Video Card Issues(?)

Alright, so I'm pretty puzzled by this one.

All of my games play as though I'm using software acceleration.

Right now I'm running with Windows XP Professional, an Athlon XP 2800+, 1 gig of RAM, and a Geforce 5200 FX, yet I can't even run a game that's got a Geforce 4 MX as part of a Recommended setup without massive slowdown (and that's at the lowest settings). As I said in my earlier thread, I don't have any overclocking going on, and from it looks like everything is set up properly in my BIOS.

I've installed new video card drivers (nVidia's official ones as well as some Omega drivers whose version number seemed horribly out of date but managed to run a little better than the nVidia ones. I've also updated DirectX (was at 9.0c already but I figured it couldn't hurt).

Does anyone have a clue what could be going on? Windows functions perfectly fine, the directx demos for 7, 8, and 9 all work properly, and even when I load games the initial animations look perfectly fine (though I don't know if they're prerendered or not). I can play videos without problems, and this is pretty much the only thing that's wonky about my computer right now.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

No BSODs of the sort (nv4_disp.dll), or anything remotely related to drivers? First thing that comes to mind is do you have VSync enabled? I've never myself had this kind of problem before--my videocard problem (major artifacting) ended up being a PSU on its way out the door. I would imagine videocard symptoms are different between each one in correlation with a faulty PSU; you can take that route and pop your PSU in a friend's computer and trying out the equivalent of your games on his computer. Other things:

- Check card's seating and reseat if necessary.
- If AGP, Fastwrites and Sideband Addressing enabled?
- Try dusting your AGP/PCI slot with compressed air.

I would actually advise you dust your whole setup to ensure proper airflow; due to overheating, your graphics card will start to throttle to prevent frying your card. Good luck.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

I just reseated the card last week when I dusted the whole computer, actually. Cleaned out it's fan as well as the heatsink/fan on my processor to try and help cool things down a little bit. I know Fastwrite is enabled, and I imagine the second one is too since there were two AGP options in my BIOS and I have both of them on (as they've always been).

I'll try playing with the sides of my case off to see if heat's a problem, but I doubt it since it's a fairly old card and I don't think it even gets that hot.

Oh, and no BSODs, though every now and then the nvidia desktop manager will randomly have issues on me. I figure the recent driver reinstalls/upgrades I've done should take care of that.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Now that I think about it, check the thermal paste and heatsink's seating on your card also. Some fresh, new AS5 couldn't hurt.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

I accidentally opened up SiSoft Sandra earlier today and figured, what the hell, I'll check it's video card properties. It said that Fast-Writes is Disabled (something I know is enabled) as well as Isochronous Mode as not be enabled. No clue what the second one is, but the first puzzled me a bit, so I went into my BIOS and disabled fast writes. There was a bit of a performance boost, though it still doesn't feel like it's up to where it should be.

Later today I'm going to try enabling it again to see if it goes back to being poor performance or if it stays about where it is now.

I was speaking idiomatically.