Battlefield 3 on Z2?

Hi,

Has anyone tried the BF3 demo on the sony Z2? I find it really laggy for some reason, what are your settings? I would preorder if it worked better.

 

720p Low settings = 20fps

Don't buy Rage. It wont even launch on the Z2 because the drives are too old.

Sony has a great idea with the PMD, but being at mercy of special drivers is absolutely maddening.

 

no modded inf's for the pmd gpu?

@maven1975 why'd you return your last z?

 

I didn't like the driver issues with the PMD, how delicate the bottom casing was around the memory card slots. I also have problems with Sony's lack of desire to even take the effort to sell the proper Z2 cases here in the states. At this rate, we wont see them until the Z23 is launched and that will be almost EOL for the Z2 series.

Gonna kick back on Sony computers for awhile. I am sure the quake in Japan and the economy is not helping them push products. I just feel they need to remember that the Z2 is their top of the line laptop. Its not doing them any favors letting it, and the Z name get tarnished because they have better things to do. Its hard enough to sell PC laptops these days with everyone buying into the Apple hype. Let alone charge them an arm an a leg four a subpar product. (Compared to the Z1)

Everyone's in love with thin and light. With buying the Z2, I just needed that slap in the face telling me sometimes the scarafice is not worth the tradeoffs.

If I were to buy a thin and light computer again today, it would be a.MacBook Air with the C2D and 320m. $600-700 bones is just right for what it does. Although, since when did the Z1 become a heavy brick? I and we Z1 owners need to remember how lucky we are to own one of the best and last 13" all in one laptops.

 

I understand the urge to game - I game myself from time to time. I don't understand, though, the urge to game on this machine. Even if the PMD worked perfect the screen is just too small for my old eyes to effectively shoot aliens and enemies.

I don't think that this is the machine to buy if you want to game on a laptop. Heck, I can't think of any ultra-portable that is really suitable for gaming. The Z2 is what it is, and what it is IMHO is a great computer for business and travel.

 

has anyone tried the retail version on BF3 on the Z2 yet?

 

Rage actually runs surprisingly well on the Z11. I lowered the resolution to 1366x768 but actually have textures on high and it's extremely playable and dare i say, even smooth! I am shocked. random texture loading every now and then vs my desktop, but it's hardly a fair fight there, although despite having older drivers it's been graphic glitch free. I had the latest drivers (on release date) for my crossfired 6970's and it ran horribly with crazy graphic glitches. I guess nvidia still has ati's number when it comes to OpenGL.

 

Kinda a poor example for a couple reasons. Shot with my phone, meaning I played with one hand (wait... what??) so it was either walk or mouse movement, never both at the same time. The colors and sharpness are way off.

Also, the razer turns itself off after 10-15+ seconds of non-movement, so every time i went back, the initial jerkyness looks like it was the Z's fault but it's Razer's power saving feature

rage - YouTube

 

With the new universal drivers BF3 is almost playable on low setting. 1600x900 gives about 30fps, lowering resolution to 1280x720 gives you another 10 fps or so. The framerate drops more when explotions happen etc. The render.perforverlay graph indicates both cpu and gpu is limiting performance, but according to taskmanager the cpu is not fully loaded. Could this be some kind of light peak bottleneck?
Perhaps it would help playing the game on a external screen, using the light peak GPU connection one way?

 

Worth a try but I don't think LightPeak is the limiting factor here. Its bandwidth is much wider than a pcie x1 gen1 Optimus link which can play this on high details see here [eGPU x1.1Opt External Screen] Battlefield 3 - YouTube

Check the thermal policy and set to maximum performance power plan.

 

But the 560 ti is a much better graphics card than the 6650m.

 

That's true, my statement was just to prove that the bandwidth between laptop and GPU is NOT the issue here.

 

create a file named user.cfg in the same folder as bf3.exe and put the following line in it
WorldRender.DxDeferredCsPathEnable 0
it gives you a boost of 7-10fps. then turn the in-game MSAA (deferred anti-aliasing) off and use the in-game FXAA (post anti-aliasing) instead. it gives you another fps boost with the same overall image quality.

 

Thermal policy and power plan was set to performance (I've actually mapped the 'vaio' button to control thermal policy). The GPU was also slightly overclocked using trixx.

Thanks, I'll try it out and see if it improves fps on the Z2.

 

There is a slight complication with that. nVidia, ONLY on x1 links (likely leftover driver code from the ION2 setups), engages a rather capable link compression system (there should be benches in the eGPU thread). So nVidia on X1 is not comparible to AMD on X1.

 

PCIe compression we are seeing at x1 links with fermi cards has its roots in the x3510 pine trail chips, where only x1 link was available. ION2 came far later.

Z2 has x4 2.0 over Light Peak - this is indeed not comparable to x1.Opt

Well, I keep my statement up, bandwidth is not the problem here. Probably the PMD (mid-class gpu) is just too slow for BF3 in HD or higher resolutions.

 

^ i play BF3 on my SA's 6630m (overclocked to 725MHz core/945MHz memory/904mV voltage) -- 1366x768, mix of MEDIUM + HIGH, MSAA off, FXAA on, HBAO on -- along with the user setting i posted above and get 45+ fps in multiplayer maps. 6650m is a tad more powerful with a bit more overclocking headroom.

so yes, if you want to play at 1080p, i think you'll have to make a sacrifice in terms of image quality.

 

Did we ever settle it was an x4 link, however? I remember there was a point where we had bandwidth testing application, but never much beyond that...?

For reference, the Apple MBP thunderbolt connector is also linked via a PCIe x4 link, but has much less bandwidth exposed over that.

The reason I stated ION2 was due to Intel effectively blocking nVidia from making Intel chipsets... so forced to go external on "power netbooks?" Unless if we are talking about the same thing here, lol (or I'm way off on what ION2 actually means ?).

 

I did a quick test of the user.cfg parameter above and it seemed to help. The framerate was a little bit higher, but more importantly it seemed to lessen some of the stutter and framerate drops.

I googled the parameter above, I wasnt able find out what it actually did, but it is referenced a lot of forums for bf3 performance tuning. Som places also suggest a lot of other parameters as well, like this thread:
http://battlelog.battlefield.com/bf3/forum/threadview/2832654624791210468/