Dell XPS M1330 and Aero Glass Performance.

[P4Power]

My friend just bought a new XPS M1330 and is having problems with Aero Glass being laggy when any window opens. He has the GeForce 8400M card with 128MB of dedicated VRAM. Now, my XPS M1210 has a Go7400 with only 64MB of VRAM and it runs Aero perfectly and we are both running the same screen resolution, so it is not a memory issue. I had him run Everest on it and I was able to find out what the 8400M's clocks are at its various modes:

Standard 2D GPU: 169 MHz, Shader: 338 MHz, Memory: 100 MHz

Low-Power 3D GPU: 275 MHz, Shader: 550 MHz, Memory: 301 MHz

Performance 3D GPU: 400 MHz, Shader: 800 MHz, Memory: 600 MHz

Here is the rest of the specifications for the M1330:

2.60GHz Core 2 Duo T9500 Penryn

6GB of DDR2-800

320GB 7,200RPM HD

I would assume that Low-Power 3D is the mode it selects for Windows Vista. I think the problem is because it is clocked too low, but I am not sure. I figured that even at those low clocks it would be adequate to run Glass since it has 16 unified shaders and my 7400 only has 4 pipelines yet has no trouble.

[Guest gtnrkt]

Which driver version is he using?

Old driver versions have really bad performance with aero on gf8M

[P4Power]

He is running 176.44 from Dell.

[gtnrkt]

Try out one of the 179, the .13 and .14 ones should be the fastest for aero cause they have no functional powermizer (the card always runs on maximum speed)

The 179.28 one (official mobile from nvidia) is the most stable one at this time with good aero performance, but seems only to let aero run on low-power-3D

Edited January 5, 2009 by gtnrkt