Mass Effect 1 Performance on UL30VT-X1 = poor?

I bought Mass Effect 1 on steam a while ago when I had my old computer. It was equipped with a 8600m GS GDDR2 and the performance was bad. It ranged from 15-25 FPS throughout the first hour I played the game.

Now I have this new laptop that has the G210M, a better graphics card (and I OCed it - gets ~3800 3dMark06). It runs a little better, but not by much. The strange thing is that even when I turn everything off and I'm on a low resolution, the game can't even get over 35.

Was this just a bad port or something? Why the performance in this game so poor? I'm running this from STEAM btw.

 

the G210M is just not very strong. If you're turning everything low and on lowest res and it still runs bad it may be CPU bottleneck.

 

What Bearclaw said, once you lower the resolution you are putting more strain on the CPU, and in your case it may actually lower your FPS. What are the rest of the specs for your machine? (RAM, OS, etc)

Overclocking that CPU wouldn't hurt, but that laptop is really not suited for gaming, the G210m is really only meant to run older games and run the display. Mass Effect ran maxed on my old Toshiba that had T5800(1.6Ghz Core 2 I believe), but the graphics card was a 9700m GTS, which was an enthusiast level graphics card at the time.

 

U7300 OCed to 1.7 ghz, g210m 512 mb memory gddr3, 4 gigs ram, windows 7 premium...

I know this isn't made to be a gaming laptop. At the same time, every game I've thrown at it, I've gotten to perform pretty well, even though they are ONLY a year or two old. In addition, I've seen benchmarks on this card, and read reviews on my laptop where there is detailed information on what it could run game wise. Therefore, I feel that the excuse that this card isn't meant for high end gaming isn't sufficient.

http://www.expertlaptopreview.com/?p=96 - this laptop uses the same card and take a look how it performs here.

So it still doesn't make much sense to me, which is why I'm wondering if it's just a bad port or there are settings I have to adjust. Otherwise this means that this game is more graphically intensive than most of the Source engine games on all high settings, Bad Company 2, Modern Warfare 2 on high, and Starcraft II on med/high..

Just played mass effect on a variety of settings and resolutions. Most of the time I got between 18-28 FPS.

 

All that review shows is how weak this graphics card is. Mostly low settings on low resolutions with some medium and sometimes high, but with abysmal framerates on the medium and higher settings.

This review by Anandtech shows the same thing, low settings on low resolutions, and even shows Mass Effect, lowest settings, 800x600 and not even pushing 30fps average.

It certainly runs some games ok even some with higher settings, but Mass Effect wont be one of them, it does not have the shading power to keep up. I am surprised how well it does in some games though.

 

You have to think that someone with close to 600 posts on a notebook forum would have a bit of insight to understand the specs of their own laptop. That GPU is not for gaming, unless by means of 2005 or earlier.

 

Funny, because I've personally tested many games, a lot which came out around 2006-2007 and I can all get them to run at at least 30 FPS at low/med settings, some even at high (mainly the source games: TF2, L4D, L4D2 ) all at native resolution!
My old laptop had a 8600m GS from 2007, which was classified as low-mid range gaming notebook. The G210M is more powerful than that.

You guys act as if I'm expecting that I'll be able to run every game on high. If I wanted to do that I would just build a gaming rig.

What I'm talking about here is Mass Effect 1 ONLY. I'm wondering why it was only this game having poor performance out of the other games I have. I was able to search around some more and I found that even other people with powerful graphics cards were having trouble running this game well. In some cases Mass Effect 2 ran perfectly for them, but Mass Effect 1 had a lower FPS...

I knew the games that I would be able to play and I found out that this laptop can pretty much play them all at a solid frame rate.

 

mass effect 1 run with an unstable fashion even if i could keep a reasonable fps through it it was really wierd and not constant the gpu usage monitor kept varying
ME2 was way more constant in fact so much that the demo made 100% usage on both gpu and drove them to a thermal shutdown retail version was fixed

 

The release date of a game does not implicate it's level of demand on the gpu. There's also the fact that Mass Effect isn't exactly the most optimized game.

 

Fail post on my part, nvm.

 

Ok maybe it is not as powerful. Not trying to argue here, but it seems to be performing better than my GDDR2 8600m GS did in all the games I've tried AND my 3dmark 06 score was 2700 max (best stable drivers) with the 8600m GS while with the g210m was giving me around 3400 stock.

 

Im sorry if im coming across as a jerk, just trying to clear up misinformation. Some of which I posted myself, I looked at paper stats and a few games and made some assumptions. The G210m and the 8600m GS DDR2 are very similar.

I am going to retract my comment about it being weaker, I assumed you had the DDR3 version but the DDR2 version is much weaker. My mistake. On paper it obviously looks as if the 8600m GS should surpass this card, 128 bit bus compared to 64 bit with meager clock speed increases. This is certainly true in regards to the DDR3 version, but not so much with the DDR2 one.

As I said before, it has a crippled memory bus and this limits the card a lot. Unfortunately it looks like your going to have a similar experience to your DDR2 8600m gs, try the newest drivers if you can and overclock that card if at all possible, raising the memory clocks will help raise the memory bandwidth, which is the weak point in this card.

 

You are almost certainly bottlenecked by the CPU. Mass Effect ran perfectly fine (except for one very specific area) on my 8600M GT with all settings maxed out at 1280x800... but the CPU usage of my 2.5GHz T9300 was always between 90% and 100%. Bioware's recent games are pretty CPU-intensive.

 

yeah, I've figured it's an CPU issue. That's fine though because it can still play older games that I own well and some of the newer ones like Starcraft II well. Mass Effect 1 is still definitely playable, just not up to the level of Bioshock, SC II, or any source game.

 

ME/DAO/DS2 is all cpu intensive, so does GTA IV

G210M is not much of an upgrade to 8600M GS since they all feature 16SP