*OFFICIAL* Alienware "Graphics Amplifier" Owner's Lounge and Benchmark Thread (All 13, 15 and 17)

I thought the same as you beforehand, that the VR goggles connected to the AGA GPU HDMI would act like an external monitor, but it does not. Whenever you guys actually try it with a VR system (Rift, Vive, WMR) and get good results, please let me know. Thanks. The only person I have heard back from that successfully used the the AGA to improve VR performance had a very old internal card (760?) that would not run VR. He used a gtx1070 in the AGA and was then able to use an Oculus Rift and get reasonable (but not stellar) performance.

I recently talked to Dell Support and was told that I am not the only VR-user to have similar problems with it and that they are currently developing an new version of the AGA. Apparently one that also supports thunderbolt so other pc's can use it. I kinda doubt that this is going to help us but who knows?

 

here is my score. alienware 15 r1 with gtx 1080ti
https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/27601178?

 

Ya, I got good scores as well but this did not translate to significantly improved actual VR performance. Sorry but unless you have some actual VR experience with the AGA I will not take notice or respond further. If I ever want to improve things using an external monitor (highly unlikely) I may dust off my AGA again. If it is working well for you and your external monitor purposes, I think that's great.

The main purpose that I posted my VR experience with the AGA is to warn guys who may want to try the AGA to improve VR performance. So, I guess you/they have been warned and I will now unsubscribe. Bye and thanks for trying to help.

 

I understand your reasoning, but knowing the way how the AGA works, gpu technology, routing etc your issue is pointing at a configuration/software issue and not hardware. Or your software is just not optimized. Did you try running the same gpu on a desktop for example?

The AGA is just an external pci express slot and acts like one as long if you use an external monitor. Only when you have your internal monitor active. The piping of the display image back to the laptop causes extra performance loss.

Did you disable the internal monitor while using VR?

 

Some noob questions that I hope you can help me with...

I’m running a 17R3 with a 6820HK and a 980M, and I just received my amplifier yesterday and I’m planning to use it with a GTX 1080 (or GTX 1180 but that’s another story!!), and I’ve noticed the 460W output of the amp doesn’t meet the required 500W of the cards I’m looking at. Do I need to upgrade my power supply to make this work or does the standard supply do the job?

The second and bigger issue for me however is the compatibility minefield I’m scared to wander into!! I’ve been saving for a while now and don’t want to blow it all on a card which won’t work, leaving me with a oversized and overpriced USB hub, and an nvidia ornament!

The cards in the below link are the ones I’m looking at, and would be hugely grateful if anyone can confirm which if any are definitely compatible with the AGA. Thank you for your help!!

https://www.pbtech.co.nz/category/components/video_cards/geforce-gtx-1080

...or maybe these if I save longer!!

https://www.pbtech.co.nz/category/components/video_cards/geforce-gtx-1080-ti

 

Any card that is close to a reference size is fine. Worst case scenario, bust out a screw driver and just remove the top of the AGA, then you can fit any size card. As for the PSU, that is the recommendation for running that card as well as a full system with RAM, CPU, Storage, etc. You will be fine

 

I think you are far better off scrapping the idea of an AGA solving your performance issues, esp if you are thinking about getting into VR. You already have a pretty good gaming laptop so just use it best you can. Save up for either a better laptop or desktop pc imho. If you feel the need to buy a +$1,000 video card, the only ones that Dell will support with their AGA are the nvidia FE versions (single fan blowers). I would only buy one of these video cards if you intend to use it later with a desktop gaming pc.

The internal AGA power supply works fine. I had a few guys tell me to go out and buy a better one which I did ( Consair 750w) and it made absolutely no difference. You can get quieter fans but no big deal. Thanks to the Brain Trust on this thread I have not only stupidly bought an AGA, I also bought an expensive PSU, fan, plus a gtx1080ti blower. All a waste of time and $'s imho.

Learn from my mistakes or you will probably have the same outcome.

 

Hey diesel, we have similar systems and the same monitor, what kind of fps do you get in games?

