Low Fps During Gaming

Dear Alienware M15x users,

I have a 9 month old M15x, initially it worked brilliantly on games such as battlefield bad company 2, call of duty modern warfare 2. However lately I tried playing call of duty black ops and its become unplayable with fps lower than 20.
I tried fiddling with the graphics setting and still its impossible to play multiplayer or campaign smoothly even at the lowest settings. I've seen people being able to play at 1920x1080 with 50 fps average. My question is could there be something wrong with my GPU or laptop as a whole?
My specs are;
i7-820QM
8GB 1333MHz RAM
Nvidia GTX260M 1GB VRAM (driver version 266.58)
screen resolution 1920x1080.

 

Black ops had problem with system resources, but they released a patch that fixes it. have u tried that? my vaio(most of brands use same hardware so, not only alienware users) ran poorly on unpatched black ops, but after it ran very well.
Try running different games, like Civilization V, it requires a lot of system resources, and if it runs well, then it's not ur hardware.
Also try updating drivers
system requirements are obviously not the issue, so
GOOD LUCK!

 

ok thanks i will try that

 

Ok, first of all make sure you didn't enable stealth mode accidentaly (or whether it didn't activate itself as it does from time to time)

Then go to the config files, both multi player and single player and search for the following entries:

seta r_multiGpu "0"
seta r_multithreaded_device "1"

They must be set like this.... but on a lot of systems they are the exact opposite which is wrong for your machine. If you have multiGPU "1" change it to "0" and when you have the multithreaded setting on "0" set it to "1".

This tweak massively improved the performance for me.

 

yea first thing i checked was the stealth mode since i use it often..
but where do i find the config files? isit somewhere in my HDD or is it somewhere inside the game that i need to put those commands?

 

My M15x is dead atm, but it should be in

programs(x86)/steam/steam apps/black ops/players

or similar, can't remember it exactly atm, you hould be able to find it somewhere there... it's called config.cfg if I'm not mistaken. There's one for the single player and one for the multiplayer.

Best thing to open it is notepad++, but the standard microsoft text editor will work too.

 

ok yea i managed to that and i did see a good improvement in performance for about 5 minutes in a match. but the as it started to get hot really quickly the fps started spiking and i could only get a average of 19 fps on medium resolution and no anti-aliasing. Im starting to think that there is some issue with my laptop now because now i can't even play the crysis 2 demo which ran perfectly before. so idk whats going on and i made sure it wasnt on stealth mode or low power consumption setting and everything.
thanks for your help though.

 

Have you checked your temps? sounds like thermal throttling to me.

 

Yeah. sounds like throttling. Which BIOS do you run? If you're still on a revision older than A08 update the BIOS and check again.

 

use gpu-z to make a log file of your game play and upload it here.

 

haha i was using the BIOS version A05... now that i updated it to A09 it runs soo much better at even higher settings.

thanks to everyone for your help. i wouldnt have been able to figure this out myself.

thanks again.

 

Hehe, yeah, it's (almost) always good to have the system up to date...