The performance difference is definitely noticeable between the two cards, but I still am experiencing 'pauses' when just running around luna. In 2D, I zoom around with no issues but pause every 2-3 houses or so. I'm on Fios and my CPU is now upped to 2.29 ghz. In the EC, I put the sparkles to medium and detail to medium and saw little performance difference.
Is there something else I can do to eliminate the choking in town?
hmmm Lots of items in Luna too, thinking it could be just item lag. Were you always stuttering in certain places before the card swap ?
I would need more info to better understand what's causing the 'stutter/lag' issue you are experiencing. Something tells me there are too many processes running and the glitch you are seeing is the
single core cpu maxing out at 100% at times causing the stutter. While uo is running go to task manager under the process tab and tell us the number of processes running in the far left lower corner. Look under the cpu column and see if any other process is competing with UO for cpu cycles. Once you identify the culprit(s)[eg: office,adobe anything,itunes,yahoo anything,quicktime, etc etc] msconfig them out. Restart and see if it still happens.
Looking at services.msc might help too. easy example is if you're not running a wireless network, no reason WLAN AutoConfig needs to auto start when windows boots, disable it. If you don't happen to have a printer connected to that computer, disable Print Spooler too. Remote Registry, disable it. Fax, disable. ICS, disable. Nvidia (I know you have ati/amd) StereoScopic 3D Driver Service... are you serious ? Disable.
Don't disable anything you are uncertain of.
Also are you virus/malware free for certain ?
If you mean 'sparkles' in EC are some sort of video setting, set it to default. Then
set ATI catalyst setting to default and see if stutter still happens.