M11x Gaming Discussion Thread

If I get a desktop, I'd receive a free Just Cause 2 coupon with the Fermi card... if I do get a desktop, care to swap games or something? You buy me one, I give you JC2?

 

I just installed Batman AA from Steam and everything was set to very high, 1378 x 766 resolution and turned off v-sync and physx. I was completely blown away how awesome this game looks and how smooth it plays at these settings. I do not even have my cpu overclocked. I played this on my PS3, but the graphics cannot compare to the M11x. I also just benchmarked the game using the in-game tool and got an average of 52 fps! I was really surprised! Does the new Splinter Cell game look and play this great on the M11x?

 

Oh, and what does stereoscopic 3d drivers do for the game (Batman AA)? Can I play the game in 3d with some red and blue 3d glasses?

 

Is that a r1 or new r2 you are using with Batman asylum?

 

It's the R1 at normal clock speeds. I only set the AA to 2x, which may make a difference?

 

Stereoscopic could be looking cross eyed too.

http://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/img/3DfreneticAR051607.jpg cross your eyes until theres one image in the middle, try it a few times to get things sharp.

 

It'll make a huge difference. No real benefit with 8x AA, I barely see any graphical improvement when maxing out the settings on my rig to playing on my M11x.

 

This is really interesting. I had no idea that that game ran so well not overclocked. I am kind of jonesing to set mine back to normal clock speeds (I pretty much OC'ed it out of the box when I got mine last week) and see what it does on a variety of games.

 

Unless you're benchmarking there's little point in using the stock clockspeed.

 

Does anybody know the DPI for the display? At 1366x768 w/ an 11" screen I imagine the text is pretty darn small & hard to read. Granted it's primarily a gaming machine but I still would like to be able to read a web page!

 

^ just because of the large resolution doesn't mean you have to resort to reading small text. In Windows 7, there's an option in the display for you to make everything display larger while keeping the same resolution. Don't worry about it.

 

If you go into the display settings, there is an option to turn the text size up to "Medium - 125%". That's what I did. Worked great. I did have to go into Firefox and set the minimum text size to 16, though. Maybe it was 13, I don't remember now.

I'm 36, and have no problems using this laptop for several hours at a time.

 

i just installed NFS Shift, while the frame rate is ok 45-50 is not smooth as GRID for example ... CPU Bound maybe??

 

Good to know about the increase in pixels. I have tried that w/ limited success in the past b/c some apps don't "adhere" to the scaling. I was just curious of the exact DPI b/c I know right about 117dpi is all my eyes can handle. That's the dpi of the m15x w/ the 1600x900 screen.

 

Would someone mind running the Final Fantasy 14 benchmark to see how that game is going to run?

Thanks
FINAL FANTASY XIV Official Benchmark

 

FXIV Benchmark
Low = Ok framerate, smooth with stutters with tons of action, possible very slight sound lag
http://img228.imageshack.us/img228/7876/benchmark720p.png

High = Poorly, constant stutter, sound lag

http://img203.imageshack.us/img203/7112/benchmark1080p.png

The benchmark consisted of cutscenes. No gameplay.

Sorry this post couldn't be more detailed(or grammar friendly). Work in a few minutes. Hope this helps.

EDIT: according to the benchmark page
[Under 1500] Insufficient Performance
Does not meet specifications for running the game.

 

Thanks again for running that, answers my question as to if it would run or not. Looks like its a no go.

 

Just played a round of Bad Company 2 on my R1.

I left everything set to default, I just turned the shadows to "low".

It played perfectly fine online over WiFi. This is incredibly exciting, I had no idea that game would run so well on this laptop. Framerate appeared to be mid-30s?

 

BFBC2 IMO online plays very well. I have no problems with it. If you start using a FPS counter then it'll just seem bad but it's probably 20-30 but plays very smooth to feel like a good solid 30FPS.. no worries, just play the game and have fun!

 

Yep, I've had great luck with Bad Company 2 on my m11x, both single and multiplayer.

 

Would you mind checking something for me? Set all the settings to lowest possible (including in the settings.ini file that you have to edit with Notepad). Your settings.ini should look like this at the end, but at the correct 1366x768 resolution (my resolution is messed up).

Now download and install FRAPS. Play a match or so and figure out the average FPS (or record the whole match and upload to YouTube). Now without changing any settings, drop the resolution down as far as you can go in the in-game menu, and run FRAPS again.

I'm interested to see whether there will be any significant FPS boost on the R1 with significantly reducing the resolution.

 

^ just curious, how much more FPS are you wanting. You'll prob see a jump up no more than 5FPS for lowing to say 800x600 but you're playing an first person shooter here. don't you want a higher res? It plays well at 1280x720, I dunno, but I like native res or damn near it.

