Lagging for Gaming - NP9262 9800m GT SLI

Dear all,

I am a new owner of the Sager NP9262,
with Q9550, 4GB RAM, 2x 9800M GT SLi enabled and Win Vista Ultimate (x64)

Everything seems alright after delivered,
updated my display card driver to official release 176.09

It's jz ok to play Crysis with all High settings, but not very smooth for Crysis Warhead.
Now, i play with FIFA09, but it's jz a nightmare, lagging so much under high settings, still feel not smooth enough with medium setting with 3d grass enabled...

I wonder wht's the main problem, should i use another version of graphic card driver? If yes, which should i switch to? If not, what is going on?? I am quite confident that the config. of this gaming notebook is good enough for the game, i guess....

 

Humm that is weird even Crysis Warhead should be playable on high settings in 1920*1200, see if u can get some tweaks though it helps a lot and allow you to play like very high with more fps....

For FIFA very strange....try 180.10 drivers from laptopvideo2go.com

And check DirectX version too. Of course this computer (i have the same) is more than enough to play FIFA al maxed out

 

make sure to update the games with the latest patches.

Crysis did not enable SLI until later updates.

 

J@cky,

Something isn't right. I suggest you run 3DMark06 and post the scores here. Be sure to post SM2, SM3, and cpu scores as well as the total score. If nothing else, this will give you a reference point before you change drivers.

 

Thanks for everyone's suggestion....

I decided to check it using 3DMark06 first.
Is it ok for me to use basic version? any big difference?
and what else I should or shouldn't do while the test?
for example, what program i shouldn't run during the test?
or i should jz leave it idle? what about browsing the web?

Thanks.. sorry for too much question at a time

 

I've run tests on my laptop,

here are the marks (1920x1200) :
Total: 12345
SM2: 5135
SM3:5006
CPU: 4302

are they normal?

one more question, the "details" of 3Dmark 06 only show 1 of the 2 display card, Is this normal?? (see picture below

 

Another thing to check before you go playing with drivers is to check and make sure SLi is working in game first. Go into your nVidia control panel and enable the Sli indicator bars. Start the game and you should see the green bars on the left side of the screen. They should start in the middle of the screen and move (depending on the load on the card) to the top and bottom of the screen.

 

i think he just needs to enable his second card. it looks to be disabled. when you install new drivers, it disables the second card by default. click the SLI tab under nv control panel to verify. if you already checked this...then disregard....

or each card is using a different driver....(speculation of course)

 

Score seems good... but could gain about another 1000 or so.

I think there might be a lot of bloat and resource hogs running in the background:
- disable Aero Theme (switch to classic)
- disable any sidebars
- disable any AntiVirus/Spyware suites
- disable System Restore
- disable Indexing Service
.....etc...

 

I had already enabled my SLi (2nd card) right after i update my drivers... that's y i feel weird about wht's shown in the image above...

I tried to enable the SLi indicator and it was running during i run my games (like FIFA09), but still a bit laggy, which made my a bit dizzy when looking at the screen for a long time

Thanks for the suggestion....
I would like to ask, how to disable indexing service?
that really slow my laptop down sometimes......~~"

 

Your CPU score seems to be OK, but your graphics scores (SM 2/SM 3) are way too low. For example, with 8800's I get SM 2/SM 3 scores of 6321/6702. I'm running XP, but, with Vista, you should still get to within 5% of my scores, which suggests your cards are running 20% too slow, even at the low default resolution of 3DMark06. As resolution increases, this shortfall becomes more and more dramatic.


I believe 3DMark06 doesn't show the second card in the details, and your graphics scores are high enough to suggest that SLI is working. Still, you might assure that both cards show up as installed in Device Manager, and that SLI is set in nVidia Control Panel.

You might have gotten a bad driver install so it might be worthwhile to reinstall, but using a driver cleaner after you remove nVidia drivers in Control Panel.

Naturally, you should check to make sure your power settings are set for maximum performance, and the 3D image settings in nVidia Control Panel are set properly. (Don't use the "balanced" or "quality" settings.) If you've made drastic changes to "desktop color settings" you might try restoring the default settings. I've noticed, in particular, that big changes to gamma can really have an adverse impact on some games.

The behavior of your system is very similar to the behavior of mine when I had problems with the SLI bridge cable (the cable that connects the two GPUs).... only modest falloff in 3DMark06 performance, but horrible game performance. Those connectors don't seat very securely, so you might bear this in mind if your other efforts fail to solve your problem.

 

I think becuase he test it at 1920*1200?

 

Thanks wobble!

any suggestion on which driver to reinstall?
and how should i use driver cleaner to clean my system? before i reinstall or after? (sorry for bothering, never used it before)

btw, I have run another test with 3DMark Vantage under quality high setting and resolution of 1920x1200

I observed that the preformance was quite poor for my graphic tests (jz about 11 FPS +_+)
the detailed marks are as follow:
3DMark Score: 0 <---ya... it show 0 i dont know why
GPU score: 3930
CPU score: 11513

I dont that's acceptable for this card to score only 3930?!
anyone had run a 3DMark Vantage before??~~"

 

normal resolution test is 1280*1024 why did you run 1920*1200

 

o..
i thought i should make it fit to my screen size....

ran another test using 3Dmark06 under default resolution
here are the marks:
Total: 13311
SM2:5170
SM3:5963
CPU:4271

still not as good as wobble's 8800's of 6321/6702
I guess it's something to do with the driver, isn't it?

