R1 Performance difference between video drivers 263.08 and 301.42?

What's the performance difference between the latest stock Dell video driver (263.08) and the latest one on nVidia's website (301.42)? I noticed a substantial increase between Battlefield 3 for the newest nVidia driver, but I'm also interested in other games, mainly
Max Payne 3
Assassin's Creed
Amalur
Grand Theft Auto IV
Burnout Paradise
I'd love to know if losing the ability to let my laptop sleep is really worth it or not.
Also, I've been noticing crashes with black screens and either stuttering sound, or sound restoring followed by a powered off screen, and then no sound.
First encountered it in TF2, then Burnout Paradise, and most recently, BF3 in campaign. I'd be interested in knowing if this was simply a drive error, which may be resolved as I recently reinstalled my driver, or a GPU problem (which I doubt because I always keep an eye on my temps.)


cheers

 

This I would like to see the end of. I myself use to run the 301's, then switched to the Dell 263's. I have not tried running BF3 yet. How much increase did you notice?

As for the ability to sleep properly, mine does not always sleep properly on the Dell drivers. 1 out of maybe 5 times, the laptop just crashes when sleeping, just like when running the latest Nvidia Drivers.

Only games I can confirm run the same on either driver are:

Modern Warfare 3
TrackMania
Race Driver GRID

As for losing battery life because the GPU is enabled, it is hardly true, notebookcheck showed the idle power consumption was nearly the same whether or not the GPU is enabled or not. Plus, when surfing or doing light stuff, the GPU is always in the lowest power state. The Intel card is so under powered that my laptop lags when opening videos (even 100MB avi's). MKV playback is pathetic and I end up using my GPU the whole time.

Does anyone have a way to lock the 335M into the lowest P-state?

 

Havent tried the 301s or BF3 but most apps/games will not show benefit unless a specific update is requested (IMO). If it matters the mix-mash of optimus drivers for the R1 has no hybernation issues on my setupso maybe the sleep function will be ok also. If I recall its using 285 series driver. The intel driver I am using is newer than the official ones provided and I suspect it would do much better for you.

 

Could you please teach me or link me to the intel drivers that are updated? I already tried using driver update on the intel card and could not find anything. My version is 8.17.12.6308. As long as I can at least improve video playback on the Intel card, I will be happy.

 

Current Driver Installed 8.15.10.2413
Newer Driver Available:15.17.18.64.2555 (8.15.10.2555)
Check yours:
Intel® Driver Update Utility

I do NOT see the version you have.

Lots of off-topic things here but this is the thread I used:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m11x/618374-m11x-r1-hybrid-optimus-driver.html

As for intel stuff I would lookup DrGoodVibes postings like these:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m11x/564122-m11xr1-browser-gpu-acceleration.html
http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...-intel-r-4-series-chipset-windows-update.html

You can compare results there to see if any major diff exists. If so then you might have issues drivers cannot solve.

My version is much older than yours. 8:15:10:2413
Possible that "older" drivers can work better. Any suggestion for a place I can test so you can compare? A specific file download+playback?

 

That is a screenshot of my Intel card. I already checked my Chrome and found that it is already hardware accelerated. I got it by letting windows update get the driver for me when I was installing the Dell 263. You can probably get it by clicking the update driver and letting windows update do it.

I just checked on the intel site and found what you were saying, that my driver version is newer than what is available there. As for the file to test, try playing any 720p MKV video that is 500MB or more and look for fast action scenes. The laptop will lag when opening it, then when playing there will be massive artifacts and pixelations and the video will skip back and forth.

I use MPC-HC with no extra codecs (only DX9 which it wants when running for the 1st time). I can see that DXVA is enabled.

Are you running the Hybrid graphics driver? the GPU might be coming on when you play videos.

Thanks for the help

 

Not playing many mkv files but I get some artifacts/pixelation with some sample files - some worse than others. MPC should work... did you try VLC? This may not be fixable though. What does the net say for 4500 users?

 

Edit: the earlier test was with whatever Windows Media Player would do (forget what codec stuff I have). Just tested the same file with VLC and zero issues. Ver1.1.7

My optimus settings are for intel with both players.

Some old info, never tried myself:
Watching H.264 videos using DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA)

 

I give up. VLC is not using intel on my system... confirmed with Nvidia GPU tool.

 

Haha, sad to hear. I moved from VLC as it was not DXVA enabled by default and I was lazy to go through all the settings. Also, VLC had this weird font cache building thing sometimes when I ran it. MPC has DXVA working right after installation.

Online, there are modified drivers for the 4500, but I could not install them at all. When I deleted the driver through device manager, I had to eventually uninstall the Nvidia driver and then start all over again because of a problem.

One such thread is this: Modified Intel laptop drivers for gaming! (Good FPS!)

I just found out that the link there works. Before this I downloaded from a random 4shared site. Will test out if I can get the drivers from that thread to run or not.

 

Hope you sort it out. I'll just keep using the 335 - but I game a lot less.

 

Well, I tried and it broke the Hybrid graphics. Ended up reverting back to the default latest windows update driver. 335M all the way for me!!

 

If you check the links I gave it might be possible to build your own homebrew driver combo. There is some downside to GPU switching (needing reboots sometimes IIRC) but some prefer it.

^^^ not an optimus config!