Low FPS With GTX 980M

Eorzea Time
 
 
 
Language: JP EN FR DE
Version 3.1
New Items
users online
Forum » Everything Else » Tech Support » Low FPS with GTX 980M
Low FPS with GTX 980M
 Asura.Kurganprime
Offline
Server: Asura
Game: FFXI
user: Kurgan
Posts: 13
By Asura.Kurganprime 2016-05-18 12:37:32
Link | Quote | Reply
 
I get poor performance with 60 fps enabled with shadows turned on. I have turned shadows completely off for running at 60 fps and it helps a lot. Not like the shadow effects even on high in FFXI are anything to write home about. I recommend turning it off if your frame rate struggles. In highly populated areas, it will kill your frame rate. Even with it turned off, I still slow down big time around the MH in Western Adoulin.
[+]
 Asura.Kurganprime
Offline
Server: Asura
Game: FFXI
user: Kurgan
Posts: 13
By Asura.Kurganprime 2016-05-18 12:50:52
Link | Quote | Reply
 
Bahamut.Vinedrius said: »
I wonder if this could do any performance boost for me. I am not having this lame "optimus choosing intel over nvidia" issue but it sounds like this thing emulates dx11 on a dx8 game and it lets you set the amount of vram (or is it ram?) for the game to use, so maybe it could help with the performance on my laptop with gt 630M which has 2 gb vram?

If your laptop is already using the 630M and you don't have an integrated Intel GPU, I doubt it will help too much. But you're welcome to give it a try.

The VRAM setting is just faking out older versions of DirectX for how much VRAM is accessible. Some really old DirectX games may not be able to properly address huge amounts of VRAM on today's GPUs. FFXI's minimum VRAM specs are 32 MB. Recommended specs are NVIDIA GT 740 or better which came with either 1GB or 2GB of VRAM. So I'd set VRAM to 1024 MB at a minimum for FFXI.
[+]
Offline
Posts: 23
By riktar 2016-05-18 14:24:50
Link | Quote | Reply
 
it's odd because my gtx980m has 4gb of ram but i only have 16mb - 1024 mb, nothing more. do you guys have other options?
 Bismarck.Dubai
Offline
Server: Bismarck
Game: FFXI
user: Enitsu
Posts: 500
By Bismarck.Dubai 2016-05-19 01:45:59
Link | Quote | Reply
 
I found what makes my Alienware restarts on its own.

"NVIDIA Graphics Driver has stopped working 15-times"

anyone know whats making the graphic driver not work which allows my laptop to automatically restarts?

Any advice would be good.
 Asura.Syto
Offline
Server: Asura
Game: FFXI
user: Sessho
Posts: 446
By Asura.Syto 2016-05-19 02:19:03
Link | Quote | Reply
 
Bismarck.Dubai said: »
I found what makes my Alienware restarts on its own.

"NVIDIA Graphics Driver has stopped working 15-times"

anyone know whats making the graphic driver not work which allows my laptop to automatically restarts?

Any advice would be good.


If you have tried various other graphics drivers as well as Alienware's updates to them, then the only other advice would be to send it in for advanced diagnostic of graphics card driver. They will test in various situations to duplicate the issue.

Also, depending on what model and how long ago you purchased it, graphics cards on gaming laptops don't have the greatest life span as many think they do. Especially if they are running a game several hours a day. This is not considering whether or not you have a cooling fan underneath to assist with ventilation, etc. If ventilation is not good, then it can reduce the life even more.

If your laptop is within Manufacturer's warranty you should take advantage of it while its still intact before it expires. Otherwise, its time to throw it out and buy new one.

Also, the Alienware's Core External Graphics Amplifier Unit can give you an alternative solution. With the amplifier, you can just bypass the internal graphics card completely and maybe swap out the graphics card by itself if it diagnostics are bad with another one. Not sure what situation you are in.

Restarting several times is definitely driver issue or a driver issue that is linked to a hardware problem that is beginning to reveal itself. Working with computers for so long I have seen so many cases. First try other drivers from Nvidia before assuming the worst.
 Bismarck.Dubai
Offline
Server: Bismarck
Game: FFXI
user: Enitsu
Posts: 500
By Bismarck.Dubai 2016-05-19 03:29:18
Link | Quote | Reply
 
Asura.Syto said: »
Bismarck.Dubai said: »
I found what makes my Alienware restarts on its own.

"NVIDIA Graphics Driver has stopped working 15-times"

anyone know whats making the graphic driver not work which allows my laptop to automatically restarts?

Any advice would be good.


If you have tried various other graphics drivers as well as Alienware's updates to them, then the only other advice would be to send it in for advanced diagnostic of graphics card driver. They will test in various situations to duplicate the issue.

