Is it the game or the GPU ?

[Kilauea]

I am playing Heroes V on the main rig in my sig and I am noticing some slow downs while playing. They seem to occur after a while and when the view is zoomed out.

My GPU is underclocked to the max and the CPU is not overclocked. The resolution is 1024 x 768 and every details is maxed out, with max AA. After lowering the details to minimum, it seems to run smooter. Here are the system reqs for this game.

• Minimum System Requirements
• - Processor: 1.5 GHz
• - RAM: 512MB
• - Video Memory: 64MB
• - Only supplied on DVD?: Yes
• - Hard Drive Space: 2GB
• - Operating System: Windows 2000/NT/XP
• - DirectX Version: 9.0c
• Recommended System Requirements
• - Processor: 2.4 GHz
• - RAM: 512MB
• - Video Memory: 128MB
• - Hard Drive Space: 2GB

Now, what I don't understand is that even if the GPU is underclocked, it should be more than able to play this game(its far from a new game) specially at such a low resolution (even with maxed graphs), am I wrong ?
I have upped the GPU and did not notice much difference too.

Can anyone enlighten me.

[CanadaRox]

How low have you clocked the videocard? And is this your new rig or the old one? I'll assume its the new one. My only suggestion would be to try going back to stock settings and see how it plays. Just because you have the required RAM on the graphics card doesn't mean the core speed doesn't matter.

[Shadowmeph]

you might have things running in the back ground that are using up some of your ram and cpu try and turn off everything you don't need in the services area ( admin tool) while playing and it will improve performance. when I used to play return to castle wolfeinstien enemy territory and we had competitions I used a reg edit that I would click on the reboot that would turn off every thing I didn't need when I would check in the task manager I only had 15 process's running the with the game running it weould go up to 17 proicess's this dramatically changed my gaming. so I would check that out if you are not sure which services to turn off go to the blackviper web site he explains which services do what and why some are needed and some are not.
I still use his site when I build older computers for people that just use the internet and I turn off allot of things that don;'t need to surf the web.

[Kilauea]

Yes it is my new rig. The video card is underclock at GPU clock 500(from 850 stock) Mhz and Memory clock 490 (from 975 stock) Mhz.

I have very few programs running in the background.

[Kilauea]

The question is still unanswered, I think.