Okay. I am determined to be able to get no less than 30 fps in the heaviest of fighting with settings on High. My rig is in my sig. I am pretty sure there is no reason why I should be getting anything less than 30 fps at any time with my configuration in the future when the optimization is up to par. RIght? please don't tell me I can't get this (30 is the absolute minimum) once everything is properly optimized. If I can run it on high like this, I can die happy. It is a very beefy gaming laptop (please don't comment 'that's your problem') Buying a new computer isn't an option.
No need to feel sorry about anything mate. The performance in this game is simlpy bad and that even with the best hardware. I would not mind if every day the peole would make 100 new threads about performance so that everyone who considers investing monney in this game thinks twice before doing so. That is the only way this game will ever get optimised. I too think that 30fps is not enough to enjoy a shooter.
Unfortunately....that's probably your problem. If you're at like 10fps, it's because your laptop is overheating and SpeedStep is throttling the processor down to ~1.6GHz. Either disable SpeedStep and risk damage if the temperatures get too high or find a way to deal with the poor performance that results from cramming an i7 into a laptop and expecting it to not run ridiculously hot. If it's ~30 that you get, that's not surprising for your setup in PS2.
You need to be realistic here. The 660M is a great GPU for a laptop, but it's only 640 GFLOPS. A desktop 660 is 1,800 GFLOPS, or roughly three times as powerful. What drivers do you have? If you don't have the newest ones, go to www.nvidia.com and get them. What resolution are you running? Is switchable graphics Optimus nonsense screwing up your system like it's screwing my friends up? He can't run PhysX at all, despite having an Nvidia GPU. Can you monitor GPU and CPU temperatures to see how much thermal headroom you have left? When you're playing and Alt+F are you CPU or GPU limited? Have you adjusted your power management software on the laptop and configured Windows for best performance rathe than power saving? Some laptops have BS defaults for power. You're lucky you have 30fps at all and lucky you have an i7.
You're not going to be able to 'tune' a laptop as well as you can a PC; there's a lower power and thermal budget to play with, and the parts (like the memory) are less likely to be quality parts. Have you done the basic tuning already? 1) Use msconfig to disable background processes and programs that run on startup that you don't need. 2) clear your temporary files, browser caches, any downloaded files you don't need anymore. 3) defrag the drive. (2) and (3) must be done in this order - this will hopefully move the PS2 install towards the outer edge of the spinning disk platter, which will boost your loading times (which will reduce stutters in game). 4) Make sure the machines power profile is set to 'high performance'. If you've done all that, the next step is to start looking at system settings. You don't want to overclock a laptop due to the thermal issues, but you might still get a boost by reducing your memory latencies in the BIOS. If your system can run with the command cycles set to 1T instead of 2T, do that as well. All that said, you're going to be held back a bit by the GPU. The game will say you're CPU limited, but this is the real culprit. The 660m has a narrower memory bus than the desktop version (only half as wide as mine, for example), and there's a chance it's using the systems DDR3 pool instead of dedicated GDDR5. Yeah, double trouble. If you can't get the performance you want after doing everything above, you might *have* to drop some settings. Most won't have a huge impact, but try them one by one to see what works for you. In my own testing, turning 'graphics quality' (depth of field and bloom) down helps and actually makes the game look a little better. Particle effects, Ambient Occlusion, and Render distance all help as well. Bearing in mind the memory speed bottleneck, I'd strongly advise you to keep textures down and PhysX off as well.
I always have updated drivers. I don't know whether physx is on or not. How do I tell? I never turned it on or off. It generally says GPU if i am not on low. The game runs ultra smooth now on low and pretty well on High Graphics w/ Medium for everything else. My computer can run games like battlefield 3 on maximum w/o any issues. I don't understand what memory latencies are and I am not keen on messing with bios. I tried dual booting ubuntu only to have to have them restore it because new puters have ******** bios called EIFU or something.
Do your elevators look like this? http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/1117162757599746187/6649918F15472BB8A773E22DB7F67E132CAF0C16/ Are you CPU or GPU limited?
