Very irritating high/low DPS cycles on 1080p HDMI output

For an i7 M11XR2:

My laptop works like a beast on its natural LCD. I have an 8k+ 3DMark 2006 score and so far have yet to witness a game (other than WoW @ high settings in 25-man ICC) to give me any trouble in FPS department. Everything runs smoothly.

I read a few people on these forums talking about how their performance degraded substantially when they switched to an external monitor with a different resolution. Tonight, I connected the laptop to a 50'' plasma TV using the HDMI port and adjusted the resolution to 1080p (1920 x 1080). Everything looks gorgeous. However, there is a major problem that exists in every game I tried (Disciples II, Mafia 2 demo, Dragon Age: Origins and WoW) on the TV screen. The FPS fluctuates in cycles between low and high values.

For example, when playing Disciples II, the FPS goes back and forth between 15 and 45 and it's very noticeable. Same thing with Mafia 2 demo. In medium settings on laptop LCD I have around 30FPS. When I connect to the TV with 1080p, the FPS decreases naturally due to higher resolution, to around 23-25FPS but every 2-3 seconds or so it dips to 5-6FPS then jumps back to normal values. It is very irritating and basically makes games near unplayable.

Once again, I have zero problems with these games playing them on 1366x720 on the LCD screen. I wonder what the deal is...

 

You can try enabling vsync to have a more fluid framerate
but really, at higher resolutions you aren't going to have the same results than on the native res. of the m11x

 

Doesn't this have something to do with the CPU clock jumping all the time with these i-series processors...?

 

is your speedstep enabled or disabled ? and turboboost?

 

Can you give more detail on the cycle aspect of what you're seeing? Is it a random interval? Does it happen if you output to 1366 x 768 or something closer to that?

 

To answer some of the questions,

Yes, I do have speedstep and turboboost enabled. My CPU is OC'ed to 164MHz.

When I output to 1366x768 it doesn't happen. All games play smoothly or at least at a fixed FPS. In terms of the cycle aspect, no it's not a random interval and that's what's really interesting. The FPS basically goes back and forth between a high value (say 25 FPS on Mafia) to a low value (5 FPS on Mafia) every 3-4 seconds. It stays at 25 for 3-4 seconds then moves to 5 for 3-4 seconds and then jumps back up.

I can totally understand a drop in performance due to going from 1366x768 to 1920x1080, hell I'd even settle for an average 15 FPS throughout the game instead of 25, what I don't understand are these awkward cycles that makes the games quite unenjoyable on 1080p HD.

Note: Since last night I have also tried this with Dell Nvidia drivers from their support site, the same problem. Totally lost here.

 

That is odd sounding. Would be interested in seeing if it occurs on another display/TV. You're seeing this on the High Performance power plan, right?

 

Yes, high performance plan. What I will try tonight is setting the resolution to something lower on the TV and see if this happens again.

 

Just chiming in here, I seem to get a LOT lower framerates on an external monitor through HDMI, same resolution compared to the m11x display. Weird, and annoying.

 

Perhaps yet another optimus limitation? I hope it's just driver related.

 

I had this problem with WoW also, where the FPS would fluctuate. Especially in areas that were not graphically intensive. Gave up talking about it really. The fact is I play WoW on alot of diff comps and it doesnt do it on any of them. I actually prefer to play WoW on my mac mini with the nvidia 320.

I mean it does it the second you load WoW at 1080p. Do you see the snow fall at the log in screen go into slow motion every few seconds?