Very bad DirectX performance. FZ38M

Hi,

I don't know what to do anymore. Perhaps somebody of you can help me...

I own a VGN-FZ38M Vaio since about 4 month. As most of you will know this notebook comes with 4 GB RAM and a Nvidia GeForce8400M GT. This should be enough to run any game at the moment. (Operating system is the pre installed Vista Home Premium 32bit).

My problem is, it doesn't even run old games, or benchmarks. I get horrible 3D performances testing with 3DMark06, Warhammer Online (Both directX 9) and a Call of Juarez graphics Benchmark (Direct X10). The older Benchmarks / Games don't get me more then 12 FPS at any time, most of the time it runs much slower (1-6 FPS), the DirectX 10 Benchmark doesn't "run" at all, it just shows me a single Picture every few seconds, so it is somewhere at 0.5 FPS or something.

I tried new drivers, old drivers, installing directX9c. The temperature of my GPU is pretty normals when not in "action", around 56° Celsius, after 5 Minutes of Benchmarks it rises to approximately 65° which seems ok too.
DxDiag shows no Problems (I have attached a DxDiag Log).

The Vista Performance Indicators are all ok, the HD is 4.8 which is lowest (Vista Help tells me 3.0 is "ok" for Games, so my 4.8 Overall should be enough too)


I'm absolutely clueless what could cause this very bad performance. My HD has lots of space left (each partition >25GB). There are no programs installed which should affect graphics performance.

I thought about putting this Posting in the nVidia with defect Chipsets thread, but since I don't know if my problem is related with the chipset and I want to reach the broadest range of knowledgable peaple available I started a new thread. Hope this is ok...

I would really appreachiate your help! Thanks in advance, EddyS.

 

What is your full 3dmark06 score because 12fps seems about right for 3dmark06 with that card. Also, don't expect to play much DX10 with that card. My 8600m gt can't even handle DX10 very well.

 

The full 3Dmark06 Score was somewhere around 1100, don't remeber exatcly. I just remember that my score war almost half the score of a reference with a 2GB RAM, 2GhZ single Core System....

 

3dMark06 is NOT a real gaming performance indicator per se. Look at the SR ATI 3470 gaming thread...that card is more powerful then the 8400 and gets similiar FPS's on 3dMark06...except the 3470 is a DX10.1 compatible card...

Look on the forum and as you can see, some relatively new/brand new games run perfectly well on them. You can't play crysis, but you can play bioshock(most likely), call of duty 4(most likely), etc.

But, the 8400 is part of the defecitve nvidia's 84xx and 86xx series, so... eh, your card could just be faulty, it's still under warranty, so if there actually is somethign wrong with it, maybe you should get it checked out. Your 3dmark score should be in the 1600-1900 range. If it's like...500, then maybe its broken, but if its over 1100... then it's fine.

The 8400, much like the 3470 are low-end GPU's designed for light gaming and watching/editign/ripping dvd's/music, etc. It's not by any means a GPU powerhouse, but then again you didn't buy a gaming laptop....

 

The thing that really bothers me is the performance with the Warhammer MMORPG, this is designed for "low end systems" and thus should work fine with my notebook which is (by the producers standard) ranked as "high end" (for this specific game).

Perhaps I will just give the Computer to my reseller and let him check if everything is ok....

 

Well...what exactly is your 3dmark score? Also, try googling GeForce8400 and WarHammer... but it should work...

http://kotaku.com/5031089/warhammer-online-system-requirements-revealed

 

Ok, then I maybe have simply overestimated the power of my system

Now that I have switched 3DMark to Win XP compatibility mode I get a score of:
2748 3DMarks
SM 2.0 Score 1034
SM 3.0 Score 1015
CPU Score 1867

This seems to be okay?

Warhammer looks slightly better using WinXP compatibility. Only little lags when loading new textures... still not very happy, but well, if this is the way it is...

Thank you for your help!

 

Just thinking...

Empire Earth II ran better on my 3 year old Medion, 1,6Ghz Centrino and I think 900 or 915 Chipset than on my SZ with the NVidia.

Compatebility is a great problem, especially if you are using old software.

For example, Maple 9.5 runs in XP, it runs in compatebility on my mother's laptop, it doesn't run on mine (SZ) which means I have to buy a copy of the newest version.

 

I play WAR on my vaio FE790 with Nvidia 7600 go which is about 800 to 1000 point above 8400 in 3Dmarks06. Although it runs smoothly most the time, I still can feel it works pretty hard on it. X400 series is not really a gaming kind of video card...I will expect the new Vaio FW with ATI 3470 to run slightly better than 7600 go but not by much. I think to get semi-decent performance out of WAR at max setting excluding seige you need at least a 8600 GT or a 9600 GT.