 

Thanks for the response, I am looking to make my laptop vr capable for race and flight sims with the intention to build a desktop after incorporating whatever gpu I purchase. The sentence that alienware state that worries me is:

“Certain video manufacturers may modify their video card VBIOS causing incompatibility with the graphics amplifier (Superclock, Overclock, Dual and Triple Fans).”

But if you can assure me that a card that fits is a card that works I’ll be a happy man!!

 

It may work but when you try to use it for VR, you will not be a happy man imho.

 

All founder edition cards work.

I use an evga 1070gtx ftw2 card myself. Had to mod the case for it to work.

 

TomC69, you are worrying me!! What’s everyone else’s experience with AGA + VR?

 

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You should be worried for a good reason For VR, the AGA is a waste of space, time, and $'s imho. You will notice that no one on this thread that has actually used an AGA with a VR system (like Viv, Oculus, WMR) has had any success.

 

Tom are we talking unusable vr or poor quality? If it’s workable I’m ok with it as it’s a stepping stone to a desktop build. If it’s unusable I’m honestly gutted...

 

I used the AGA for 2 years and I did connect the Oculus a couple of times. and what you describe was not what I experienced and it also seems unlikely it is a hardware error as I have explained before.

Did you even try basic VR benchmarks such as the SteamVR benchmark and documented your findings?

As long if you dont your internal laptop screen, connect your VR set directly to the GPU of the graphics amp you should not have any bottleneck. If you still have it can be unoptimized software and if your iGPU interferes disable the intel GPU while using the VR set to make sure it is running without any interference.

 

Honestly, the main game I play is Diablo 3 which my setup is laughably overkill for haha. I plan to start playing Overwatch at some point and want to replay Crysis 1-3 again so those should be a better fit for such a rig. Diablo is regularly around 160 FPS with all settings maxed

 

Based on Tom’s earlier posts, he’s getting terrible gains from his AGA on non-VR games as well. I would take everything he says with a grain of salt. If you’re getting the expected gains for non-VR and have your stuff set up correctly (i.e. external monitor and headset plugged into the AGA, not the laptop HDMI port) you should be good to go.


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I really did not get a chance to try very many non-vr games with my 'borrowed' external monitor so my % improvement estimates may be a little low. Obviously you plug your headset or external monitor into the AGA gpu card's hdmi, duh! If you have some actual current VR experience using the AGA, please share this. Thanks.

Aside; If the AGA w/gtx1080ti was so good and cost effective to use to improve VR performance then why aren't the VR forums and YouTube brimming with this information??? Probably because it does not work well with VR, nor is it a cost effective solution for most imho. If you actually talk to Dell Support guys you will find that even they are reluctant to recommend the AGA for VR improvement purposes.

 

The AGA/1080ti combo should still give you much higher gains with the internal display than you’ve reported. If you’re only seeing a 10% improvement over your laptop’s onboard video when gaming with the laptop display, there is something wrong with your card, AGA, or drivers.


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As to your second point, if the AGA/1080ti is so bad for VR performance, why do you seem to be the only person who has posted on here and reddit complaining about it?


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Probably because I'm only one silly enough to try to do this, and admit the fact, lol! Actually, some openGL games in non-vr got lower fps with the AGA/1080ti than my internal gtx1060. Realflight 8 (RC flight simulator) for example went from 300fps to 100fps, still ok to view though.

Honestly, the help and advice I've gotten from this thread has not been very helpful and has only cost me more time and $'s. Reddit is not much better sometimes, lots of bs guys posting bs many times. Still, at least there are also many useful posts there as well.

 

Why are you unwilling to accept the idea that your AGAs poor performance is somehow caused by a defective driver, card, or AGA itself? I have never heard of anyone report a performance decrease going from their mobile 1060 to an AGA/1080ti.
Do you know if there is a demo version of RealFlight? I’d gladly test it out on my setup. Are there any other games that you saw take a performance hit?


