So I have had my shinny new Alienware for a few months now. It is running a P4 3.4GHz processor, 1gig of ram, and a Nvidia Geforce 6800,256meg pci-express graphics card. It runs any FPS i can throw at it great, HL2, Halo,and Doom3. In EQ I can be at a 72person raid with all effects on even spells if i want and no lag at all, but when I try to play C&C generals or even Age of Empires2 I get horrable lag. It gets choppy and my fps just plummit even with as little as 2 ememies once they get there numbers up. I have all the lastest drivers and patches for both games and know you can play them cuz a friend has an HP with a slower processor and a 256 agp card and he can have up to 4 teams in C&C before he gets lag even with the graphics all the way up. I have tried messing with all the settings in the games and no matter what I change the lag stays the same, dosent even go down if I drop the rez to 800x600. Below are a few benchmarks if they will help at all. Any help I can get it very much aperciated.

Burn-In/Benchmarks
Doom 3
Doom 3: 83.2 fps
3DMark 2005
Game Tests
3DMark Score: 4,775.00 3DMarks
GT1 - Return To Proxycon: 21.03 FPS
GT2 - Firefly Forest: 13.55 FPS
GT3 - Canyon Flight: 24.44 FPS

CPU Tests
CPU Score: 4,742.00 CPUMarks
CPU Test 1: 2.45 FPS
CPU Test 2: 4.08 FPS

Feature Tests
Fill Rate - Single-Texturing: -1.00 FPS
Fill Rate - Multi-Texturing: -1.00 FPS
Pixel Shader: -1.00 FPS
Vertex Shader - Simple: -1.00 FPS
Vertex Shader - Complex: -1.00 FPS

Batch Size Tests
8 Triangles: -1.00 FPS
32 Triangles: -1.00 FPS
128 Triangles: -1.00 FPS
512 Triangles: -1.00 FPS
2048 Triangles: -1.00 FPS
32768 Triangles: -1.00 FPS

Zignus Veneficus
Vallis Aspectus

EQ runs fine? So what's the problem? :D

Try the latest video drivers maybe. Early drivers support for PCI-E may have been a bit dodgy.. not sure.

A friend of mine contacted me in game after reading my post, they found out this is a problem with the game it self. Something todo with a patch and it not liking my pc, or anyones running windows xp. So I guess I will just have to follow Welas's chain of thought and play more EQ.

Zignus