Poor performance in games

I just tried playing Mirror's Edge on Max at 1080p with no AA but the framerate is around 28-30 with drops to the low 20s. At 768p it was around 40-50. Given how old the game is and comparing performance to other GPUs, it seems Im getting way below what I should be. Same for BIOSHOCK 2, at 1080p it wildly fluctuated between 60-40 FPS, at 768p it was would go down to the high 40s. Last game I tried was Serious Sam 2 which came out all the way back in 2005 and yet again at Max on 1080p the framerate was poor.

I have set my NVIDIA GPU as the preferred one and have set it to Power Management to Maximum Performance. I even checked GPU-Z to and the speeds were at max. What could the problem be?

 

Make sure you set Mirror's Edge to use the nVidia GPU specifically. You said you set nVidia GPU to the preferred one but I wasn't sure if you meant globally or specific to the game exe. In any case the 740m in the Z510 has a 64-bit memory bus which means it's really starved for memory bandwidth, which means higher resolutions don't play well. 64-bit is really relegated to 1280x720 resolutions or lower.

 

Yep I did set the .exe itself to the NVIDIA, still no luck. But yeah Im aware that I have the 64-bit version of the GPU but should it be this much of a problem when the games in question are so old, changing the resolution to 768p I was still way under.

 

FPS was still bad at 768p? Hmm. Have you checked temperatures of your GPU lately? Cleaned out your fan vents? Maybe due for a repaste.

 

Your performance DOES seem a bit odd.. can you show us your GPU-Z screenshot?

Also, is PhysX off in Mirror's Edge?

 

For Mirror's Edge make sure you have PhysX turned off as it is extremely buggy. Even on my 870M I would get frame drops to ~10 FPS in events where glass shatters. I hope this may help with that title a little.

 

Serious Sam 2 is giving me 30 FPS at 768p on Max which is seriously worrying. PhysX is already turned off and as for GPU-Z, its showing GPU Load at 99 with both Core and Memory clocks running at fastest.

Edit: Updated drivers and restarted, no difference.

 

No, I wanted a screenshot of it so I could see your card's specs.

 

Make sure you are running either on performance or balanced power mode. You could be stuck on power saving and it would exhibit behaviour similar to what you are experiencing.

 

He said GPU speeds are max, peformance mode is enabled, I'd like to see temps though.

 

Actually, Mirror's Edge launched with an early release PhysX package included in the install. And any specific libraries override common libraries, so your updated PhysX installation won't actually be used. The included package was always extremely buggy and inefficient.

There's a sticky on the steam forums that describe the steps on how to fix it in detail. But you need to find the /Binaries/ directory, and delete physxcore.dll and physxdevice.dll.. Do not delete any other files. The game then will use your "series"-specific and updated PhysX libraries.

edit: ..by the way, lots of old 3d games written on the Unreal Engine framework will, almost without fail, max out your cpu constantly. No matter how much cpu-power you have, or how many cores, etc. It's a thing... So your average unoptimized old game written for an old single-core system, with a few hacks to maintain the threads, that sort of thing, could overheat your laptop in a way that more modern games won't, yes.

 

In Serious Sam 2, load is around 50% and temp is around 60, framerate is 30 at 768p. In Mirrors Edge, GPU load is 99 and the temp is about 75. If it helps my Unigine Heaven score is exactly the same as it was back in April so I don't think its down to dust build-up.

Thanks for the info, I haven't even got PhysX on. I did run 3DMark 11 and got 1852 for GPU which just below the average of 1985 that Notebook Check reports.

 

So.. your scores are normal, and they should indicate that you can run ME is something like.. 1280x720 on high.. Possibly with texture size turned down, and the visual effects that are specially shader-intensive turned down, you should be able to get something around 35 fps at the lowest.

And yet the performance isn't that great. Three possibilities (and maybe a combination):
1. forced anti-aliasing? If it's set in the global prefs in the nvidia panel, it won't affect benchmarks that disobey the profile system, or circumvent it by design.
2. Adaptive v-sync and 60 Hz screens. If turned on, anything that doesn't produce a stable 60 fps stutters like crazy.
3. Core affinity automatically is switched during lowering and rising boost intervals, which creates small (but sometimes noticeable) framedrops. For older games, forcing a stable but lower clock-speed, or manually setting the affinity to a specific set of cores tends to solve it.

It helps to run a clean install and use that geforce ultra-super duper experience program to set the profiles and prefs too. And I'm guessing that Lenovo still have those helper apps that might not be extremely efficient. But I'm guessing v-sync and aa settings is the problem here.

 

No, I meant Windows power plan. Maybe he has set it to power saver...

 

Thanks again for the info. From what I gather I think it's a CPU or software issue since the GPU benchmark turned out fine. When I disabled Vsync in Bioshock 2, the framerate is usually around 80-100 but then in certain scenes it would plummet to 30-45 FPS. Not only that but it can also stutter like crazy with even the sound suffering making it more or less unplayable. I played the game just fine on my first-gen i3 and HD 5650 back in the day.

I checked XTU and from what I saw the system was jumping constantly between 1-3 cores being in use. Do you think this could be causing the uneven framerate? If so how can I 'lock' games to two or more cores rather than constantly jumping around.

 

Have you tried ThrottleStop yet?

 

Mm. You can open the task manager (ctrl+alt+del, some menu) and go to details->set affinity. The thing is that it shouldn't be a problem in the first place - what happens is that a process is shifted when the core clocks down, then there's a pause, same thread maintained by different core, etc.. not very efficient.. But the uneven balancing can be circumvented by turning the clock-speed down to a set level. Or... you could remove the throttling policy, or override it with throttlestop, if the processor model/vendor allows it ..don't really recommend that unless you have to, though. Specially since increasing the clock speed probably isn't really necessary in the first place. And usually won't affect the framerate all that much..

 

I was thinking of Throttle Stop but its quite complicated so never bothered with it. I tried setting affinity to two physical cores and it didn't help either. I also tried the Intel IGP (HD 4600) and the framerate while lower, would drop in exactly the same places. Again I played many games comfortably including Bioshock 2 on my HD5650. Honestly what can I do at this point, could it be a hardware problem?

 

ThrottleStop isn't that complicated. If it's an issue of OEM-enforced throttling, exchanging the hardware won't do squat.

Set Windows power plan to High Performance and set Minimum Processor State and Maximum Processor State both to 100%.

Then, open ThrottleStop and follow these settings. Check Set Multiplier and adjust it as high as it goes, but make sure you uncheck BD PROCHOT (unlike in my screenshot). Don't forget to Turn On ThrottleStop at the bottom right.



Here's a direct link to the latest version of ThrottleStop: https://www.sendspace.com/file/oquhg3

 

I tried your instructions on Throttle Stop, multiplier was already at the highest and I turned off BD-PROCHOT but no difference. Honestly should I be worried about my hardware since it seems I have exhausted all my options.

 

Edit: Sorry DP

 

Edit: Wait what?

 

Despite the fact that you posted the same thing 3 times, I think you need to let us know if your "Cmod" and "Chip" rows are at 100% all the time. If they are, then somehow your machine appears to be just not so good I guess? I don't know.

 

Update - I tried BF3 on High settings and it was mostly at 30-35 FPS. Any ideas?

 

Sounds about right for your specs. What resolution?

 

lmfao

u on....tell us what your gpu is and then we can say for sure

but honestly if your scoring 1800 in 3dmark11 what do you expect 100fps in all games maxed

 

At 720p, the results I'm getting are what I you would expect from benchmarks on the internet so it makes no sense for older games like Mirror's Edge and Bioshock 2 to run so poorly.