You're in the unfortunate position that dispite the GT660M and the i7 in your laptop having names which evoke the image of thier desktop bretheren, but they are not up to the mark or expectation when compared to thier namesakes. Laptops as other have mentioned are vulerable to heat build up, and therefore self protective performance throttling is employed to save your expensive electronics from burning up. Downside is that this is bad news for framerates, which is why you will see alot of gamers warn against the use of a laptop. As BlackDove has pointed out, you have significantly less power to play with than you may be lead to belive looking at the name, to this end, you are better off treating your graphics card and CPU as if they were a midrange desktop, and set your game up accordingly. PhysX has to be "turned on" for it to be a factor, it is off by default. I'd recommend leaving it like that, you will only hurt your FPS and to be frank you're not missing anything other than a few pretty visual effects. If your CPU is being turned down by the heat build up, check your fans are working and aren't blocked, and that you have the laptop on a clean solid surface (i had a friend who used to put thier laptop on thier pillow at night and wonder why the heat went crazy). If heat is a serious issue for you, consider purchasing a "cooling pad" for your laptop to sit on, these are typicaly a tray on short legs with 1 or 2 fans built into the bottom that increase airflow to the underside of the laptop. Ultimatly, you are going to be restricted by your hardware and its sensitivity to heat, your laptop is a really nice machine, but sadly its not going to be as good for gaming as if you had spent that considerable sum of money (that looks like a £1,500 laptop at a guess) on a desktop.
CPU is perfectly kosher. It looks like its my GPU. No the jump pads do not look that pretty. All I want is to be able to play it on High at no lower than 30 fps. Are there any puter experts here who think this may be possible with future optimizations? If not, what about a mix of High and Medium?
I wasn't confusing the two of you - I was asking for a clarification as to what you do get and answering in advance if you said 10. Your issue is a combination of the laptop i7 being weaker than the desktop counterpart (which gets ~37-40 stock) and the 660M is more or less a 550Ti in terms of performance. 30fps on high is what I would expect as stated previously. To get above that you're going to have to settle for medium settings as what you have is GPU that compares directly with a very mid-range offering from the previous generation.
Turn down stuff that doesn't matter, like shadow quality or render distance a little bit. Also, what resolution are you running? That's incredibly important information. Are you CPU or GPU limited? DEFINITELY get a cooling pad, unless you have a laptop that's designed for gaming(high CPU and GPU loads) and has massive fans like the Asus ROG series do. I'm amazed it runs as well as it does. That's clearly a decent laptop, and there are driver level tweaks you can make to get further performance benefits in the Nvidia control panel. You can also try the Geforce Experience thingy. I haven't done it personally, but it's supposed to automatically set stuff up to run best on your system. I like to do it manually.
I have a cooling pad. If I set it to High, it says GPU limited. the resolution is 900. I have changed the render quality and distance multiple times. But much lower than 90 % it really starts looking like poopy.
I have a ****** 960T@ 3.8ghz, a 6870@ 920 and 16gigs or 1333mhz ram. With: Settings all on low except flora and shadows off as well as model and textures on high Cores unparked Page file removed Power on high performance I get at least 35-40 fps in big fights. I'd say check the settings. Most importantly turn shadows and flora off.
Then you're probably hitting the limit for how much the GPU can actually process in terms of filtering and geometry. Try turning down or off things like fog shadows and shadows.
Of course it's not, you should be able to run PS2 very well with that pc. The problem is this game is not optimized (and I think it will never be) for some CPU. This game is very CPU-heavy and cannot take advantage of an 8-core like yours. You could have better performance with a 4 core with higher frequency. I had an amazing fps increase by overclocking my CPU (amd FX-8120) from 3.1ghz to 4.0 ghz. It has been very easy even if I had never done anything like that before. Of course you might need to buy a new heatsink before overclocking. I know, it sucks we're almost "forced" to overclock in order to get decent performance. SOE did a bad job, but that's the only solution I've found so far.
