8600GT struggling with NFS: Most Wanted

Hey all, I have a lappy with nvidia 8600m GT (not sure if it is ddr2 or gddr3), driver 176.44 (i think) and t8300 processor. Its a pretty new laptop and I haven't used it too much yet (nor is it overclocked or anything).

But this thing is really, really struggling to play a four year old game - Need for Speed: Most Wanted. It stutters and lags like hell on high settings. I don't have any FPS software, but I can tell you that it is pretty much unplayable. So I started decreasing all the graphics settings, one by one, hoping to make gameplay smoother until I got to this point -
resolution: 640 x 480
no AA
shadows off, car reflection off, rain effect off
world level of detail, texture quality, car geometry all low
pretty much as low as it could all go

.....And it STILL lags , stutters and slows down during parts of races. I've heard so much about the 8600/9600 GT cards....they can't be THIS bad surely.

As for the temps, well they seem all right to me if HW Monitor is accurate. Normal GPU temps are b/w 59-69 degree . Max during or immediately after playing NFS are 78 or 80 celsius. CPU and HDD temps don't seem too high either (b/w 37-50 degree celsius). Like I said, there is no overclocking of CPU/GPU either and the lappy is pretty much in a standard state (as it was out of the box) except that I've transferred my files and softwares to it.

Whats up with this ? NFS: MW simply can't be this demanding now, can it ? How do I make this game smoother and more enjoyable ?

 

is it on power saver mode?

 

High Perfrormance mode and plugged in.

BTW does power mode affect performance ? i thought it only changed screen brightness, scrensaver/sleep/hibernate time and stuff like that. Does it throttle the CPU/GPU too ? Does that mean you can't game on a battery ?

 

it downclocks the CPU and in some laptops, the GPU. so you cannot play on battery

 

Get new drivers.
8600M GT should be able to max it out within 1280x800.

 

Read up on how to disable powermizer. An 8600M GT regardless of whether is DDR2 or 3 can max most wanted and carbon on the highest settings even at resolutions at 1680 x 1050 can bear witness to that. If your card is always downclocking due to powermizer your core drops from 475 to 160odd mhz and the memory from 400 to 100 on ddr2 card so HUGE hit in performance

 

Something is definitely wrong here. I play that game on medium settings on my Geforce 9500m GS (Asus G1SN) which is quite a bit weaker than your GPU (I think) and I get performance of minimum 60 - maximum 91 fps. I am using Dox Optimised Drivers 185.20 on resolution 1280x1024. Have not tried higher resolutions yet though.

 

9500M GS <-> 8600M GT
Same.

Bump up your settings if you are getting minimum 60 getting minimum 30-50 is worth it for the better graphics.

 

Sounds like something I'm having with Halo.

my notebook I'm sure has enough juice to easily play Halo but it doesn't.
I'm not sure whether it's my video card of it's actually Halo.

 

i would check to see if the right drivers are installed properly
i got a nice boost from updating to the latest drivers
used to get 25fps on medium, now i get 35fps at 1280x720 with everything maxed out and AA at half

 

Either update your drivers for halo or turn off decals in the options and it should all be good.

 

i have EXACLY the same problem with most wanted and halo in Vista, but Halo works flawlessly in W7... just for notice... halo 2 worked great with first instalation, and after that i had removed that and installed again couple of weeks ago and i just couldnt play coz of shuttering... but i havent found any soluton for Most Wanted
Fps is always 50+ in 1280x800 but it looks like its beneath 25fps...
so sad coz most wanted is the best nfs title after hot pursuit 2 :/ subject opinion ofc

 

my drivers are up to date its the latest Nvidia release.

I'll turn off decals, I haven't tried that yet.

I'll come back and post my findings

 

I just read the driver update on forums. Maybe try different drivers then. I never bothered myself, i just messed around in the options till i found out Decals option was causing my slowodwn. Don't miss out on much turning it off.

 

Try DOX's 185.20 drivers.

 

i haven't turned decals off yet on Halo but Call of Duty 4 is working like a Dream at the moment.

I'm probably gonna stick with the current drivers for now because I'd rather have Call of Duty 4 work well than Halo

 

Hey i'd just like to reply and tell that my problem seems solved for now.

i think the most important thing was that in the nvidia control panel some applications were using the global graphics settings default which included 8x anti aliasing and 8x anisotrphic filtering....now i'm specifically setting this for all games to 2x....or off for crysis type stuff

also i think leaving mu torrent 1.9 beta on in the background, even if it is not downloading, just seeding affects performance....this doesn't happen if there is a direct d/l through firefox going on though

hope it helps

 

I would keep antialiasing off in all but the oldest games (half life 2 and older) and only set it on the in game settings. Also update your drivers to 178.28/48 from nvidia's website.

 

are those drivers stable ?
i'd prefer stability and compatibility over very minor performance boosts.
do those drivers have sleep/hibernate/bsod/overheating issues ? and what are real world performace gains like ?

 

Very stable. I run 178.28 and it really boasted performance. 178.48 I think has sleep issues as its beta but I never use hibernation so doesn't bother me. I updated from 16xx series drivers and I had enormous performance gains. Can't tell you difference between earlier 17xx drivers and this one but I also found dox 185.20 to perform worse than 178.28.

 

hummm, I'm using 176.31, play @1024x768 (can't go higher since it doesn't recognize the native 1440x900) all maxed and it's quite smooth. However, I keep AF down to 2x to avoid occasional stuttering.

Btw, I was able to play it on X3100, so the game itself is quite well optimized