mass effect poor performance

hi, just wondering about my perfomance with mass effect. i have to pretty much put everything off/low to have the game run effectively and even then its pretty poor. is this game a sign that i need to upgrade soon? (shame because ive only had this laptop for a year and it appears it won't last through 2008 - i have a 8700mGT toshiba satellite x205.. maybe i shoulda gotten that desktop instead )

any comments i'd appreciate thx

 

Something is definately wrong here. My XPS1530 with 8600M-GT can run on all High and still get Min. 17FPS and Max. 58 FPS, with an average of about 30FPS. 8700 should get better performance unless your running on a Pentium II or you have 32MB of RAM.
I think you need new drivers.

 

im using 174.93 and all my other games work fine

i have to OC to get the game to run "ok" on all low/off settings

 

Hm... that's very odd.... 174.93 works fine for all my games... you might as well try 175.16

 

well i dont really like mass effect, my point was that if i cant run mass effect then how am i gonna run games later this year ;[

 

anyone know what my problem could be on mass effect? its horrible having everything on dead lowest and having to oc to play it on those settings

 

Hi kraz30g,

Make sure you are connected to the power plug! The batteries alone wont do it.

 

Yea make sure your GPu is set for max performance and not power saver, that could be it.

 

ME is a graphics hog, I have to run at 1280x800 at low setting to get it to run smooth on the big fights (but most other times, med is ok)

 

That's very strange, what FPS are you guys shooting for? I run it maxed out (minus motion blur) with anisotropic filtering at 1600x900 using 177.26 drivers with about 20-30 FPS. I know that this is a bit low for some people, but for ME, its not necessary to get ~60 FPS IMO.

 

its just real clunky when moving around a lot - looking around with the mouse is fine tho. this is only when im OC'd and everything low

 

Ah, ME is not the smoothest game as far as loading contents while on the move. You usually won't notice it on a desktop with faster HDs but on laptop, it's will have minor stutter at the the oddest time and you look and you see you drive light blinking like mad.

 

try reinstalling and following the guide @masseffect.com forums. Hard to believe that you arent getting good performance with a 8700m gt though. That card should play even upcoming games without problems @ high settings.

I have a 8600m gt which is about 25% slower than your card and Im running the game @ ultra high with 30 fps average. But b4 i always use to get crappy performance b/c of heat issues and driver incompatibility. Take your time to find the right drivers and tweaks and ways to manage heat. I wouldnt worry about upgrading your card just yet.

 

heat is never a problem, i dont think ive ever gone about 65 C

 

use riva tuner or gpuz to see ur clock rate while playing the game
it could be the poweroptimizer in ur driver downclocking your graphic card.
happened to me with mass effect.

 

Kraz30g with Ocing , you should never drop beloew 40s... something is wrong here

 

well this is the only game that does it ;\

 

I dunno, I can run at 1280x800 all high, no grain no blur and average ~28fps. This is on an overclocked 8600M GT DDR2.

I say it's your driver that sucks. The topic on LV2G is full of people reporting performance issues. Either go back to 174.74, or go up to a 175 driver.

FYI I'm currently playing Mass Effect with 177.26, and it's running better than it did on the best 174 or 175 drivers.

 

The game runs fine on my nc8430 on Medium Settings and that uses a X1600 256 mb Radeon card.

 

What res are you all running this on.

I have XPS 1530 (1440x900). Should I run the game at it's native res or go for the 1280 x 800?

 

Hey jayq, you should be able to get a minimum of 25-30 on 1440x900

 

I'm running it on 800*600.

 

Yup successfully played away for most of last night at 1440x900. Particles on high, Textures on ultra high, film grain on, motion blur & shadows off. With an overclock of 550core/800mem I was averaging 30-35fps. Temps nice and stable at GPU 75degrees, Cores 1/2 68degrees and ACPI (THM)? 80degrees.

Stunning looking game it has to be said!

 

Hi guys, perhaps someone of you can help me because I've got some serious isses going on performance-wise in Mass Effect.
The first time I installed Mass Effect was like 2 weeks ago. Everything was running great and so on, but then I had to format my harddrive and therefore had to reinstall Mass Effect.
Since then the performance has been extremely messed up. I don't get over 3fps even in the main menu it doesn't seem to matter if play on 1024x768 with medium to high details or on 640x480 with everything set to low.
I don't get what's going on there...

What is also very strange is the fact that I use exactly the same drivers (Dell 174.31) that I had used before I formatted. Everything should be basically the same setup as before the format and still Mass Effect is running completely horrible.
Hope anyone can give me some advice btw I'm a Vista user

 

Just thinking out loud as I too recently formatted my hard drive.

I see you reinstalled the nvidia 174.31 drivers. Did you remember to install the following also;
1. Intel Chipset Drivers
2. Intel Storage Matrix Drivers
3. Current DirectX runtime drivers (recently updated)

Also may be worth using rivatuner to monitor your clock speeds in the background when starting up the game.

Just some ideas.

 

You rule man. An old version of DirectX was the problem. That didn't come to my mind. Thanks +1rep