Help make my AW13 faster for Star Citizen

I'm not entirely computer literate for the more in depth solutions to problems, but from what I've been told I should be able to run Star Citizen fine on my laptop. However, I seem to be only getting between 3 to 5 fps on the lowest settings in the game, at 1080p. I haven't messed with a .cfg file yet, but from my understanding of my specs, I shouldn't be getting that bad of performance. I run most other games on medium to high at around 30-60 fps at 1080p. Only SC is hurting me.

Some relevant info, let me know if you need more, or specifics.

OS: Win 10
CPU i5-5200u @ 2.2 ghz
Ram: 8 gb (not sure if ddr3 or ddr4)
GPU: GeForce GTX 960M; Driver Version 359.00
PSU: 130w

Running in high performance mode with sleep options turned off.

I'd prefer not to pour too much money into this, as I'm a college kid with roughly 200 bucks in the bank. This laptops primary function is to take notes in lectures, with the side ability of running some simulations. Gaming is the nice side effect of this. It only has to really work until may next year when I get my desktop back.

Cheers for any help. Thanks to @woodzstack for pointing me here.

 

maxing the ram to 16gb might do something but really i think the GPU is a bit weak. you might need to run at a lower res like 1600x900 and on 13" display it'll look fine.

 

the 960M is fine. but he needs max performance from it ghost.
heres his stats :



Is there a better PSU ?

What si the best way to max his CPU's performance, XTU or just in bios, what are the options for the AW13 ? He has 2 cores right, and they'r eat different speeds, if I guessed.
Anyone have experience with this model ?

 

i wonder if it is the PSU that's holding it back.

 

He's probably using the iGPU for the game, not the GTX 960m. The 130w PSU is fine (it's actually more than enough). He'll need to go into Nvidia control panel and whiitelist the game. The CPU should be running at full speed when using the high performance battery plan, but he can ensure that the CPU is running at max using Throttlestop.
Given that the game is in Alpha 2.0 (whatever that means), it may not work well.
@woodzstack I don't think you need to be showing his service tag in public. Also, the i5-5200u is a dual core processor with hyper threading (2 cores, 4 threads).

 

I just tried to whitelist the game, but under the instructions you linked, for the program settings, the game does not come up in the list. Is there a way to manually select it, or is the global setting enough?

The Alpha 2.0 is just the second stage of the game adding ships where multiple people can interact, as opposed to single seat fighters.

My desk top at home runs it fine, but that's an i7 3820, r9 290x, 1200w psu, win 10, and 32 Gig of ram system, a lot beefier than this laptop.

 

there's no add button in the nvidia CP?

 

Ah, didn't realize I had to click add. I thought it added the game that was selected in the drop down menu. Told you I'm not the most tech literate.

 

LOL, NEWB!

J/K, but yeah you can always ADD a game by its .exe file too, then go in and select things for that profile, like which graphics adapter to use, and other things, I will catch you on Discord later and see if I have a moment to help you.

 

So an update. Following @Game7a1 's advice, I manually set star citizen to use the nvidia gpu. Combined with that, I've changed power settings for max performance, forced single monitor display, have 4 prerendered frames, and turned vsync off. When I am able to load into the game, I am averaging ~25-30 fps at the highend, but nothing lower than 15. However, the game is crashing routinely, and I believe this is due to lack of memory, or overuse of what is available. As such, with the help of @woodzstack, I have ordered more ram, which should arrive thursday or friday.

I will update again when I have it installed to see if all the suggested fixes work, or to get more help should new issues arise. Thanks everyone so far.