I've recently purchased and installed a PNY Nvidia Quadro NVS 450 into my Dell Optiplex 755 desktop machine that's running XP SP3 and for the most part, the performance is abysmal for anything except OpenGL. The configuration I have is 4 x outputs, each running at 1280x1024 resolution and 60 Hz.
I started by using the newest Quadro/Tesla driver (297.03) and noticed that anything applications with 2D graphics (for instance Google Chrome playing a YouTube video) will grind framerates to a crawl once the size of the window approaches the size of filling one monitor or if I open two videos at the same time. Similarly, there's some noticeable issues when just trying to drag windows around on the screen too -- just the most basic of 2D causes trouble. Similarly, if I try to use something like Google Earth in DirectX mode the performance for 3D is awful as well. I So, it seems that a chunk of rendering might be being attempted in software for some strange reason, but I can't be sure. If I change Google Earth to use OpenGL instead, performance is fantastic and running it across all 4 monitors is flawless. 'm currently using the oldest driver, version 267.05, in the hopes that it would change something, but it's still the same.
It's worth noting that in my testing, I disabled DirectDraw entirely within Dxdiag and the performance issues appear to be resolved. Unfortunately, keeping it like this isn't an option as taking out DirectDraw takes out Direct3D and who knows what else. I shouldn't need to resort to this for such a new card. Furthermore, what's interesting is that my previous configuration - with a 64MB Quadro NVS 280 graphics card in the PCI (not PCI-e) slot - had far better performance by comparison.
Separately, when DirectDraw/Direct3D is enabled, I'm noticing that when trying to run the tests in Dxdiag, none of the full screen tests (eg bouncing box and 'spinning cube') will work. More curiously, the DX9 spinning cube test has run successfully 2 of the 5 times I've run the tests -- seemingly no consistency except for the fact that the DX7, DX8 and full screen DirectDraw tests all fail to complete.
I've already submitted a support request with Nvidia, but does anyone have any ideas?
Note: I've upgraded DirectX to the latest that would install (9.0c) via the web installer.
Note2: Tried running the card with Windows 7 x64 on the same machine model (Optiplex 755) with the same latest drivers, yielding the same results. Interestingly, Dxdiag on Windows 7 reports that DirectDraw and AGP Acceleration are both entirely unavailable.