Also, depending on what model and how long ago you purchased it, graphics cards on gaming laptops don't have the greatest life span as many think they do. Especially if they are running a game several hours a day. This is not considering whether or not you have a cooling fan underneath to assist with ventilation, etc. If ventilation is not good, then it can reduce the life even more.

If your laptop is within Manufacturer's warranty you should take advantage of it while its still intact before it expires. Otherwise, its time to throw it out and buy new one.

Also, the Alienware's Core External Graphics Amplifier Unit can give you an alternative solution. With the amplifier, you can just bypass the internal graphics card completely and maybe swap out the graphics card by itself if it diagnostics are bad with another one. Not sure what situation you are in.

Restarting several times is definitely driver issue or a driver issue that is linked to a hardware problem that is beginning to reveal itself. Working with computers for so long I have seen so many cases. First try other drivers from Nvidia before assuming the worst.


Purchased my Alienware 17 in 2012-2013 and usually I two box/tri-box , but I know what you mean. I guess it is time to buy a new laptop, and I will but not anytime soon(ish).

Thank you for your help!
Offline
Posts: 23
By riktar 2016-05-19 07:57:37
Link | Quote | Reply
 
Solved!

It turns out it was the FastCS add on that was throwing it off and causing it to only unlock 60fps during events or CS and not regular gameplay. I should also point out that 60fps cap is pretty much the same thing as the fastCS addon. I did have to uninstall windower4 and reinstall it in order to fix the glitch because disabling it in the settings still kept it capped.

I'm happy to report that the game is now running at 60fps (50-55 in Adoulin MH), super-sampled, and able to control the game with the controller while having wiki open... time to finally get some missions done lol.

PS: I have noticed bug/glitch that happens when i run the game after a reboot. It causes the game to crash once or twice (says POL stopped working) however, that's only the first 1-3 times I launch POL after a reboot. After those I can close and launch FFXI just fine without it ever crashing. I take it's a problem with dgvoodoo2 but i rarely reboot my laptop and in the case I do, I just have to run through the launch sequence once or twice before it stabilizes.
Offline
Posts: 23
By riktar 2016-05-19 08:02:41
Link | Quote | Reply
 
Bismarck.Dubai said: »
Purchased my Alienware 17 in 2012-2013 and usually I two box/tri-box , but I know what you mean. I guess it is time to buy a new laptop, and I will but not anytime soon(ish).

Thank you for your help!

You could monitor temps to see if it's overheating before a crash. I've seen cards die but i've also seen where the card shut down because the cooling fan would not kick in and the gpu would go into limp mode due to heat and shut down to protect itself.

You could always swap out gpus since the 17's gpu have a list of MXM compatible cards.
 Bismarck.Dubai
Offline
Server: Bismarck
Game: FFXI
user: Enitsu
Posts: 500
By Bismarck.Dubai 2016-05-20 23:18:17
Link | Quote | Reply
 
riktar said: »
Bismarck.Dubai said: »
Purchased my Alienware 17 in 2012-2013 and usually I two box/tri-box , but I know what you mean. I guess it is time to buy a new laptop, and I will but not anytime soon(ish).

Thank you for your help!

You could monitor temps to see if it's overheating before a crash. I've seen cards die but i've also seen where the card shut down because the cooling fan would not kick in and the gpu would go into limp mode due to heat and shut down to protect itself.

You could always swap out gpus since the 17's gpu have a list of MXM compatible cards.

There are 10 gpu's in my laptop. Will try to play around with them after work.

Keep in mind my laptop only automatically restarts when I 2box.
 Ragnarok.Bungiefan
Offline
Server: Ragnarok
Game: FFXI
Posts: 26
By Ragnarok.Bungiefan 2016-06-03 22:50:12
Link | Quote | Reply
 
Bahamut.Vinedrius said: »
You shouldn't still be getting 10~ fps even while using the integrated gpu. The graphical performance of the game relies on the cpu rather than the gpu as weird as it sounds. I am playing on a laptop much weaker than yours and I never had such a big fps problem on either w7 or w10, with new drivers. Btw, you should upgrade to w10 while you can for free and that might even fix the issue.

I searched about disabling Optimus a while ago and unfortunately couldn't find a way, but I never had any problem with it on my laptop either. Pol.exe is picked by my 630M just fine.

CPUs were slower when the game came out, but DX8 and DX9 support were natively in the graphics hardware. FFXI is now CPU-intense because the CPU takes over for emulating old DX versions, because the GPU passes the language on to the CPU when it natively doesn't support it.

Laptop CPUs tend to have slower cores due to battery conservation and not wanting to overheat the machine, and FFXI can only use one core, so the game runs poorly on them when running on Intel graphics on an Intel CPU.