I have an annoying problem with Hitman: Blood Money. Gfx are gorgeous, and seem to be running okay except it gets very jerky when you pan the camera around. Its not a problem with the GPU, which is rendering fine, but seems to be an issue when you look around etc. leading me to believe i have a CPU bottleneck. Note I am running Vista and the game worked perfectly ok from this point of view in XP.

My system:

Gigabyte GA-MA790x-DS4
AMD X2 4400
2Gb Elixer PC5300 (ddr 667)
XFX 8600gt XXX

At the mo i have 'FSB' clocked at 250MHz for core speed of x11 = 2750MHz, RAM running at close to 400MHz, with speed set to DDR667 in BIOS (RAM falls over above 400MHz, which is why i haven't set it to DDR800)

Any ideas? Btw the system runs Crysis fine at medium settings with no incidence of the effect described - is Hitman just ****? Could it be a dual core issue?

Oops - I should mention that I upgraded concurrently with installing Vista, so when I was on XP i was running a single core Athlon 3500+ with 1gig RAM

Interestingly, the effect only occurs when there are a lot of lighting effects on screen.

Two things I see off hand. First, the 8600GT graphics card is fairly weak, so it might well not be keeping up on the sudden changes involved when panning the screen. Second, Vista is a memory hog, so you might be running out of memory. Can't say for sure on the second, but if the game worked on XP but stumbles with Vista, heavy memory use comes to mind.

...and yet runs Crysis fine on medium settings. go figure.

btw the issue occurs at ANY resolution even 800x600 all low settings

If that is happening at any resolution I would say you have a cpu and/or memory bottleneck. I am not familiar with AMD processors but one of those two things should be the issue considering changing your resolution doesn't make a difference.

If the problem had occurred under XP, then the CPU might be suspect, but since it only occurred under Vista, I suspect the memory to be the main problem, followed by the video card.

@ OP- I see two things that might help with the memory. First is adding another mb of ram, but second is backing off the CPU overclock and turning the present ram to DDR 800 specs. With my old gaming computer has a 4400+ that I found ran best at 2640 mhz (11x240) and the ram running at a slightly overclocked speed. I have Corsair XMS in it, so that ram might take an overclock better than the Elixer ram in your machine. Can't say for sure about that.

My Elixir RAM won't clock above 200MHz FSB at DDR800. Not even 1MHz

I fancy some new RAM anyway - I'll give it a go. Cheers.