Samsung ATIV Book 6 - poor performance in old game

Hello:

I recently picked up an ATIV Book 6 and for the few days I've had it, when it comes to casual usage, this laptop has been phenomenal. However, I seem to be having a problem with it when it comes to gaming, and by no means am I trying to play the latest-and-greatest. The only game I play is Quake Live, a rather dated and browser-based first-person shooter that's essentially the even older Quake 3 title.

My previous computer was a desktop that I made back in 2006 which ran the game almost flawlessly, but there was the occasional hiccup and frame drop that prevented the game from fully running smoothly at 125FPS (the max). It had an AMD Athlon 4200+ dual-core processor, 1GB of DDR1 ram, and a 256MB GeForce 7900 GT, so the ATIV Book 6 should be towering over it in performance. But the game fluctuates heavily in its frame rate (50-120), and just doesn't handle at all like a laptop with the specs the ATIV Book 6 has for some reason.

I've skimmed through some of the other threads addressing performance with this laptop (notably posts by John Ratsey), and I can say that I've been running the game on "high performance" with it plugged in. I've marked the .exe of the game to "high performance" in the Catalyst Control Center, and I've even gone ahead and changed all of the graphics options to "performance" over "quality," and that didn't seem to change much. The drivers are up-to-date according to the CCC, and opening up Settings, "Silent Mode" is off. What gives?

Any insight would be greatly appreciated. Thanks ahead of time.

 

Updated Catalyst Control Center to a beta version hoping that would do it but to no avail. Would it be too early for me to be thinking I got a faulty unit? The AMD Radeon HD 8700M is detected in Device Manager and is "working properly," but I find it hard to believe even with this much tinkering this computer can't run the game at full speed.

 

Exactly which AMD GPU do you have? It should be listed in Samsung's specifications or perhaps on the label on the box.

You can then find the GPU on notebookcheck's GPU benchmark list. Either run some of those benchmarks and / or compare your gaming FPS with the results listed for that GPU. This will confirm whether the performance of your GPU is worse than the other available results.

John

 

I apologize for not stating it in my initial post, I just ran with the laptop model being sufficient hoping owners of the same one could chime in. It's the AMD Radeon HD 8770M specifically. I'll be sure to run some of the benchmarks and get back to you with the results in the evening.

Managed to run the tests just now, said "graphics card is not recognized" initially so I added 3DMark to the Switchable Graphics Application Settings and same deal. Runs the test as the integrated "Generic VGA video card."

 

Make sure you installed the latest version of Futuremark SystemInfo.

The GPU is the same as in many of the 2013 Series 7 / Ativ Book 8. There may be some discussion of the GPU performance in this thread.

John

 

I also have the book 6. and for the first 2 weeks, I did really struggle with the performance. I ran several benchmarks and all yielded abysmal results. There are lots of setting that have to be changed in order to get the laptop to perform to the specs. Ie: I had to change setting to not run in silent mode, turn off eco mode, make sure that power setting is set to samsung optimized or high performance. Those settings are interconnected, they will change according to one another. And they severely limit the CPU's power to around 1.15Ghz no more no less, and the machine will only run at 50% with any of those setting being active.
Also, drivers! I initially updated the machine to windows 8.1. And there was no driver available. So the machine was also limited in its ability to run. But now that samsung has released multiples drivers for the book 6, it is running as I expected. Even though the 8770m isn't the most wildly used GPU in laptop, it still runs rather well, considering my usage.

 

I was prompted to update SystemInfo when I finished installing 3DMark, and redownloading the installer doesn't let me do anything besides remove it.

I don't have silent mode or eco mode on, and I almost always run this laptop on high performance. The CPU appears to be working fine as like I said, using the laptop regularly yields the expected results. It just seems like the GPU is having issues.

I'll consider updating to Windows 8.1 tonight and get all the updates and report back. Thanks for the help you guys.

 

Updated to 8.1, had a bunch of trouble with fully uninstalling and reinstalling the video drivers, but I think I got it working now. Using a Leshcat Catalyst build and the 8770M is recognized and appears to be in working order (though I haven't tried playing Quake yet). Thanks for the help guys.

Edit: Didn't play but loaded Quake and it appears to be running beautifully now. Success.