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Why? Because all my drivers are up to date and everything works great, sans the AGA. I even got Dell to send me a new AGA to try out but I got the same results so I sent it back to them. It was very nice of them to do this and also check out my 17r4 drivers/bios was up to date as well. If you want to try Realflight you can google realflight 7.5 demo and download it. There isn't any RF8 demo but RF7.5 uses the same non-vr rendering. This was the only non-vr game/app that I tried which gave me a lower fps hit btw.

 

So here we get the issue, you primarily use the VR headset in combination with your AGA but without an external monitor connected. VR already need more performance than showing the same on a regular screen (2 screen panels VS 1) but you are also creating a bottleneck by piping your screen signal back to your internal monitor. I see you are unwilling to comment on my previous posts where I pointed this out but I will reply again for other users who might run into the same issue because you are using the setup in a non optimal way.

When did we ever take the low tier Alienware support guys here seriously after all the misinformation? I mean a lot of them state that the 99c throttling is by design as well. Why there isnt a lot of information? WEll VR didnt take off as big as a lot of people including me hoped for.


Again, if you want the maximum performance, HOOK UP AN EXTERNAL MONITOR, close the screen lid and connect the VR headset to the GPU in the AGA. As I said, the AGA is nothing mroe than an external PCI express slot and the laptop is treating it as such. Its not doing anything special until you decide to use the internal screen, than it starts to pipe back the screen signal back to the laptop screen which causes a bottleneck.

 

Hey all,

This may have been asked, but some games seem to only use my intel hd card rather than the 1080 I have through the AGA. 1) can I disable the intel card safely? 2) is an external monitor necessary for peak performance?
Thanks

 

1. No. You can use the Nvidia control panel to designate individual programs to run on integrated or discrete graphics, however.

2. Yes, but it may not matter depending on your situation. I have the 1080ti FE and 13r3 OLED 2560x1440 display and every game I have played (except Dey’s Ex) can run at Ultra settings in excess of 60 fps with the internal display. The 5-10% performance hit caused by routing the video back to the laptop isn’t noticeable because my 1080ti is able to maintain 1440p at greater than the 60 Hz refresh rate without breaking a sweat. If you’re going to use an external monitor I highly recommend going with a gsync capable display.

 

Thanks for the reply, that's what I figured. Like you I have the 17r3 with oled monitor. So I've had no issues with running ultra on any game at 60fps. However, I am now having issues in WoW of all games, I am only getting at most 40 fps with settings turned down. However, if I connect my old monitor which was only 1600x900 max res I get 100fps with max settings. Any suggestions? It's like wow is running off the HD card even though designated to run off gpu.

 

Open the Nvidia control panel, find WoW on the list of apps and set to run on the gtx 1080.

https://us.answers.acer.com/app/ans...ow-to-change-nvidia-optimus-graphics-settings


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Thanks, but unfortunately that is what I had done and it hasn't fixed the issue.

 

You could try plugging a headless hdmi dongle into your AGA. This should force it to utilize the card in the AGA rather than onboard video.


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The Intel iGP is ONLY used with the built in screen as that is the only one connected to it.

 

He’s asking about gaming on the built in screen


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I have a 1070 in my laptop and an AGA with a 1080ti, when I get home tomorrow I will run some VR benchmarks on my Samsung Odyssey and report my results. I had never bothered before because SkyrimVR ran great on my AGA/1080ti and I did not feel the need but it looks like there is some question to if the AGA effect VR performence.

 

OK, please bare with me, I'm not the most PC expert on the block and +60yo. So, let me get this straight;

If I buy an inexpensive ($100-200) external monitor (which I do not really need, and is going to just take up a lot of room on my not so spacious gaming desk) and hook this up to my gtx1080ti card in my AGA (say via its data display port) this should work ok? Am I better to use my 17r4's mini display port?

Then if I go to the win10 display settings I can project everything to the external monitor by have it turn off my 17r4 laptop screen. I cannot actually disable my internal intel graphics because it is integrated. However I believe that the only the laptop display uses it. I have all my 3d apps setup to use the higher powered nvidia gpu, including PhysX. I don't want to fully close my laptop screen because I still need access to its keyboard and trackpad for some VR flight and racing simulators and I don't really want to buy an external keyboard/mouse as well.