 

I need BC2 to run 40+ at 640x480 or better at all times. My skill and performance is mostly limited on my X3100 because I can't maintain a stable framerate above 30. I currently play L4D2 on my Intel X3100 IGP at 640x480 and I'm placing usually first or second, but I know I can do a ton more (played BC2 on a G73 and wow, difference in my round end was staggering).

 

Honestly, on Low, I thought it ran pretty well, so I'm not sure why it scored so low. Sure, it wasn't the prettiest settings it could be on, but the game won't be entirely placed in cutscene. It reminds of Just Cause 2, where the cutscenes were slow, but gameplay was fine. I would like to see how it runs on a revision 2 m11x.

 

Manage to run BlazBlue Continuum Shift at 60 fps...lowest fps is 58...nice..

 

OK, I (mostly) did this. I am packing for vacation tomorrow, so I don't have a ton of time to game, sorry.

The short answer is there wasn't a ton of difference. If I slammed everything to "low" detail at both the default resolution and 1024x768, it didn't seem to make much of a difference in FPS. It seesawed right around 35-40, diving down to 25 about the same time it went up to 50.

Extremely playable, IMO. It is worth taking a 2-3 fps hit to turn the details up.

 

Thank you. I just wanted to review the impact of a resolution swap. I'm well accustomed to gaming at 640x480 without display scaling (Read: With Black Bars) since it gets me more frames on my IGP.

 

Without OCing anything the m11x played Assassian's Creed 2 amazingly well for me. I'm just shocked that it looks so much better on such a small screen than on the consoles. Gonna mess around with Dead Space when it gets that Steam Deal

 

Where did you get BlazBlue for PC? I'd love to have it for PC, I have the PSP and 360 versions already.

 

Played Oblivion on my m11x R1 for a while, and it has 30-40FPS maxed, but it has some annoying stutters, every 10 sec or so, to about 10 FPS. Does anyone know a solution?

 

Probably Hard Drive I/O. Try to close down hard disk intensive applications. Since you're playing Oblivion, you can probably kill whatever AV you have, your music player, that kind of thing.

 

Anyone know what the highest settings you could get on the Just Cause 2 demo without stuttering?
Too many pages in this topic now, and it's probably been answered, but hey.

Edit: I got the M11x R1 / 2GB RAM / 1.7GHz overclocked SU7300 / NViDiA GT 335M

I'd also like to know if adding 2GB of RAM makes a big difference to how I'd run things.
Thanks. ;D

Edit2: I get an error when I try to run it. http://img62.imageshack.us/f/26815652.png/
That's what it is, if anyone knows how to help. I know lots of people have this error with the demo, but how can I fix it, if possible?

 

I've been playing Mass Effect 1 on it and it runs pretty bad. Does anyone know a solution?

 

Turn shadows down? Iono, Mass Effect 1 and 2 run fine on my R1.

 

ME2 runs a lot better than ME1 but ME1 didn't run bad bad, just not as smooth and optimized as ME2.

 

Has anyone with the i7 got dolphin working at a decent speed yet? Either with
Zelda TP or Skies od Arcadia?

I've finally got it working but only at 15fps which is beyond unplayable.

 

dolphin requires 2.5Ghz Dual core so I'm afraid you're out of luck still. Dolphin gamecube and wii are both very slow for me too. I was wondering if the i7 would help, but it looks like not.

 

hey does anyone know if the m11x r1 should play 'all points bulletin' on at least min specs?

my m11x is the:

su7300, 4gb ram, 500gb hard drive etc

Minimum System Requirements
Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista, 2.0+ GHZ Single Core Processor, 512 Mbytes of System RAM, NVIDIA 6200+ or ATI Radeon 9600+ Video Card

Recommended System Requirements
2.4+ GHZ Dual Core Processor, 1 GBytes of System RAM, NVIDIA 7800GTX+ or ATI x1300+ Video Card

sorry if this has been disscussed but thats alot of pages to look through!

 

Has anyone tried a 25-man raid on an m11x r2 yet? I was wondering what kind of settings it can run at.

 

Apparently the R1 can play WoW on Ultra on a flying mount in some really big space, I can't remember the name sorry. Not really a WoW player.

 

I was in Keys to the City and it was a bit iffy on the R1, the social zones were fine, and for the most part the action zones were fine. The real problem came while driving, I think I was maxing out the HDD or something, because the HDD lights were constantly on and if I drove too fast I would get ahead of it and get some bad pop-in. In the end I don't know if you could play APB fulltime on an R1. Sometimes I was hitting 45-50 FPS, and could do over 30 FPS average on high. However, when I would drive fast or somehow the loading would get behind it would drop to 15 and take a a bit to catch up. I don't really know what to make of it, or even if the i7 would help with these problems.

