Laptop struggles with old games but handles recent games just fine

I recently tried playing Bioshock 2, Mirror's Edge, Serious Sam 2 and Quake 4 and I had performance problems in all of them. I made sure that my power settings were on high performance and even individually set the games to use full performance in Nvidia Control Panel. However I have very wild framerates in all these games, they'll be running fine (mostly above 60) and then crash down at random scenes of activity, not only dropping but stuttering. I played the same games on an older laptop and they played consistently smoothly.

On other hand I ran 3DMark 11 and my score was on par with what others were reporting and Battlefield 3 ran perfectly fine on High at 720p (framerate stayed consistent throughout levels).

Any advice?

 

Update - Just installed the latest drivers and the situation has way improved. All the games now sustain a consistent framerate. The only problem remaining is Bioshock 2 which is an utter mess.

 

Glad you got it sorted out, then.

 

Its not performing as well as it should but its a lot better, many of these games were unplayable. In my case 45 FPS was a jittery mess.