Why does my 8600m GT perform so BAD?

[sheldo86]

Ok, so i recently bought a Dell Inspiron 1720. It has 4GB of DDR2 @ 667 Mhz, a T7700 Core 2 Duo @2.4GHz 965 Chipset and a 8600m GT with 256MB DDR2 with Vista home premium.

My problem is frame rates of the games i own are worse than my old computer! :)

My old laptop is a Dell 9300 with 1GB DDR2, 1.7GHz Pentium M and a 6800Go with Windows XP and it plays all of the games I own smoother and with higher frame rates.

Benchmarks:

3dMark06 Score of 3182

And Ghost recon advanced warfighter 2 is virtually unplayable due to the low FPS (no exact # sorry)

COD 2 @ 1440x900 Settings on High in Dx9 Mode: ~ 25FPS

(Just for reference, my old laptop with a 6800 is getting ~50fps with same settings!!)

I am currently using the 163.44 Drivers, but I have also tried the 158.45 and the dell stock drivers from website and i still get same frame rates. :) :P

I have installed the hofix from microsoft for Vista for gaming to no effect also disabled aero and even tried uninstalling the display adapater and reinstalling it fresh...also to no effect.

Is this a Vista issue? I dont particularly want to have to format and install XP....but if there is no other way to get decent FPS...

Any help would be hugely appreciated. Thanks.

Edited September 24, 2007 by sheldo86

[Guest tenac]

I've got a similar problem, if not the same.

My laptop is a nexoc e619 (fl90) with T7500, 4gb 667, 8600M GT (475/400)

battlefield2142 works fine, with some lag-like glitches that i've not figured out yet where they come from.

but in quake3 i get very low fps (20-30fps) regardless of what res is set or how low the driver settings are.

my driver is from nexoc, v. 101.28

thanks for help,

t.p.

[Guest tenac]

EDIT: Problem solved by installing 101.29 available at this site.

sorry for unnecessary post,

thanks anyway!

t.p.

[sheldo86]

After some reading and tweaking and investigating it appeared to be a combination of things. Switching off vista's Superfetch and Readyboost turned a thrashing HDD (Part of the problem) into a much quieter HDD. Also tweaking with nHancer solved my perfoamnce issues with CoD2. :) ....it appears that even an overclocked 8600 GT cannot run CoD2 at 1440x900 in dX9 mode with x8 Anisotropic and x4 AA and high res textures and expect to get anything better than 25-30fps.

Dropping AF to x4 and AA to x2 and the res to 1280x800 allows me to bump up texture and specular and normal maps to extra, making it look really pretty and get a respectable 45-50 fps.

So what about Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2? No luck. It jummpy/shudders at any resolution and any texture/lighting settings with all the different drivers I have tested. Some have suggested dropping the frames to prerender to 0 or 1...but that has had no effect for me. So for now, with my new dell 1720 with a 8600 GT, GRAW 2 is unplayable.

Hope this helps someone...and I hope some one can figure out the GRAW 2 problem :)