10 replies to this topic

[Capt Jester]

I will start off by saying this is a laptop, but before you say anything please take a look at my specs. This isn't any old HP or Dell laptop sold to me by some stupid Best Buy employee. I picked this laptop for everything in it, as well as its overall price which was very reasonable for what I got.

CPU: Intel 97-2670QM @2.20GHz
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce 540m / Intel HD Graphics 4000 <-- The bane of my existance and my arch-nemesis
RAM: 6GB DDR3 (though irrelevant)

I have done everything in my power to pull the most I can out of this laptop. I have it in performance mode, I have gone into the NVIDIA graphics control panel and set the MWOClient.exe executable to use the dedicated card exclusively, set all of my MWO settings to low, updated drivers, double-checked the graphics control panel, and have all but given up.

This game used to be playable at 24 FPS, but with 12v12 now, I get 12 +/- 2 FPS. That's just ridiculous that I can play other games such as Diablo 3, SimCity, and CoD Black Ops 2 at 60+ FPS, even with some high-level and all mid-level settings.

If anybody has any tips or ideas on what I can do to make this game playable again, I would love to hear it because I do not have the money to order a desktop, though I did build one with my step-dad a few weeks ago for about $700.

I've also tried raising the process priority, though the CPU doesn't handle rendering so that didn't affect the FPS at all.

[Dragoon20005]

this cant be helped

i believed the latest patch made the game unplayable on low end GPU

[japla]

i went from 30 fps to about 20. Not as low as yours, but a big difference.

[DocBach]

sorry to break it to you, but the 540M is a pretty low-end graphics card - in fact, I'm pretty sure that gamedebate has it listed as unsupported by MWO. Try cleaning out your heatsink and fans, maybe heats throttling it if you're having a performance drop.

[Gentleman Reaper]

Strange, I have Identical specs and I manage around 24 fps with 12v12 on river city (the map that I get the lowest fps on) and around 30 or higher on forest and canyon

[Catamount]

It shouldn't be your GPU, OP. The 540M is not a great GPU, true (it's not bad for laptops), but it should be able to game just fine at moderate settings, and that should include running MWO at low settings. Can I assume you've dropped to the lowest resolution and settings? Have you compared how the game behaves in full screen vs full window mode? Fullscreen is very buggy. Have you disabled AV software (stupid-sounding, I know, but several have started not playing nicely with MWO lately)? Is your GPU underclocking itself or anything? Is anything running especially hot or thermally throttling?

I'm just trying to figure out why you have problems, but some posters don't. MWO has never had consistent performance across machines, but if we can eliminate the basic things, maybe we can figure out why your system, in particular, is having problems, along with certain other particular systems.

Edited by Catamount, 07 August 2013 - 06:58 AM.

[PanzerFurrry]

I didn't notice any unusual drop in frames after the patch. I am playing on an absolute minimum (Radeon 5670 and c2d dual core).
The only difference is on Frozen City with thermo vision turned on, frames drop significantly. This wasn't the case before the patch. After thermo is turned off, frames go back to normal. (20-40 FPS).
EDIT:1680x1050

Edited by PanzerFurrry, 07 August 2013 - 10:09 AM.

[Phasma Ferratus]

Interesting, i have quite similar specs, i7-2630qm, gt540m and 8gb ram was also doing around 25-30fps pre 12v12 and now i get around 10-15fps, but that was when i was running on my native resolution of 1366x786. I dropped my resolution to 1024x720(not sure, but lowest) and get about 20fps. However my 300ms ping makes it near impossible to play effectively anymore

[Capt Jester]

Catamount, on 07 August 2013 - 06:51 AM, said:

It shouldn't be your GPU, OP. The 540M is not a great GPU, true (it's not bad for laptops), but it should be able to game just fine at moderate settings, and that should include running MWO at low settings. Can I assume you've dropped to the lowest resolution and settings? Have you compared how the game behaves in full screen vs full window mode? Fullscreen is very buggy. Have you disabled AV software (stupid-sounding, I know, but several have started not playing nicely with MWO lately)? Is your GPU underclocking itself or anything? Is anything running especially hot or thermally throttling?

I'm just trying to figure out why you have problems, but some posters don't. MWO has never had consistent performance across machines, but if we can eliminate the basic things, maybe we can figure out why your system, in particular, is having problems, along with certain other particular systems.

I am running at 1366x768 resolution, could that be it? I also have a Targus Cool-Mat fan pad for my laptop so heat should not be a problem. I have tried running full screen and windowed mode before, but it did not net much difference I think I'll play around with the video settings some more and see if I can get any increases.

Also what do you mean by AV software?

[DocBach]

even with a cooling pad you might have dust in the fans or heat sink creating more heat - laptops will throttle performance if they can't dissipate the heat properly.

[Capt Jester]

I will take off the covers on the underbelly and give it a good clean, then. Also I changed to fullscreen and my FPS increased by 10. I also enabled PhysX on my GPU, but I'm not sure if that actually helped with frames.