Terrible Warcraft performance on Sony VAIO

I have a Sony Vaio FE890 w/ a GeForce Go 7400 running Vista Home Premium with 2GB of RAM. Things used to be fine, but when I play World of Warcraft, my video performance seems poor, especially for a dedicated video card. Is there anything I can do beside reducing the WOW settings to improve performance? Could poor video performance be due to an old driver?
I'm using the Nvidia drivers which appear to be the same ones used prior to Vista: 7.15.10.9746

My Windows Experience Index overall is 3.2 and that's primarily due to the "Gaming Graphics" subscore which is the lowest of all the measured components.

 

well, that graphics card isn't exactly the greatest, but try drivers from LaptopVideo2Go. And follow Chaz's stickied guide. That might help.

But aside from that, what are your exact specs and what are your settings?

 

You stated "things used to be fine" What settings, drivers, etc did you change between now and then? Did you change (hate to say "upgrade") from XP to Vista or something?

 

Yes, a change from xp to vista would require a change in video cards if you did so please share with us what has changed

 

what are you talking about? You can switch from xp to vista and still use the same video card.

 

What? Why would it require a change in video cards?

 

My old dv2000 had a GO 7200, it played WoW quite well (30-60fps on default settings) so your GO7400 should play it like a breeze. I used www.laptopvideo2go.com drivers.

Its most likely the drivers. Btw for integrated cards they released a driver that specifically fixes WoW problems

 

I think Sony computers can only play SOE branded games. It's all part of their ONE DRM TO RULE THEM ALL campaign.

 

i meant video card drivers, mistype :/

but anyways, check laptopvideo2go if you have changed OSes for new video drivers for your new OS if running an nvidia based laptop.

 

Thanks for all the tips.

Well, I purchased the laptop with Vista pre-installed and it's using the original Nvidia driver that came with it. I went to LaptopVideo2Go and downloaded a recently available Vista-32bit driver. The driver upgrade completed successfully and the driver went from version 7.15.10.9746 to 7.15.11.7474.

When I reran the Windows Experience Index, the scores still remained the same @ 3.2.

Processor: 4.8
Memory(RAM): 4.5
Graphics: 3.6
Gaming Graphics: 3.2
Primary Hard Drive: 4.5

The Graphics performance is still the bottleneck here even after the Driver upgrade. What gives? Do I have to tweek anything on the Nvidia Control Panel?

 

WEI generates random numbers.

Its not accurate enough. Use 3dMark06, a dedicated benchmarking tool.

 

You must be in some sort of low-power/performance mode; click the battery/power icon in the system tray and make sure the profile is set to High Performance.

 

I finally installed 3DMark06 and ran a benchmark. I saw that the battery/power was set to Power Saver mode so that explains why I've been getting crappy performance lately. I switched to the High Performance as Chaz suggested and my 3DMarks went from 438 to 829.

Still bad when compared with other baseline systems.
I currently have Windows Aero & Sidebar running. My objective is to have a balanced laptop that can be able to run everything without me worrying about keeping all my video and Windows display settings at the minimum.

 

Well you are running a go7400 which is a pretty low end gpu. It's fine for wc3 and half-life 2, maybe counter strike and a few others but don't expect a monster here. With such a low end gpu you will have to make a lot of sacrifices to play games. Sorry to have to break it to you so bluntly but um...your gpu kinda sucks for gaming. Now by gaming i mean new games and shiny games. Older games like wc3, HL2, CS, mechwarrior 4(personal favorite ), freelancer (another one ), all those games are a few years old and will run at medium+ settigns smoothly on your 7400. Now games like crysis, CoD4, NFS rostreet, expect to either a) not play them at all or b) play at bare minimum settings.

 

Well.. fortunately, the only game I play on my laptop is WoW (Actually, it's the only game I play). I just need my laptop when I'm playing WoW on the go. I guess if nothing else can be configured (ie. Video Card settings), I can live with minimal settings in WoW.

 

I have a Sony C1Z that also has a Geforce Go 7400. On XP it really kicked ass in WoW. I got decent frame rates just about anywhere, and never saw less than about 30-40 fps.

Then, I gave the machine to my dad, and he wanted German Vista on it. Now the performance is horrible -- about 18 fps in Shattrath.

If you really want to use that machine to play WoW, it's perfectly able to do that. Reformat it and install XP SP2. And don't use anything higher than 1280x800, and you'll be fine. Lose the full screen glow effect, use triple buffering and v-sync, disable some extra shader effects and it will really sizzle.

I'm just biding my time until I get my Clevo back And yes that runs XP as well.

 

WoW should run fine on something like that. I remember playing it on a computer that had a radeon 9200 in it at launch so yeah, you can get smooth gameplay with...medium settings. Err on the side of frame rates over looks. You don't want machine lag when fighting a boss, especially as the main healer

 

Thanks for all the tips. I finally logged on to WoW and made some of the suggested video settings and found my FPS go from the upper teens to 30+ (in AV). I went from terrible to bearable. =)

 

thats still unbearable to me, your card should easily do an average of 50fps with the default wow settings.

 

Well some settings in games do help your performance as a player though. View distance is huge for me. I refuse to play at bare minimum view distance if I can help it. Luckily I have enough horsepower to max that in my games

But things like super high resolution, ludicrous shadows and lighting, yeah those can (and should) be turned down to increase frame rates.

 

guys, are you kidding me ? I can run and I am running Wc3 on my calculator at top settings. On this machine, Wc3 will be perfectly played. The game is 5 years old! I've played WoW on integrated video and it's playable at med settings. Try reinstalling your vc drivers. In the end, consider XP reinstall. This *hit should be reinstalled once a year if you don't want a major drop in performance.

 

Hey chill thief, computers are fickle and windows especially so. Sometimes things happen like when I downloaded sp1 and got blue screened every 20 minutes. Uninstalled sp1 and haven't had a bluescreen since. Also what integrated graphics are we talking about here - the X3100? That's actually useable. Almost on par with a 7400 like the OP has. Not quite but close. Plus this person may or may not have the option to install XP. Vista is actually a good OS, it's just a terrible mainstream OS because it requires a fairly high level of technical understanding to make it so good.

Anyways, so long as the game is playable enough for you that's all that matters.