So, if I do all this I should first of all see a big performance improvement over my internal gtx1060 with the external monitor and the laptop monitor switched off? Also, then when I plug my oculus rift to the gtx1080ti in the AGA's hdmi, plus one of the aga usb ports, then 2x touch controller sensors to other AGA usb ports, I should see a big improvement in VR performance.

Does all this sound right? Thanks for your help.

 

I'll be very interested to see how you make out! Many thanks.

 

Yes you should see a bigger performance improvement, by utilizing the laptop display the AGA is forced to use some of the available bandwidth on the connector to send the video signal back to the laptop and this causes a performance hit. By utilizing an external display and turning the laptop display off you will get "almost" full performance out of the video card installed in the AGA. The way VR works is everything is rendered on the primary display and also sent to the VR headset, so if you utilzing the laptops display you will still get the performance hit.

 

Sorry if I came of a bit annoyed. But yeah thats the case. I know it isnt ideal but as long if there isnt an external monitor connected (press windows key + P, select second screen only) you will have the internal screen its performance loss. you still can use the laptop's keyboard in that case. and yeah all the display cables have to be hooked into the 1080TI directly. If you did all that you should have a huge performance gain.

Apart from the desktop situation setup of using an external screen, etc the AGA doesnt offer a huge benefit on the current gen laptop (it did on the previous gen with the maxwell generation of GPU's). You should and this is from my experience from using the AGA with an external monitor. Have a performance degradation of merely a couple of %.

You can verify it for yourself by using some benchmarks with and without an external screen.

 

OK, I'm ordering an external monitor with a display port and I'll give it another shot. Thanks for your advice and I'll let you know how I make out. Cheers.

 

It should be working out. Make sure to reboot the laptop with the second screen only (or disable the intel iGPU in the control panel after selecting the second screen for troubleshooting purposes) and it should be good to go.

 

So I got home and ran the benchmarks and was surprised by the results, first I ran 3dmark as a control and got the following:

Internal 1070: 5219
AGA 1080ti on Laptop Display: 7648
AGA 1080ti on External Display: 7918

There is a clear increase in performance as expected for all 3, I then installed vrmark and ran some test and this is where things became strange.

Internal 1070: 6752
AGA 1080ti on Laptop Display: 6895
AGA 1080ti on External Display: 9211

There was almost no difference in performance when using the AGA on Laptop Display and the Internal 1070 as you described in all your posts. I used GPU-Z to confirm that the Discrete GPU in the laptop and the AGA were used during both test. I would expect a bigger difference between the two and maybe someone smarter knows the cause of this. But as everyone has already stated the External Display caused a huge jump in performance. I did run the AGA benchmarks again and received the following just to be sure there was no glitch:

AGA 1080ti on Laptop Display: 6754
AGA 1080ti on External Display: 9195

Again same results, no gain over the internal laptop GPU when using laptop display but huge increase on external display. Bottom line is if you want to use AGA with VR you have to also use an External Display.

 

Yes this is exactly why the external display is so important. Because the AGA will be piping back twice the amount of screen data back to the internal screen instead of 1 screen worth of data. VR is being counted as 2 separate screens.

The performance degradation is not that bit but still present when just piping back the GPU image to the internal screen only.

 

@Papusan @Mr. Fox
i am having fun testing with the amplifier on my AW 15R1. how do you see the results ?
i am using a gtx 1080ti aorus xtreme. i have to remove the amplifier cover because it doesn't fit lol. but i dont care, is beauty to see my grpahics card glowing
i am also using an external AW25 monitor ( some of the good things on this days )
https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/27668858?
i managed to have always 3.5ghz is like my base clock now. using the unlocked high performance plan. with an undervolt it consume 46W at full load, so i dont have throttling

 

Thanks guys, looking forward to receiving my new Asus VG248QE 144Hz gaming monitor later this week and trying it out with my 17r4 laptop w/internal 1060, with its screen shutdown and AGA/1080ti. I'll let you know how I make out.

