Low FPS? Or high expectations?

I don't have a lot of games to test out on my P-7805U yet, but the ones I do test out seem to be have low FPS in comparison to what others are getting out of their systems. For example:

In Unreal Tournament 3 I get 60fps capped while in locations by myself. But, when I get into gunfights or into locations with others it can drop to 35-40 fps. This is at all max settings, 1440x900. I feel like I shouldn't have that FPS drop there, but maybe it's just me.

Right now I'm using Dox 181.20 drivers on my laptop, and I'm not overclocking at the moment.

EDIT: The reason I also bring up UT3 is because in the CNET review they claimed to get 120fps at max settings. Mine is capped at 60 while I'm by myself, so that's fine. But they don't say if it drops or not during gun fights.

 

Do you have v-sync enabled? That'll cap it at 60. As for gunfights, I'd sort of expect it to drop when settings are maxed. Don't know by how much though.

 

I know the v-sync caps it at 60, and that's fine with me. The difference it makes is minimal and I would rather not have screen tearing. The problem is that during gunfights I don't think that's it supposed to be dropping that low. I wish that I had other games to test but right now I just don't have the money.

 

the fact that your 3dmark 06 score is 9616, around where it should be with a laptop like yours, it shows that everything seems to be performing optimally. it could be the drivers not being too compatible with the game, or the game using a lot of cpu power. how many processes do you usually have running in the background? (check task manager)

 

I'm starting to think that it's really just the game. Drivers have little to no affect, and overclocking doesn't do much for this game either. The only other game I have to test is Warhammer DoW:2 for now. I'm going to do some more driver testing and see if I can bump it up at all.

 

There's really no way to tell unless you find an identical system to yours. Otherwise, the only other way to gauge your systems performance is with benchmarking software.

 

yeah try that (usually i like the drivers from nvidia's website or from the manufacturer, so gateway)..but having fps fluctuations is nothing out of the ordinary.

 

I've narrowed it down to 2 things:

The CPU just isn't up to par, and I need an upgrade.
or
This game just doesn't like my laptop. The 2.0 patch created a lot of issues for people, and this might just be one of them.

I wish I had the money for a CPU upgrade right now, but I just don't. Maybe in a couple months from now I'll look into one. Either way, this problem is out of my hands.

 

General rule of thumb is if you OC the video and get little to no increase in FPS then the CPU or chipset bandwidth becomes the bottleneck. If the FPS increases significantly then the CPU upgrade will do little for you.

 

Which is what happened. But, UT3 is also very sensitive to overclocking so I couldn't overclock much in the first place. Anything over 655/899/1750 resulted in a crash. I wish I had other games to test, but Warhammer DoW:2 is the only other that I have for now.

 

I just purchased World at War and it seems like the same thing is happening. Looking up videos on YouTube, people seem to be getting twice the amount of FPS as I am, with the same settings. I'm going to test out some different drivers, and see how things work out.