pro 3D Severe Graphics Issue

Question

Greetings to all.
I currently own a Quad 2.66ghz Mac Pro with 5GB of RAM and an X1900 (512MB) ATI Graphics Card.
A while ago, I started having an issue with most 3D applications under Bootcamp. I'm using the Bootcamp 2.1 driver set and reformatting the machine had no effect on this issue.
The problem is that certain 3D games run slow.
By slow, I don't mean poor graphical performance or a lack of frames-per-second, I mean slow as in "time has slown down". The graphic performance is excellent and I'm getting high FPS as usual- but the game itself is running at maybe 50-75% of the speed it should be.
For example...
If I'm playing any VALVe game (such as Team Fortress 2, Half Life 2, Portal, etc)- all the game animations run at 75% of the speed they should. The graphics are fine- smooth with high FPS. However, my "character" moves at approximately half-speed in the game world. If I'm playing online with other people- from their point of view, I'm playing the game in slowmo. Everything for /them/ is fine, but my "character" is literally jumping, walking, etc half-speed.
If I'm playing Spore, then the introduction video when you start the game (where it says "EA" then explodes into the galaxy) is all jerky. My space ship "moves" (in the game) at approximately half the speed it should, and again, all the game animations are smooth with high FPS- but everything is moving in slow motion.
If I reboot the machine- anywhere from 3-7 times, the problem will eventually go away and the games resume their "normal" speeds. So I can tell instantly when the computer is screwed up- because Spore's intro video will playback smooth when everything is "working" and the game speed is normal (so my ship travels through space quit a bit faster, and the graphical animations aren't off sync with the audio). It's the same thing with VALVe games- I can tell when the computer is working because the character animations are running at normal speeds versus "slowmo".
I am unsure what is causing this but it is extremely annoying. I reformatted the entire Windows XP installation, no effect. I simply noticed it one day (about a month ago), prior to that the problem didn't exist.
Since this effects multiple games and the graphics performance is NOT an issue, I'm lead to believe that there's some sort of driver bug here at work, or some sort of issue with the Mac Pro's internal timer or something.
Has anyone else experienced this "warped 3D time" situation? Does anyone have a solution?
-SC

Answer 1

We're talking Windows in general. My advice, get 64-bit Vista Ultimate.
Why would I spend money on a new OS, when XP x86 (and I have XP x64- I'd sooner throw that on then deal with Vista) works? Save for this issue, it's 100% stable, and pretty much every current game on the market and most future games are 32-bit only and don't rely on Direct X 10 exclusively.
X1900 seems okay, but maybe not. Something is a bottleneck and not sure where and reinstalling ATI graphics driver hasn't helped? BootCamp 2.1 is just a bunch of low level HAL support services.
There is no bottleneck. You misread my issue.
The 3D graphics are perfectly fine. The X1900 performs to my expectations in every single game I own. The frame rate is high in every single game. The issue is that "time" itself seems to slow down, even though the framerate *remains the same*.
This is some sort of weird software bug or timer issue. Performance wise, the system is fine.
The official ATI drivers had no impact on the issue. The issue originally started when I was running XP x86 and Bootcamp 2.0 drivers. I upgraded those to the official ATI Catalyst drivers, which made no difference. I reformatted the entire machine- and installed the Bootcamp 2.1 drivers. No effect.
And let's hope you put Windows on its own dedicated disk drive, and not the poor man of the lot, try putting it on an nice $78 WD Caviar 640 or something.
I didn't even use Bootcamp (the utility). I have 4 500GB drives, 3 of which are dedicated to OS X. I removed those three, leaving in only the forth, and formatted the entire drive as a MBR partition map with an NTFS primary partition. Therefore, the forth drive is 100% Windows and nothing else.
You could run chkdsk and system file checker (sfc /scannow) as well as make sure you aren't low on disk space...
Disk is fine. ~300GB free space.
What would you do to improve performance?
Nothing at all. As I've said before, *performance is fine*. Framerates are good. Most games I can crank to 1920x1200 at high settings (sans Crysis). Spore looks and runs fine. VALVe games look incredible.
The issue has nothing to do with performance. As I've said, it's that the "game time" is running slow. The framerate is fine. Since this has nothing to do with the load of the machine (time should be a constant), it is some sort of obscure firmware, software, or hardware bug. This effects both Spore and Valve games (and others?). In both cases, "game time" and animations run in slow motion. They are NOT jerky or suffer from any performance related issues on the X1900. They're just running in slow motion.
Rebooting a few times clears the issue. Performance stays the same, but game-time resumes it's normal pace.
Buy a PC video card can work, or 8800GT, or hope the Radeon 3870, but with both of those, on 1st gen Mac Pro, you are better off with Vista.
Again, why? My X1900 may be loud, but it flies. I am happy with this machine. I keep it clean, and it keeps running stable for me as a result. Except for this issue under Windows XP 32 with game time running slow-mo, I have no quirks with this machine.
And in case you haven't already check Barefeats, take a peek:
I know how much faster the other cards are, but I don't do that much gaming. When I do, it's annoying to have to reboot several times to get "Game time" to run at "normal" speeds (as per above). I plan on updating to an 8x in the /future/, but I don't have the money to do that right now.
-SC