Studio 1735's ATi 3650 performance

So, I got myself a shiny 1735. I'm not a big gamer, but I wanted something that could play the odd game and specifically World of Warcraft. With this in mind (and the fact that I've never yet met an integrated graphics solution that didn't suck so hard that Dyson wanted to patent it), I went with the ATi Radeon Mobility HD 3650 gfx upgrade. I've never been a fan of ATi so it wouldn't have been my first choice of card, but given that it's about the same choice as the vegetarian "option" in restaurants (ie, take it, or go hungry) I figured it was worth a punt.

Got WoW installed and played about with settings. To cut a long story short, it looks absolutely gorgeous and will happily fling the game about with all the settings ramped up to max at 1920x1200. But.

WoW seems to run... I'm struggling for the exact word, but it's "choppy". When you're running / flying, the terrain isn't smooth, it kinda jerks past in quick bursts. It doesn't feel like the card is struggling per sé, it's like the sort of thing that you'd expect to be fixed in a driver update.

I grabbed the latest Catalyst drivers from ATi (8.8). They appear to install fine, along with the control centre which is missing from the stock Dell install, but it doesn't actually appear to update the drivers from 8.4. Presumably this is down to it being a laptop adapter rather than a discrete ATi card, but I've not as yet come up with a workaround to make it install though I'm sure it's possible. Anyway.

I took a closer look at the graphics card. The stock 3650 from ATi runs at 600MHz core, 500MHz RAM. yet the adapter supplied by Dell appears to be underclocked, the memory is the same speed but the core is running at just 450MHz.

Experimenting with ATiTool, I can reclock the card to run at ATi stock speeds of 600/500. At this speed it runs rock solid stable under extended load, with no discernable thermal issues that I can immediately make out. Overclocking it much past this almost immediately crashes the laptop so I can't recommend taking it much out of spec, for the sake of a couple of MHz it's just not worth the risk / hassle, but at 600 core it's solid. I can only assume that Dell have underclocked it to improve battery life, I can't see any other reason for such a large crippling.

Clocking the card 'properly' and switching off Full Screen Glow in WoW has gone a long way towards rectifying the choppiness, but I can see that it's still not "right". I've not yet played with other resolutions or tried any other games so I don't know if I'm just asking too much in terms of graphics RAM or if it's specifically a WoW issue but I'm going to carry on fiddling with it. Short of persevering with hacking the Catalyst 8.8 drivers though, I'm not entirely sure where else I can go with this. In the grand scheme of things it's not a huge issue, it's just irritating that my shiny new toy isn't quite the beast I was expecting when I bought it.

Anyhoo. The reason I'm posting this is, a) I wanted to share my findings and b) I'd be really interested to hear other people's experiences with this. Specifically with Warcraft, but gaming performance generally.

Cheers.

 

hmm... i too am an avid WarCrack addict and one of the convincing factors was that i was told gaming was decent on this system.

now i am a bit worried...

i'll give it a shot later tonight.

oh, try this... someone told me that running wow off a 16gb USB Flash runs faster...

 

http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx



Install Catalyst 8.9 Driver via the Device Manager i.e Update Driver/Browse my computer for driver software/Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer/Have Disk then point to the .inf file from the extracted ATI Catalyst installer folder. Doesn't matter what video card you highlight from the list...I usuall just pick 3600 Series.

You also could find one of those Driver mod tools which work fine but this may prevent Blu-ray playback since the drivers would no longer be WHQL signed...

 

thanks for the tips. i will be sure to check my 3650 out when i get home. i dont wow, civ IV is my fix right now (until d3 and sc2), and that runs buttery smooth, as it should.

 

It's not the drivers, it's the resolution you are playing at that is causing the choppyness.

With all settings full and playing at 1920 by 1200, you'd need at least a decent 8800 or 9800 to get it running smooth. Having said that, the game runs smooth on my 1440 by 900 LED screen version of the 1735, with all settings turned up.

The 3650 is a capable card but, only it was never meant to run games at 1920 * 1200.

 

so setting the video options within the game to a say, lower resolution such as 1440 x 900 will help?

funny thing is that in my old laptop, 256MB 7800GTX and even a 512MB 7950GTX, it was choppy...

 

Ditto. That is an extreme resolution. Crank it down and I am sure that it will still look good and play a lot better. Turn off some of the graphic features also unless you think that they make a big difference.

 

will it run properly at this lower res? i thought there were problems with displays running at non-native res.

 

yea, i'm seeing my screen blur up in non-native but in full screen mode... in windowed mode, it's clear...

 

8.9... that's new. Downloaded, looks like the bundled driver is still 8.477.

Yeah, I appreciate that it may well be the eye-bleeding resolution I'm runnung at, there's just not enough memory on the card to buffer all the textures smoothly. It's just... I dunno, it feels like an odd symptom for that to be the cause. It doesn't look like the card's choking, if you see what I mean.

Anyway, yeah, you're probably right and confirming my suspicions. I'll have a play.

 

Oh, and, I couldn't find any settings (other than Full-Screen Glow) that made a huge difference. It's not a performance issue in that sense I don't think. The screen update is fast, it's just not always smooth.