FPS problems on MacBook Pro nVidia 8600M GT

Ok, here’s the deal,

I have a macbook pro 2.4GHz, 4GB RAM with an nVidia 8600M GT. I got it in late 2007 and was running winXP SP2 via bootcamp for games such as COD4, MOH Airborne, BIA: Hell’s Highway to name a few.

All above games ran beautifully on high settings averaging around 40fps on the original drivers that came with Bootcamp ver2 on my Leopard disk.

Life was peachy until I bought COD: World at War in November 2008.

It ran very poorly and there was a point in the game where a certain level would not load. I searched forums and found that I needed to update my video drivers.

I updated from laptopvideo2go to the latest driver at that time and it not only solved the problem – EVERY game I had ran even faster and smoother.

After a couple of restarts between OSX and XP, I went to play COD5 and found that frame rates had dropped down below 20fps, at times to an unbearable <10fps.

I thought the problem was isolated to COD5, but when I went to play other titles like COD4 and Hell’s Highway, I found they were suffering too.

I reinstalled the drivers, restarted, and the problem seemed to be solved. That was until I restarted the next day and went to play. After that no amount of reinstalling or restarting would help.

Over the coming weeks, I reinstalled the drivers, uninstalled them, tried different drivers, formatted the windows partition, reinstalled windows, etc, etc, etc.

The problem seems to persist if I updated the drivers or directX. I’m not quite sure where the problem lies.

I think it’s either with the drivers, or directX having some kind of conflict. The best way I (not being overly experienced in computers) can describe the problem is that it’s as though there is some kind of a memory cache that isn’t clearing after quitting the game and restarting XP.

It’s so frustrating cause I know that COD5 can run well - and I certainly know COD4 and all my other games can run well, since i was playing them for a year without issue. I simply don’t know where this problem lies.

Can anyone help, I’d love to have my games back up and running properly.

FYI - I tried about 8 different drivers for the GPU (including older ones) - the lastest being 185.2 released 12/26/2008.

Thanks.

 

After months of trying - and ironically only hours after i first seek forum help with the issue - I think i have finally solved the problem with my GPU.

After weeks of reinstalls, formats, partitions, reg cleaning, different drivers, xp pro, xp home, a possibility presented itself to me yesterday during my forum search - heat.

I google search if overheating can affect gaming performance and the response was for the most part - NO.

I thought about this and realized that heat shouldn't really affect the GPU - but it will affect the CPU - especially one with an integrated GPU chip which i believe is the case with my MBP.

I reinstalled Hells Highway last night after several other changes to drivers and such and the impact was often the same - it would work for a while, then if i tried to restart xp - the fps would degrade substantially.

So, at a loss last night i packed it in and waited until the morning to do some more searching. I tried the game again in the morning and strangely found it to be working fine. I restarted xp and again found it to be running super smooth.

The third time i restarted and tried (just to see if it was a fluke) the fps was playing up again.

Now i tried something very different - I put my laptop in the fridge (laugh all you want) for about 20 min (condensation can be a problem if when you take it out you're in a hot environment, which i'm not, so be careful)

Once it had cooled - cooled, not cold - i started it up and tried again.

Disco! running smooth as silk.

Determined to make sure i was right I installed COD4 (often troublesome) and it was as smooth as butter. I restarted and it was fine.

I needed to heat up the laptop again so I played for a little more than an hour until my laptop was nice and hot and restarted - FPS gone to hell.

Into the fridge again for a quick cool, restart and bingo - running beautifully.

I work all over the world as a photographer, mostly throughout the middle east and south asia in dusty and dirty environments so my laptop gets a workout and collects a lot of dust. Dust insulates the heat and if the CPU gets too hot, it puts the breaks on - thus killing gaming performance.

The problem in my case could be a faulty fan as when i opened my laptop, it was dusty, but not in the extreme. Nonetheless, the problem in my case is clear and it's a possibility worth exploring for others too as it's a little less time consuming than reinstalling everything.

Hope this helps anyone else who might have been experiencing similar problems.

 

Have you read about the Nvidia deffective 8 series GPU?

Apparently from all the information I've read all GPU 8 series are all affected.
Heat is the number one cause, if you do some googling you'll be able to find out more.

 

ummm.. i hope your joking??

 

does anyone know what process the 9500m GS is manufactured on? for some reason i was under the assumption it was 65nm, but wikipedia and notebookcheck say otherwise (they both say 80nm)... as well as a few other links on google

if thats the case, is the 9500m GS completely identical to the 8600m GT?

 

Something similar happened to me man

I'm in the middle east, and as you probably know some places here [riyadh] are very dusty.

After ~6 months after a while of playing I noticed that my framerate would drop to the point that the game was unplayable

I was monitoring my temps using HWMonitor and it showed my GPU and CPU hitting the 90s often
Once it showed TZS0/1 at 100 degrees C

I decided to open it up and clean it
This was the state of my heatsink before:


Shocking I know

I cleaned some out then using an old,toothbrush
Today I cleaned the air intake fan and heatsink using compressed air and after playing CoD 4 for a few hours, my GPU didn't go over and CPU over 70
(before they would be in high 80s low/mid 90s)

Maybe if you could open it up without voiding the warranty (not sure about macs) then you can check how much dust there is

Hope this helps

 

I think your cooling solution is only masking the real problem, your GPU might be faulty.

I have the same notebook, though I bootcamp it with Vista SP1, I had the same sudden decrease in performance one day and had no idea why. I did many of the things you did to try and fix the problem.

Check something for me, if you will. This can be done in windows using CPU-Z or GPU-Z, but I'll assume you can't download those. Log into Mac, go into your system profiler, and go to the display section. A few lines down it should say something about the PCI-Express Lane Width. This SHOULD always say 16x. When my GPU went bad, it would show up as 1x, though sometimes after repeated restarts or cooling the laptop, it would show up as 8x.

It seems that you are in a similar situation. A PCI-Express lane width of 8x is actually adequate to keep the GPU functioning fairly well, it doesn't really need to saturate 16 entire lanes, but when you go down to 1 lane (1x) then you are SEVERELY bottlenecking the bandwidth of your GPU, which will cut the FPS in most games by 80%.

If you get to an Apple Store, they can just run a benchmark on your GPU to see if it is part of the faulty batch, if it is then they'll replace it for free, even if you have no warranty or applecare (they did with mine). It does take a few days for them to switch out the motherboard (they call it a logic board) though.

Hopefully you are right and it was just boatloads of dust overheating your system. Make sure that there is clean (but adequate) thermal paste between the GPU/Heatsink and CPU/Heatsink.

 

Download HWMonitor and report how high your GPU temps are getting.

 

large temp fluctuation can kill any electronic.


follow kevin jack's rec please.

 

Attachment comparing GPU-z outputs for 8600m GT (found on google) vs. my GPU-z output for a 9500m GS.

I'm surprised that they're pretty much identical (except the 8600m GT is GDDR3 vs. DDR2 in the 9500m GS). I thought there was a die shrink as well, but apparently the 9500m GS just has more 'power efficiency' = +10% performance.

Here's a NBR discussion: link