Display driver mods for W500?

Everybody knows the W500 is not a gaming laptop. The FireGL is optimized for CAD/3D work and shouldn't ever be considered for gaming. Ok, i'm glad we got that out there.


That said, does anybody know whether or not a driver exists for the FireGL V5700 that tips the scale a little closer to the Gaming side?

 

The W500 still does fine on games, though I wasn't able to find modded drivers or anything (and I looked a lot).

What you can do is get things like config files for the specific games you want to play. For example, I play a lot of Call of Duty 4, and normally that only gets me like 90 frames per second on the 960 resolution.

If you get a config file though for COD, and replace the deafult one, you can run the game much smoother and it'll give you something like 150 - 300 fps. Very playable.

 

You can always grab whatever the current ATI release is and use the mobility modder and they should work perfectly fine (switchable graphics aside) for your card, though you might have to disable the switchable mode in the BIOS before they will install properly.

Also, I disagree with the premise of workstation GPU's not being good for gaming. Sure, they weren't originally *marketed* for that purpose, but they are the exact same chips used in the non-workstation counterparts. The only tangible difference is the drivers may have slightly differing configurations for the cards (good or bad). In my experience, it matters more what driver version you're running than if it's a workstation configured card, and Lenovo's release is not usually the latest.

 

ATI doesn't support the W500 GPU. If you want to download ATI drivers, you'll have to select one of the other cards listed there, and those won't work properly, as I've already tried and found out the hard way. I tried to use the mobility 3650 drivers and it was epic fail. The only current support for W500 GPU comes straight from Lenovo.

Mobility modders.net also does not support the Fire GL 5700, at least not yet, however they do support most of the other Fire GL series and may have an update for this card in the future.

 

If I had any idea that this GPU was so hokey I probably would have never bought the laptop to begin with.... hindsight is 20/20. When I first got it, they were going through the huge ordeal of whether or not it was actually a "FireGL V5700" ... well that got straightened out at least. How is it that ATI doesn't support their own chip? Isn't that a little bit rediculous?

On a different note, I ordered a spare battery from the Lenovo outlet store for like $40.... a few days later I got an email thanking me for my purchase of the "TRACKPOINT CAP COLECTION" and that they charged my card 9.99 -- with no mention of a battery.

They didn't even spell collection right. Lenovo is really droppin' the ball lately

 

Yeah, I'm really surprised that ATI doesn't offer support for this card, but then again it's highly customized for CAD which I guess might not be ATI's thing, but Lenovo's.

What games are you hoping to play? There might be other tweaks and such that you can use to really improve the performance. I'm still hoping that new drivers are made though in the future.