I am getting extremely low performance in COD4MW with a 8800GT at 1280x1024. Since I'm new to COD4, I only played the tutorial and first ship level. I got constant stuttering in tutorial and FPS was as low as 20-30. In the ship level I only got 10 FPS. Everything in the game is set to max except for AA and AF which are left to none.
However I'm fine in games like Crysis (all high, 0xAA 16xAF), Oblivion (HDR 8xSSAA 16xAF), and UT3 (4xAA 16xAF). The driver I'm using is 174.74 beta. I switched from 169.21 WHQL because of AA not being applied and broken game profiles in NV CP. I'm using Windows XP SP2.

my specs:
E6300 B2 @ 2.8GHz
EVGA Geforce 8800GT 650/950/1620
Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 rev 1.0
PCP & C silencer 750W
OCZ GOLD XTC DDR2 800 2GB

Identify the problem for me please thanks.

very weird, since it doesnt seem to be hardware related i'd say a reinstall is in order. Either that or a defrag

It's called a beta for good reasons. You're out of luck until official new drivers get here.

yea shes right revert back to old drivers

Try and set the affinity to one cpu "0" when this game is running and see if it helps.

Open Task Manager
Righ-click on the partition.exe(COD.exe) process and choose "Set Affinity"
Check the CPU IDs (example CPU0, CPU1) that you want the process to run on.

doubt that would do much, heck it might even hurt performance.

Old 169.21 whql I was using had broken game profile and AA not being applied or doesn't go off when set to off in NV CP. See this thread:

http://forums.tweakguides.com/show [...] 135&page=2

I switched to 174.74 beta for that reason.

I found that the problem is not that simple. When I played cryris, it was when I just turned on my PC. However after one day of usage, EVERY game slowed down a lot. Oblivion got FPS almost halved, and Crysis too. I think when I first played COD today it was when "it" already started happening. I.E. FPS in every games becomes very low. My card idles at 50C and load at around 70C, fan speed 65%. And CPU idles at 40-42C load at 52-55C using core temp.

Well i've seen 174.xx break games already. so i am back on 169.21 I loose TV overscan, but at least my games play right.

You gonna have to make a call as to what more important AA vs performance.

Send nvidia a bug report so they can fix it on the next release. if they dont know, they can not fix it. Since they are trying to squeeze the Geforce 9 cards they seem to be forgetting about the 8 series. Let them know....

As for loosing performance after, make sure there is not junk running eating cpu power or any virus/spyware scan running(they run at the most pain in the a$s times).

in the settings set your graphics card to 'dual graphics card' i had a 8800gts 512mb and it lagged like **** **** and i enabled that after someone told me and then i got super high frame rates.. so give it a shot

If setting the game config to dual card works regardless of only having one card then it gives 'The way it's meant to be played' a slightly darker undertone.

I have an Asus EN8800GT and a Q6600 chip, both card and chip are clocked at stock and both COD4 and Crysis play fine in XP, absolutely no hassles with frame rates, playing at 1280x1024 with all settings at high, max settings for COD4.

Maybe you have a virus?

That would be a lot of people with virus...
It's a beta, it's to be expected.

It's the beta drivers. Downgrade to 169.25.

I seem to have found the problem. It's because of CS 1.6. I d/led it from a link a friend gave to me. When I play cs 1.6, and then play other games like Crysis and Oblivion, these games ran real bad. (Other games like FEAR and Unreal 3 are not demanding enough for me to see a serious performance drop) Now I reinstalled COD4MW and upgraded to 1.4 patch and now it seems to be running normally. So i guess its the cs 1.6 i dled that caused the problem. I ll just forget it for now.