Optimizing a quadro fx 3600m to work like a geforce?

[Guest Jackie-Sunburst]

I'm currently wanting to mod the drivers for my quadro fx 3600m card to be optimized for gaming. I am currently using a nvidia 175.32 drivers that I installed using a modified inf that I acquired from this site. I'm using that version of drivers as it was the latest that nvidia listed on their site for the geforce 8m series and I imagined those would be the safest to install. While it was my hope that the drivers would have the card running similarly to a geforce 8800mgtx, I still notice a lot of hitching, stuttering, and delay that I had attributed to the card operating on workstation drivers. My desktop (which I understand is not a good comparison since it is a desktop) is using an older mid-line ati raedon hd card and doesn't experience many of these problems playing the same games at the same time in the same locations. That said, I can't afford to change the quadro fx 3600m card (swapping to an actual gaming card is not an option), and so I want to optimize it the best I can.

My computer's basic specs are as follows:

xp pro os

4 gigs ram

2.5 ghz dual-core processor

To anyone who has set up a 3600m card for gaming, or who has an idea how to get the most I can out of this card, what would you recommend?

[zipper]

This is the latest Quadro driver, a good starting point for testing:

http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/nvidia/175series/17826.exe

My FX 1600M does behave quite like a 8700M GT in games I think.

I have tried almost all latest drivers with the modified inf with good results.

[Galdere]

I'd say you should go with a more up to date driver and make sure you clean out the remnants of the old one in safe mode using the recommended methods from these forums. An FX3600m is very similar to a 8800m GTX as you say, so you should be able to get a lot out of it without any problems.

[Guest Jackie-Sunburst]

My understanding is that I don't want to put a quadro driver on the machine as quadro drivers are built for opengl programs such as cad, and because of their need to be near perfect in how they handle, the drivers cause the cards to render graphics significantly slower; they are essentially "more careful". Games on the other hand need a constant stream of incoming information filtered into them at higher rates of speed. If I recall workstation and gaming cards somehow use memory differently. I don't remember if this is correct but my understanding is that where gaming drivers use the memory to render graphics upfront and on a streaming basis, quadro drivers hold it and use it in one big go. Because of how they render the graphics, a card ran on quadro drivers runs directx applications significantly slower than a card ran on geforce drivers; geforce drivers on the other hand run opengl applications worse.

Also, specifically to quadro based workstation cards, before the 3600m/8800mgtx cards, the actual architecture was different. Not to say you couldn't soft mod an 8700m to a 1600m or vice versa but no matter what you would not get the same performance, they had different pipelines (32 vs. 64 unified), different memory bus (128bit vs. 2x128bit), and different transistors 289 mill vs. 587 mill. Though a 1600m quadro card is "essentially" a 8700m, it's not. But with the introduction of the g92 gpu, the 3600m card is essentially the 8800mgtx (that specific 8800 card) (same gpu, pipelines, memory bus, shaders, clock, nm technology, etc.); the differences are the drivers and that the 8800mgtx runs with a slightly lower (5 deg) power consumption.

Is my understanding of all of this correct?

If it is, I'm still pretty confident that using geforece drivers on a quadro fx card is the best option to get the card to work like an 8800mgtx card. With my current geforce drivers though I'm still experiencing hitching, stuttering, glitching, and rendering problems though (some flickering and very occassionally my screen will look like someone took the whole image, chopped it up in horizontal lines and then tried to paste it back together). Also even with fraps telling me that I have high fps, my games feel like they're running slow. I have a few games that I play -- a few ssingle player and two mmo's and I'm having this with all of them. Checking nivida's site, the drivers I'm currently using are still considered the most up to date drivers for the geforce series 8 mobile cards. There are newer drivers available for desktop cards, but not for mobile cards. How safe are desktop drivers to install on a notebook?

[zipper]

My FX1600M benchmarks within 1% identical with a 8700M GT and the difference in gaming between quadro and forceware drivers is negligible.

Have a go with 178.24/179.13(=like178.13)/180.43 drivers - the latest is quite betaish still, the former are good ones.