WoW runs fine on all high last time I tried it.

 

I know general WoW play was pretty fine on the R1 however I'd heard intensive 25 man raids didn't do quite so well. I was just wondering with the i5's and i7's if it opened the door a little more to larger and newer end-game raiding.

 

If only lol.

No you actually need a specialized screen (120hz) as well as some expensive stereoscopic glasses .

 

I run starcraft 2 on ultra, on the native screen
no framerate drops, touchpad is absolute crap for trying to pull off macro rushes and forget about micro
beyond that, everyone went fine on mine

specs
m11x r1
su7300 oc to 1.7ghz
4gb ram
obviously with the nvidia card


but if you use the crappy intel card, you can run the game on lowest smoothly

 

This is just silly, the requirements, even for WOTLK, are like a 1.2 Ghz P4 and 32 megs of video ram. The M11X is like 4 times the CPU power and 30 times the video ram, pretty sure it will run just fine. It is possible you might need to turn shadows down or something in a large raid, but there is no possible way it is CPU bound.

 

I'll be honest, I'm not techy, I only know what I've read from other people. However my understanding is the bottleneck for WoW on the old m11x was the CPU. Everyday play was fine, small groups were fine but 25 mans in Icecrown Citadel caused big hits performance wise. Which is why in the end I never bought it as I was looking for a laptop to raid on endgame. Of course it's easy to get people to try WoW out but much harder to get them to test the machine out with heavy AoE in a 25 man raid (which is what the real test is for WoW players).

Sorry if that's silly.

 

The quick answer is: the CPU has no part in the graphics of a larger raid, it has no part is rendering the aoe, it has no part in rendering 25 people with shadows. All of this is a GPU issue, more precisely it is a GPU bandwidth issue. The M11X only has a 128 bit bus, versus a 256 bit in most modern cards. This means, while all Ultra might run fine 90% of the time, when you get in a large raid suddenly the card runs out of bandwidth and your fps drop. This is in no way CPU related.

I really wish I knew someone in an ICC guild to test it, but I would challenge them to drop shadows down lower in the raid, and see the effect. As an example in another game, Shadows on medium in Crysis gets you 25-45 FPS, shadows on low in crysis with no other changes gets you 45-85 FPS. Pretty much dropping the shadows one notch doubles your FPS. You also never hear of people saying "Oh I tried all low settings and still got slowdowns", if you were to drop everything to low and still got 20 FPS then yea, that is a CPU issue, but no one ever does. They get slowdowns on all ultra and blame the CPU, which is simply incorrect.

The M11X is primarily a bandwidth bound machine. I think the problem is ever since the M11X released anytime anyone had any slowdown at all they didn't try to tweak, they just blamed the CPU. Now people are getting the i7 and finding out that it only gets like 3 FPS more in GTA4, and 1 FPS more in Crysis, so all this time it was GPU bound, and not the CPU's fault.

 

I am in an ICC 25 hard mode guild that is currently 9/12 into the instance on HMs. I raid exclusively on the m11x as it is my only computer. I can tell you from experience, not hearsay that this thing does OKAY in 25 mans, and that is not set on ultra. If I set this to ultra, the laptop gets so hot you don't want to touch it. My frame rates sit around 60 or so anytime I am not in a 25 man. The AOE from 25 mans however does cause my frames to drop down in the teens.

I am by no means a computer expert and not sure how or if I can improve this. What I have done in the mean time is drop the settings from ultra to a custom settings which have helped a little bit, but nothing substantial. I still see low frames in 25 man raids when there is a lot of AOE going on. I am overclocking my cpu from the bios, and might consider turning that off to see if it reduces some of the heat from the machine, but so far, I would say that wow 25 man raids on this machine are better than average, but by no means are they perfect. Even on lower settings, I still get a ton of low frames on aoe fights.


If anyone can suggest a way for me to get more fps out of this machine, please do so. It runs so hot in 25 man raids and the frame rates are not that great. I haven't even bothered trying ultra again because I am seeing rates in the teens in 25 man raids on lower settings.

 

well one thing you should try is set max fps in WoW. that keeps the temps down a lot from my experience. that won't help the min fps though which you're dipping but have you tried turning special fx down? Like the shiny stuff like for aoe spells

 

What are your settings? For instance, you should leave textures on ultra, because that won't have an effect, but you should turn anything shadow or dynamic light related down, as that is gonna have the most effect. I don't have WoW installed right now or I would boot up and try to give you a great config. Anyway, if the slowdown is only happening during graphically intensive sections of the game then it is a GPU/bandwidth issue, and should be fixable with the right tweaks.

One other thing I would be interested to see would be if you turned off your page file. I would wager that could get you some pretty substantial FPS increases.