Acer 5024wlmi - gaming problems - against Acer 4601

Hello everybody,
Very nice to find such a professional forum. I am so mad because of one problem. I hope you will help me to solve it somehow...
Well I recently bought a Toca Race Driver 2 game. I installed it on my friend's Acer(Pentium) and on my Acer 5024 (Turion).

My Acer 5024 wlmi has 1.8 Turion, Ati Mobility Radeon X700 128 MB, 80 GB hdd , 512 RAM - and it is almost a virgin (only Office 2003 and Windows XP SP2 installed).

My friend's Acer is 1.6 Centrino, Ati Mobility Radeon X700 64MB, 60 GB HDD, 512 RAM)

and ... gaming performance on mine is worse, not fluent. WHY?? What should I do. Centrino is fluent - and it is a jou to play. And mine with better specification is not THAT fun. Of course graphic settings are the same on both notebooks.

I will really appreciate any help. I have already installed new processor and ATI drivers - no difference at all.

Thanks

 

Check if you have ati's powerplay settings adjusted to optimal performace and if you have anti-aliasing disabled! You should have better performance than you're friend!

 

Well, Powerplay was adjusted for optimal performance.
I am not sure about anti-aliasing - I have this option in OpenGL and Direct3D settings. In both I can only disable option "depending on application/program (translation)". If I disable it I get another option: 2X / 4X / 6X. I think there is some progress in performance after setting "Main settings" on "Performane" (maximum to the left) both in Direct3D and OpenGL but it is still not as good as on the other notebook.

 

Put the Anti-Ailasing to "Application controlled". That should fix that problem..

I would also download and install the latest ATI Mobility Catalyst drivers for your video card - the most recent version is 5.13, but 5.11 is good as well.

 

I have Application Controlled from the beginning... so that is not the case.
I will try to install new Ati Catalyst.
But maybe the problem is not in video card (the other computer has the same, but with 64MB) but maybe in the processor ?
Maybe Turion doesn't work well with this particular game .... don't know , I've tried anything..

 

Well I've installed Catalyst 5.13 with DHmodtool. Toca works better but still not as smooth as on the other Acer. Maybe I should try to install another game and check performance..

 

I would run 3DMark05 on both machines and see what kind of scores you get.

Is it possible that one of the graphics cards has a 64-bit memory bus?

 

Today I have installed 3dmark05. My acer's results:

Main Test Results
3DMark Score 2514 3DMarks
CPU Score 2689 CPUMarks

Detailed Test Results

Game Tests
GT1 - Return To Proxycon 11.0 fps
GT2 - Firefly Forest 7.6 fps
GT3 - Canyon Flight 12.1 fps

CPU Tests
CPU Test 1 1.4 fps
CPU Test 2 2.3 fps

Unfortunatelly I'dont have access to Acer 4601 anymore.

Are your result's similar?


Oh, one more thing - even when I am going in game settings into max performance instead of quality - there is no gain in performance at all. It is strange - I can put top quality and the game is same fluent (smooth)...

 

Those results are what you should be getting...I'm not quite sure what the problem is with the game - have you checked if there are any patches/fixes for it on the Internet?

 

Yes, the 3DMark05 result is OK.
And I don't think that this problem has anything to do with the Turion or X700 per se.
Are you sure that the Turion CPU is continuously running at full speed (1800MHz) and not switching back to 800MHz, e.g. because of high temperatures ? You can check the CPU temperature and speed with e.g. MobileMeter.
Alternatively, the "not fluent" running may also have to do with loading data from the harddisk,
or maybe your virus-scanner is interfering ?

 

Thanks for reply.
Well, I've set computer to mode Always On + I disconnected it from the net, disabled Norton. No effect on the game.
When I am driving straight in the game it is ok, and I get 50-100 fps. But when there is a turn, a lot of cars, and some braking , sliding + some sound from tires - I can see about 20fps (Fraps). It's horrible because right and precise turns are most important in this game.
I have also turned audio to low quality. I think it has a little improved smoothness.

 

It may be due to sound card (I guess).. I`m planning to purchase PCMCIA creative zx.
Watch the CPU load in task manager when the PC is idle. Is it above 2% ? If so, check what application causes the load. What is your memory frequency ?
Mine (5021) was 133Mhz, then upgraded bios to 1.11, it raised to 166Mhz. Unsatisfied, I`ve made this:
http://sourceforge.net/project/screenshots.php?group_id=143522 to raise it to 200Mhz which gave me pretty boost in SiSoft Sandra`s memory benchmark.
But the exact values that would not hang my laptop proved to depend on bios version.

 

Yes, it is probably the sound card that is causing it. I sometimes get the same problem in Soldiers: Heroes of WW2 where the frame rate drops really low and the hdd starts working all the time. This is because there seems to be a bug in the sound drivers (haven't tested with these newest) that causes them to drasticly increase the memory usage (mine went to 1gb) which then causes the lower framerates as the computer is reading off the hdd all the time.