Samsung 700Z7C-S03 horrific FPS....

First of all, let me assure you that I have taken every option known to Google to leverage the conventional wisdom of the Internet to solve this problem. All my solution attempts are listed below. Obviously none of them worked. I tried everything to solve the problem on my own, but maybe somebody here has an idea.

The game in question is (the yes it is horribly optimized) ARMED ASSAULT 2 OA (steam version) made by BIS . The game is quite old (nearly 5 years), and used to run reasonably well on my Sony Vaio i3. Now however it totally fails - my guess is that the CPU is just not engaging.

I now have less then half of the FPS I previously had on system two generations older. No matter what I am doing, I am stuck with around 8 FPS on "medium" settings and 10 FPS on "low" settings.

My system:
Samsung 700Z7C-S03 (WIN 8)
:: Processor
Intel Core i7-3615QM 2.3 GHz (Intel Core i7)
:: Mainboard
Intel HM76 (Panther Point)
:: Memory
8192 MB, 4096MB + 4096MB (soldered)
:: Graphics adapter
NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M - 2048 MB, Core: 835 MHz, Memory: 1000 MHz, GDDR5, ForceWare 295.55
:: Display
17.3 inch 16:9, 1920x1080 pixel, Chi Mei, Anti-glare / matte, glossy: no
:: Harddisk
Seagate Momentus SpinPoint M8 ST1000LM024, 1000 GB 5400 rpm + SanDisk iSSD P4 8GB

What I have tried so far:

1. Using all parameters listed on the BIS wiki, including -winxp, -nocb, various values for max memory, limited cores and threads, etc.

2. turned off individual threads via affinity during the game itself.

3. edited .cfg in a number of ways, as per often-mentioned google guidelines.

4. forced NVDIA and intel chip-set to run in turn (with absolutely not difference).

5. I have of course updated NVIDA drivers, applied the BIS patches directly, used Arma20A beta.

NONE OF THIS HAS HELPED AT ALL.

My overall CPU consumption has remained remarkably stable - in multicore use never goes over 25% no matter what. When I force single core it does sometimes peak at close to 80% briefly. RAM is totally stable at 40% no matter what. The HD does sometime surge to 100% in bursts, however when I am reloading a (presumably cached) scenario like Benchmarking 2 the HD is not active at all but performance is the same.
The power supply does not seem to be the issue as well. I have upped the power in a a number of ways and there has been absolutely no difference in FPS.

There is no earthly reason why my laptop - which is close to gaming rig – shouldn’t be able to play Arma2 at the highest specs, which is indeed why I bought it. Otherwise I have spent well in excess of €1600 for something I do not need at all.

Needless to say, the computer is awesome otherwise and it does play other games exactly as I expected it - but the only game I really want - total fail.

Can anyone help?

Cheers, S

 

Some thoughts:

1. Did you enable silent mode? (It locks the CPU down to minimum speed).
2. Which GPU is the game using?
3. Run HWiNFO and see the maximum CPU speed then look at the estimated power consumption.

John

 

Hi John,

1. Silent mode makes no difference - revealingly.
2. Mvidia gt-650m
3. Ok...but how icoukd it possibly be a power issue?

 

It must be a software issue no doubt, if you can play other games well. Before I owned this Samsung I had a Lenovo Y570 with the Nvidia GT 555 and I couldn't get Quake enemy territory to play, it was like lagging bad. It works on this Laptop and on the HP I had before the lenovo, plus all other games run as they should.

I have to say when I first got this Samsung I couldn't get BF3 to run well until I nuked all of the Samsung software (it was a bit laggy), I found after logging off the game that Samsung's updating software would have a notification bubble opened, something like this bubble it was checking for updates while I was playing. To me this means it's taking up resources like, my wifi & using the cpu for this task, do I really need/want this happening while I'm play?.

If I had to guess I'd say that some software running in the back ground is conflicting with that game and only that game, probably the power saving software (switchable graphics is a good idea that doesn't really work well for gaming). I have all my power setting set to performance, no quiet mode, cpu in bios to max mode