I'm trying to play some Day of Defeat: Source on a Dell XPS M1730 with a GeForce 8700M GT and 4 GB of RAM on Windows XP 32 bit.

The drivers all appear to be up to date, but I'm still getting poor performance, somewhere between 10 and 20 frames per second. I get similarly poor framerates in Left 4 Dead. I'm playing at near maximum settings, but in the past have been able to do so with much higher framerates.

Just wondering if this is something someone might have experience/have insight into... any help? If I've left out any necessary/relevant information, please let me know... I realize that this is a pretty vague question.

Thanks for any help!

Several informative diagrams follow.


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"buddabuddabuddabuddabuddabuddabuddabuddabuddabudda"

Lower graphics settings

Or check task manager for cpu hogging apps.

Also remember that DoD has been ported to the Orange Box so the system requirements are up.

Thanks, MZZT. None of my current processes are using more than 30 MB...got about 3 using that much. I am running L4D at the moment and it's using about 350.

Lowering the resolution from 1920x1200 to 1440x900 (while not the biggest jump) produces no significant performance increase.

[edit]Also, on another laptop with slightly lower specs I am getting a steady 35-40 fps.

a DoD tip that might help answer my question?

"Lesson 1: pop pop pop budda budda buddadadaadad pchew"

Ugh look at CPU, not memory.

And if performance doesn't increase when you fiddle with graphics settings, it means your CPU is the likely bottleneck. Though L4D should be running worse than DoD...

You're running 1920x1200 on a 17in laptop screen?

Ugh, My bad MzzzzzzTttt, nothing is drawing CPU power...

and zanardi is something wrong with that? that's the native resolution of the monitor

Hah!

His CPU is fine, there should be no bottleneck at it's speed, at least when it comes to DoD.

Hell, even my inferior PC can run it at well into the 200s.

I say: get rid of AA if you've got it. At 1920x1200, you don't need more than 2x, or 4x. You're more or less wasting performance that way, at least IMO.

And, of course, check your NVIDIA control panel. Try changing a few things, it might help.

hm, interesting. Res just seems a little high for the size of that screen

There is definitely something wrong. I just don't know what @_@

I would download CPU-Z and GPU-Z. Use GPU-Z to compare the information it's showing for clock speed / pci-e speed to the defaults for a GeForce 8700M GT. Use CPU-Z to check your CPU clock speeds.

I have heard of various bugs with drivers not restoring full GPU/CPU clockspeeds after sleep states or when changing between battery->AC profiles.

That's a normal 17" laptop screen resolution. Most have options between 1440x900 and 1920x1200.

Check your DirectX version in your video settings. It could be that your game, for some reason is running in a higher DX mode than your card or computer can handle. It can happen (it is steam after all, configs can get giffed). If not try reinstalling DirectX. If that doesn't work try your Nvidia display manager (Mine in ATI is catalyst control centre) and see if the AA or AF is not set to a higher value than it should be (I leave mine on application controlled). If that doesnt help try reinstalling gfx drivers.

Those are usually the three things I go for.

i always love to hear about people with faster computers having games that run fine on my computer run like crap on theirs

i'm not sure i understand your diagrams, could you clarify

-______________________________________________________;

Scussssse me mister Saberopus, ur face is missing a tooth!

" 'Clarify this, *******! ,' responded Michael MacFarlane in typical midget indignity, sulking away down the train tracks"

And your...... somethnimumblejumble is missing a fmmchjgmmmm

Anyway, thanks for all the help everyone... I'll get back to you once I've checked it all out

I was going to say this too, theres no reason to run that high really. Especially on a 17 incher. That's a res more suited for a 22+ incher.

Id say stay at or below 1050, keep AA off and HDR and you should see a lot better performance. Especially from the source engine, its trusty

i see!

other than the whole thing about running at an LCDs native resolution gives the best results

otherwise his image quality is at the mercy of the scaler used

Hey this is saberopus's brother, and it's actually my computer that's being a wiener, he's just doing me a favor. I ran the CPU-Z app, and it tells me my core speed is 1596.1 MHz with a Multiplier of x8. I have an Intel Mobile Core 2 Duo T8300 @ 2.4 GHz. Unfortunately I don't really know how to compare the results to what my speed should be, could my CPU be the problem?

To add some more info, I was once able to run all source games fine since the Orange Box came out, on max settings and resolution, with an average of 40-50 FPS. I've also noticed a slight slow down when opening new windows, etc. Furthermore, when I open a high rez video in MPC, when I try to play a video full screen in hulu, or a higher quality youtube video it also lags, and I know it's not my connection (this problem never happened before either).

I think a CPU problem sounds like it would cover all of these, but I'm not really knowledgeable about this stuff.

Edit: Possibly helpful info: just yesterday when attempting to diagnose the problem, I ran the video stress test in CS:S, once again with max settings and rez, and got an average FPS of 54. I then joined a server and got <10 FPS on average.

Thanks for your help.

Well DoD:S doesn't support multicore out of the box IIRC so that's basically like running it on a 1.5ghz 1 core. Even on my 1.8ghz with all settings on low it's a low framerate.

You can try the experimental multicore stuff for orange box (google for the cvars) but it might crash more often than usual.

Or you can just expect not to be able to play the latest games on your NETBOOK (DoD:S uses the orange box engine now as I said, which is recent).



Not when it comes to Orange Box engine it isn't. He's under the minimum requirements by 200mhz.

Yeah but the thing is this is a very recent problem. I've been able to play TF2, L4D, DoD:S and CS:S all on the high settings long after the orange box came out. I have recently formatted (to return to XP from Vista, in which I had a multitude of other problems), but I'm sure I have all my drivers and necessary software installed, and that everything is all updated. I've done virus scans, and defragged my hard drive and everything, so as far as I can tell, everything should be running fine.

One other issue that I forgot to mention that could be causing this deals with my power supply/battery. Either sometime right before I switched to vista (sometime in January I believe) or actually right when I made the change, my battery was no longer able to charge. I tried researching this issue and found that this can sometimes happen if the wrong BIOS drivers are installed, but I was pretty sure I had the right version, and after going back to XP I made sure I installed the right version, and the problem still persists.

So is it possible it could be a problem with the power supply/battery?

Well unless his laptop is set to always run at that speed, I wouldn't worry.

The 1.6 ghz is Intel's speedstep throttling down to conserve power. When he's running something intensive, it should return to 2.4 ghz. If it's not, that could be part of the problem. I think some laptops can be configured to always run at the slower speed when using battery power- but I doubt you are playing games running off the battery.

I would bet this has something to do with it, does it constantly think it's in a low power situation?

Well I think I'm pretty sure the power supply is the problem. Just from perusing the Dell support forums it's clear that the power supply issue is fairly common. I got an error saying something along the lines of "Unrecognized power supply, system will run slower and suck," and it seems the only solution is getting another power supply. Luckily I think I'm still under warranty so hopefully I won't have to pay for another one.