Original M15x in todays games..

I'm looking for other owners of the original M15x (with the Core 2 Duo and 8800m GTX) to tell me how well they play games like Bad Company 2 and Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit.

This could be perfectly normal, but it seems like my M15x is underperforming and I wanted to make sure its not..

My Bad Company 2 settings.ini file looks like this:

Lowest possible settings. And I average 30-35 FPS.

In NFS: Hot Pursuit I have my settings on lowest (well, theres not many settings you can actually change) and 1440x900 and I get about 15-25fps.

Now I'm thinking its either because 1) its old, 2) I have a slow 2.1ghz dual core, or 3) the 8800m GTX just isn't good enough anymore. Maybe its all 3.

Just wanted to see if other M15x owners are seeing similar results... I've tested all testable components in my laptop and found no issues. Also, I had a similar issue (games underperforming) when I first bought this laptop and had to send it in to get warrantied.. Ended up being a bad motherboard. Obviously its not possible for me to test my motherboard so I'm wanting to make sure my performance is on par with what other M15x owners are experiencing.

 

In the old thread (oh boy, I was in the upper case M section) I determined I have a version or two old video drivers. I don't think it will make much of a difference but I'm going to update to the latest from Nvidia..

 

Small update.. Installed the latest drivers from Nvidia for the 8800m GTX.. Checked the "clean install" option... after it installed the new drivers it restarted a second time and bluescreened.. Restarted the machine and device manager is reporting that the drivers have stopped because the device has reported problems (Code 43).

Looked on Alienware's website to see if they have any tested driver offerings and they don't appear to have Windows 7 drivers for this machine.. In addition their latest Vista drivers are 176.37 which are freaking old.

So I'm thinking either my video card doesn't like the Nvidia drivers, which makes no sense, or my video card is bad... which wouldn't surprise me and just add another notch in the horrible history of this laptop.

 

So the video drivers I had installed prior to today were quite old. 195.81 drivers from late 2009. These happen to be the last video drivers for this video card that aren't "Verde".

According to Nvidia, "Verde" means:

So I'm wondering if this is my issue. Something changed in the Verde drivers and my laptop can't support them.

 

Your lap top can not go any higher than the 186 series of drivers. There is a issue with the compatibility of the Area 51 m15x BIOs with verde drivers.

I have an Area 51 M17x with dual 9800m Gt's (a 9800m gt is the same as a 8800 gtx). Some games only utilize one card, MOH Tier for example, and Im able to play it maxed out with a max temp for the card at 88. SO your card is still good, you just need to play with the available drivers and see what works. Good luck.

 

Yea.. I found that thread in this section about that.. I've tried everthing I can to get newer drivers.. even tweakforce drivers don't work.

I imagine I could get 10-15% increased performance in todays games with proper drivers.

 

Yes, you're stuck with the old 186.81-91 set of drivers for the area 51 m15x.

On the bright side, I haven't encountered a game I couldn't play because of driver issues. I have read though that Metro 2033 requires the newest set of drivers, so you won't be able to get that running on this machine.

 

Yea, it just sucks that Alienware is literally forcing us to have to upgrade our machines due to not making new drivers. But I guess thats how they make their money.

 

Did you tried with the drivers from laptopvideo2go?

I suppose that the drivers from the last months should work also because at least the architecture from the 9xxxM to 3xxM series doesn't varies very much.

 

I looked into those drivers the other day but it looked like they only supported a generation or two old of Nvidia cards.. but I just looked again and it looks like that post has been updated to support a lot of cards.

I'll try those and see how that goes.

 

You can try to turn down your renderaheadlimit to 0 from 2 will give you a slight performance increase and your FOV is really high for a 1440 x 900 screen does it fisheye for you?

http://www.rjdown.co.uk/projects/bfbc2/fovcalculator.php

 

I usually notice bad FOV and I thought 75 was pretty good. I think I switched it to that during the beta. That site you linked to recommended 65 so I'll try that out. And I'll turn down the renderaheadlimit.

Thanks for the tips!

 

@cha

I have been playing metro 2033 on my 8700m gt until it died recently.
with drivers from laptopvideo2go.
DOX mod drivers were the best, but stopped working for me one I went to win7.

@astrogiblet
And I played battlefield bad company 2 on it aswell. with settings higher than that, and thats on a 8700m gt, so your 8800m gtx should be doing quite a bit better than that.

Try DOX mod drivers if you can, or just the latest drivers from laptopvideo2go if you havent already.

 

I was having similar issues a while back and I updated to 186xx drivers from laptopvideo2go with the .inf. Before giving up, I updated the Physx drivers even though they were up to date. Uninstalled and re-installed and my performance went way up and I can now play most modern games at 1440x900 on medium to high with good fram rates. It doesn't make sense, but even if the game doesn't support it, or it does and you have it disabled, it nerfs the card. So try that