serious performance dip m17x

My m17x came in about a week and a half ago. I bought crysis, installed it, and it ran great on very high settings at 1440 x 900 resolution getting about 20-35 fps. It ran great for a while too im pretty far on the first game. I recently went out of the state for a week. I came back, turned it on, for some reason half the keyboard flickered and didnt light up. That got me nervous but once i opened the alienware command center it lit up. I played crysis for about half an hour, no problems. Turned my laptop on sleep. Came back, turned it back on, opened crysis, and it opened in a window for some reason and the resolution was set to the setting under 1440 x 900 i think it was 1280 x 720. I put the resolution back, set it to fullscreen mode, loaded my game...what? I was getting literally about 2 fps and each object in the game was loading seperately and took forever to load. Also for some reason the gun i was holdindg seemed to be out of position, like it came from the bottom of the screen instead of the corner like normal, and looked out of wack. I've tried to run crysis a few times, clearing any background tasks and everything, but same problem. Also, i remember when i first got the game i let it scan for optimal settings and it set everything to high. Now when i scan it sets everything to medium. Anyone know what could be the problem? My specs should be in im sig. I did a dxdiag if that helps. any help is appreciated

 

What power state is your machine running in ? IE high performance ? Also putting your machine to sleep can sometimes take things outta whack, did you reboot after you saw you were only getting 2 fps ? sounds like it reverted to the 9400m with those FPS your seeing .

 

Hi XxDAINBRAMAGExX ,
First of all, do you have all your updates? Crysis is really buggy on the original code. Also, I wouldn't recommend putting your computer sleep, as it does cause issues with Command Center and returning the computer to a normal state. Have you restarted the computer and tried again?

Update: Yeah.. what quad said lol. I didn't notice that the diagnostic did say it was a 9400. You need to restart and hit your stealth button. It won't switch back to your 260s automatically.

Thanks,
Gabe

 

I think Quad has it pegged... however also make sure you are running the game as the administrator

 

No administrator required. Even unpatched, it will launch properly. His computer woke up with the 9400 instead of the 260s. It will resolve once he enables stealth.

Gabe

 

ok so just restart and enable stealth mode?

 

Yup. First restart to take care of the issues that putting the computer into sleep caused. Then, press the stealth key and it will switch back to your 260. A good visual indication is that your SLI hybrid tray icon will have two green bars for the 260 and one green bar for the 9400. Keep in mind that your screen will go blank for a second as it switches to your 260s in real time.

Thanks,
Gabe

 

yep, that did it. thanks for the help

 

I forgot to mention that you can always use stealth mode in place of sleep. Just enable stealth mode, press fn+11 to turn off your alien fx, and close the lid (don't forget to set fusion to "do nothing" when the lid is closed). Even though it's set to "do nothing" the computer will still turn the LCD off when you close it.

Thanks,
Gabe