 

Hi all,

I am just wondering if anyone running a 1080ti in an AGA could chime in on this and answer if this is normal operation.

I have an Alienware 17 R5 (i9 1080) & when I'm at home I close the laptop screen, connect it to my AGA with a 1080ti FE, external display and keyboard and mouse.

Upon first connecting the AGA, the 1080ti only showed up as a Microsoft Basic Video Adapter in device manager (or something to that affect)

Reinstalling the NOTEBOOK GeForce drivers reinstalled only the notebook 1080's drivers and not the 1080ti's, now I have read that this is what you are supposed to do, but this did not work and I guess it is because there is no NOTEBOOK version of the 1080ti … am I right?

Anyway so I installed the DESKTOP GeForce drivers and the 1080ti installed perfectly fine, however what I have noticed now in device manager and Alienware Command Center is, my notebook GTX 1080 has not been disabled. The notebook 1080 runs along side the 1080ti.

I would like to point out that there is no issues when gaming or benchmarking using the AGA and 1080ti, it definitely is using the 1080ti inside the AGA and not the notebook 1080, as I have verified that the GPU usage and clock speeds of the notebook 1080 in EVGA precision are at 0% and 139mhz respectively.

So is this normal operation for a 1080ti in an AGA?

Cheers,

 

Ya, there isn't any 1080ti notebook driver so I think you need to use the desktop version. What I did with my 17r4 (i7 7700hq, gtx1060) was to install the 1080ti desktop driver (just the video driver btw) after the AGA first booted up and showed the Microsoft basic driver in device manager. The next reboot it showed only the 1080ti display driver and that it was working properly.

When I shutdown, then disconnected the AGA and rebooted, it initially showed the same basic driver but after a couple of minutes it correctly re-installed my 1060/1070/1080 drivers.

I'm not sure I would believe anything that AW command centre tells you. It may just be telling you that you have an internal 1080? Have a look at device manager and if the 1080 shows it is disabled and your 1080ti is working properly, I would not worry about it.

Otherwise, I guess you could simply shutdown, disconnect the AGA, reboot, and check device manager to see that it goes back to just your internal 1080. Then shutdown, reconnect AGA, reboot, and see if it switches back to the 1080ti.

 

Install the nvidia driver package in laptop only mode, after install ifntel hd graphics. Make sure windows update is turned off for these drivers.after reboot with the AGA and the whole process of booting up should be quicker. Wait a bit after startup for windows to load up the drivers.

 

And this also works for a 1080ti in an aga? Thanks.

 

yeah it does. in fact the driver packages are exactly the same. But windows update ruins the driver installations on these systems.

 

Thanks for the reply, I cant help but stress to you all that my 1080 ti is working as intended, its installed and working, its just that my notebook 1080 isn't disabled in device manager?

Can you confirm that in your device manager your 1060 is no longer showing under display adapters? … or is the intel hd, 1060 and 1080ti showing together?

Mine is showing the intel hd gtx 1080 and gtx 1080ti from the AGA all together, but good news is that the laptop is using the 1080ti (and intel hd although listed is disabled due to having a g sync internal and external display)

I'm not sure what you are trying to say but I have installed the 1080ti perfectly fine using the desktop drivers and the card is performing as it should its just my notebook (internal) 1080 is not disabled like Alienware advertises that it does. As guessed, its because there is no notebook driver for the 1080ti so it doesn't know to disable the 1080 so It just runs them together.

I can also confirm if I turn off the laptop, disconnect the AGA and turn it back on that the notebook 1080 takes over perfectly fine with no hiccups or drivers needing to be reinstalled... which is as designed. I just thought that it would disable in device manager when using the AGA but if it doesn't and its by design then im happy.

cheers for the input guys

 

ah okay so no reisntalls are needed? YOu got the Gsync model? Because this behavious is only seen as far as I know on gsync models.

I have an optimus model so in my case the 1070 is being disabled.