 

Concerning Beyond99's comment... did you really run 3DMark06 at 1920x1200? (Most of us are too cheap to actually buy this program so we're forced to run it at the low default resolution of the free version ) If you did, I retract my comment that your graphics scores were too low, because they are not bad at all at this resolution. It might be useful for you to run the Crysis benchmark at 1920x1200 High settings... you should get average FPS in the neighborhood of 30FPS. (The GPU benchmark is in the game's "bin" folder.

I don't run Vista so I have no knowledge of Vantage, but you can check this thread for comparisons with your scores: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=301658

Here's a typical approach for driver installation:

1) Remove nVidia drivers in Control Panel

2) Restart in safe mode and run a driver cleaner (Driver Cleaner Pro/Driver Sweeper/CCCleaner)

3) Restart and install the new driver on each card using the "have disk" method.

4) Restart and set SLI

5) Restart

 

yeah, what wobble said, only im not to cheap(owns 3 versions). but i sure didn't see that 1920x1200 the first time...did you edit that in???

 

That's better, but I think the graphics scores should be higher. Unfortunately, people have mostly been posting only total 3DMark06 scores lately, but if you search you might find graphics scores of systems like yours (our systems are quite different... OS/CPU/GPU) for comparison purposes. I can't recommend a driver for Vista but you should be able to find recommendations on this board somewhere.

Sorry for the confusion about 3DMark06 resolution.

 

aren't you over clocked wobble? or is that stock under windows xp?

 

Just for reference my system had these scores:

3D 14865

SM2 5983
SM3 6886
CPU 4695

My system
Q9550
9800 GT SLI
2 200 Gb raid 0
4 gb ram
XP Sp3
Dox 178.13 video drivers

 

you will gain like 500 points if you take it out of "high quality mode"

 

No... stock clocks. My scores are pretty typical for XP, 8800GTX SLI, and a 3.0 Ghz dual.

 

cool. i did about the same in xp. it's vista im trying to conquer now...

side note: called sager to ask about the bios. they asked me to email them with my request and they would get it to the technical department....so we shall see. im sure this has been done many times before, but im going to give it my golden try now...*LOL*

 

Well, I expect any speed differences between XP and Vista will become irrelevant soon as Microsoft browbeats the industry into developing more and more Vista-only applications to make us XP users "go away". I know I'll have to make the switch, but I'm not looking forward to it.

 

man, vista is lovely. *LOL* embrace it like you did wndows 98...then windows *cough* me....then 2000....then the first batch of *cough* windows xp & and the 600 updates...*LOL* and now...vista

pretty much everyone hated xp when it came out, but as time progressed...they got use to it and that was that. same will happen with vista and xp will be come the old 98.....

 

I guess that's "progress" but I'm finding it hard to forget when Word Perfect loaded in less than a second on my Wang workstation (8088 CPU/DOS/dual floppies/no HD). Have to admit, though, that the graphics were "poor".

 

remember dos 1.0 and the dual floppy machines...*LOL* that's where i started at.

 

HI John,
do you mean a BIOS update would help??
actually i am not too concern about how much score to get, I jz wanna play my games (Crysis Warhead, FIFA, the Witcher, etc.) smoothly without lagging...

I hope a reinstall of latest driver would help...
once again, how to use the "Driver Cleaner" to update my display driver?
should i first uninstall my old driver, then "clean" it, then install a new one?

 

O... one more question, John...
have you face any problem when connecting external HDD (ATA) to you vista machine??

coz my vista laptop can't recognize my ATA 3.5" external HDD, but when i connect the same device to a WinXP machine, everything's fine..... that's weird

 

to disable Drive Indexing:
- right click on the C: Drive > go to Properties
- on the bottom, UNCHECK the "Allow Indexing Service...."
- hit OK and choose to apply to all files/folders
.... chose Ignore all if it asks anything.

the other way is.

Or you can just go to START > RUN
- type: services.msc and press Enter
- then go to and double-click on Indexing Service
- click the Stop button
- and choose the Startup Type in the drop-down menu to Disable
- then hit OK.

 

o.. thx...
then i think i have already disabled it long ago...
cheers....

regarding the Driver Cleaner thing, another could offer me a right sequence of doing it?

THanks

 

nope, no problems. every once and a while though, it will not recognize..so i either reboot or uninstall usb ports then reinstall them and a few other things i try....like

check your device manager. make sure you don't have ? marks on anything drive related.

while your in the device manager, click on disk management. make sure you drive has a drive letter assigned to it. one that is open and not taken up by any other device.

try using a different usb port

then report back after wards....

 

I've try each and every usb ports on my notebook....

and i am quite sure nothing wrong with the drivers...

i've read some articles that Vista x64 have problems to recogize a ATA USB HDD, but seems those problem have not been solved...

the weird thing is the HDD works fine in all XP computers...

regret that i dont have another ATA hard drive to try..



BTW, I've updated my driver to 180.10, it works pretty good with the FIFA09, smooth motions @ high quality texture, 3d grass on... etc... thanks for everybody's help!

 

What does turning off drive indexing do for you?

 

http://texhex.blogspot.com/2007/11/windows-vistas-constant-hd-activity.html

 

well that dang constant drive running was killing me. for the first few days it ran like 20 minutes after 2 to 5 minutes of being on. but when turned off....you can use it right away and allot less disk activity going on. meaning that hd light stays off a bit more....

 

I like XP since its less of a resource hog, as well it accesses the HDD less or not at all after minor tweaks.

Vista will require some effort to fully disable all of the resource hogs and HDD accessing services/utilities.

 

dont get me wrong...i love my vista, but when benchmarking back to back and reboot after reboot...it was the most annoying thing in the world!..*LOL* now that im not benching right now...it wants to stay off....hahahahaha, what is up with that. drives are just as quite as can be.