Possible Win 7 / DX9 Problem

[rodney_ws]

I have a perfectly stable Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit desktop with an ATI 5850 GPU running the current WHQL drivers. This week I decided that I REALLY wanted to play Europa Universalis 3 (EU3 for short) and tossed in the DVD. It installed fine, but gave an error indicating that d3dx9_35.dll was not present. A quick Google search revealed that I would need to install the DX9 run-time distributable from Microsoft. This particular package was listed as being applicable for a wide range of Windows... including Windows 7. This seemed to run counter to everything I knew... DX11 SHOULD be backwards compatible with DX9, but in this instance it wasn't. So I installed DX9 on Windows 7 (yes, this seems VERY alien/wrong to me) and it worked.

So what's my question? Well... I guess here it is... did this in some way hamper my performance? The reason I ask that is that games that my system should play flawlessly have a tick in them now. Gaming at 1680 X 1050 with all details maxed, I get an average FPS of 60 in Company of Heroes but there is a repeating stutter... and even in EU3 (a graphically simple game) there seems to be some visible stuttering as I scroll across the map. I'm debating reloading my system clean (hell, I just installed Win7 this week!) just to go back and establish some sort of gaming benchmark... but I just can't help but think that the DX9 install on Win7 has caused me some sort of performance problem.

Any insight or pointers into this would be GREATLY appreciated.

 

[mactronix]

Well i did notice when running the new DX 11 benchmark that it ran noticably slower in DX9 than it did in DX10 or 11. Now i have a DX10.1 card while yours is DX11 native so im thinking it could be down to some sort of latency issue with W7 running in DX9. I didnt need to install anything extra to run it though and i have run DX9 only games as wel but didnt benchmark any or have any noticable issues with playability.
I dont know for sure what your issue is but it seems very odd that you should need to install anything to use DX9. Wait for a few more supplies but personally i would go for the re-install.

Mactronix