How can my laptop play DAO better than my desktop???

[Oyeve]

My home PC is as such:

C2D e8600
Radeon 5770
Windows 7
Cinema display (1680x1050)

My laptop specs:

I7 M620
Nvidia NVS 5100M (1 gig ram)
Windows XP
HP LP2475W monitor (@1920x1200) or LCD 15.6" (@1600x900)

And the laptop spanks my desktop in DAO. I can crank up all of the settings in the game and play at the highest resolution on the laptop and DAO runs great.

On my desktop I have to crank down the AA to 2x for is to be as playable as the laptop.

I'm not really complaining as the laptop apparently is a good gaming lappy, but I would never have thought it would be that much better than my desktop. granted I havent used my desktop for gaming lately but I finally finished building it (had the build on the back burner for nearly 2 years) and recently got the 5770 to replace the 3870 and finally started playing DAO on it. I installed on the new laptop just to see what it can do and was really amazed. Then I thought, crap, my desktop must suck.

Thoughts?

Laptop model, btw, is an HP Elitebook 8540p.

 

[Seero]

Sounds like a driver/registry issue. However, DAO (Dragon Age Origin I assumed) uses physX, and doing it with CPU may have performance impact.

 

[Oyeve]

Sounds like a driver/registry issue. However, DAO (Dragon Age Origin I assumed) uses physX, and doing it with CPU may have performance impact.

yes, Dragon age Origins. So Nvidia does physx in HW and ATI does it in SW I assume?

I am just really perplexed. I know nothing about the NVS 5100m on the laptop but I kind of assumed it would be meh if anything even with 1gb of vram.

 

[TheMeanestGuest]

Dragon Age doesn't really use gpu accelerated PhysX in any meaningful way, so far as I know. I recall a quote by a Bioware dev who said something to the effect of there being a theoretical advantage with arrows, but that you really wouldn't notice it.

The real reason you might be seeing the laptop do better is probably because Dragon Age is one of those games where quadcores are advantageous.

That said, I have no idea what an NVS 5100M is. Is it a workstation part? If so, I'd still think you should be getting a better experience with an e8600 and a 5770.

Edit: I decided to look up the processor model number.. which is apparently a dual core. Now I really have no idea why it would be better on your laptop.

 

[Qbah]

The NVS 5100M has 48 shaders and is the equivalent of a GT330M. It's roughly the speed of a desktop GT220. There is no way it can come even remotely close to a desktop HD5770. Both your laptop and desktop processors are dual-core. Your laptop just has HT. Not to mention that E8600 is the best C2D ever made. So the laptop CPU is just a bit better.

So I'd say there something wrong with your desktop rig. Running the newest drivers? AMD just released Catalyst 10.5. You sure you're not forcing some insanely high fancy AA mode in CCC? Perhaps you have a really bad antivirus that's killing your HDD access? Perhaps some rogue process is eating away at your CPU in the background?

 

[DaveSimmons]

I wonder if the laptop is really cranking up all of the settings, or if the nV drivers are pretending to accept your settings then doing whatever they want to, to run smoothly.

Or this:
> you sure you're not forcing some insanely high fancy AA mode in CCC?

 

[alcoholbob]

Bioware's engines seem to respond to faster CPU and triangles/s as they generally make very limited use shaders.

 

[LoneNinja]

How much Vram does your 5770 have? If it's a 512mb card that can effect the AA performance, the hyper threading on your laptop cpu also helps. However I do agree that I would expect the desktop to run the game better.

 

[Daedalus685]

DAO scales very well with quad core CPUs.. I'm not sure how well this translates to hyper threading on a dual core.

That being said though.. It should still be faster on the desktop. Might want to check that the GPU is properly clocking, and that drivers are up to date. Can't say I had any issues in windows 7 with DAO but one never knows.

 

[Oyeve]

I wonder if the laptop is really cranking up all of the settings, or if the nV drivers are pretending to accept your settings then doing whatever they want to, to run smoothly.

Or this:
> you sure you're not forcing some insanely high fancy AA mode in CCC?

I checked the settings on both the laptop and desktop. The only thing I havent tried is playing DAO on the desktop in winxp. I have the DT with both xp and win 7. I will see how it runs on the DT on xp tonight. The 5770 is 1 gig and I have 10.4 for drivers. I will try the 10.5 drivers and see if there is any dif. On the DT I am using 4gb of PC8500 ram but cpuid is telling me its running at PC6400 speeds. I dont think that would make a dif but i'll mess with the bios settings jic.

 

[Oyeve]

Ok, I installed CCC 10.5 last night and now my PC spanks my laptop (I feel much better now) I was using 10.4 installed over 10.3 which was installed over whatever CCC was out 2 years ago. I removed all AMD/ATI drivers and did a nice clean install of 10.5 and DAO is way better on the DT than the LT now. Sweet. Thanks all.

 

[Qbah]

Ok, I installed CCC 10.5 last night and now my PC spanks my laptop (I feel much better now) I was using 10.4 installed over 10.3 which was installed over whatever CCC was out 2 years ago. I removed all AMD/ATI drivers and did a nice clean install of 10.5 and DAO is way better on the DT than the LT now. Sweet. Thanks all.

Good to hear you solved your problems

 

[jvroig]

Ok, I installed CCC 10.5 last night and now my PC spanks my laptop (I feel much better now) I was using 10.4 installed over 10.3 which was installed over whatever CCC was out 2 years ago. I removed all AMD/ATI drivers and did a nice clean install of 10.5 and DAO is way better on the DT than the LT now. Sweet. Thanks all.

Something similar happened to me with my old 8600GTS several months ago. Random stuttering while playing Fallout 3 and sometimes even annoying slowdowns lasting for >10 seconds, and upgrading to the latest drivers seemed to have no effect. Fix: all it took was a nice clean reinstall of the drivers after a good run of DriverSweeper.

[Unfortunately, before I got around to doing that, I already bought a new CPU and motherboard, thinking my X2 5000+ was definitely the culprit due to being weak. Live and learn, anyway it was about time to upgrade that 5000+ even if it actually did play Fallout acceptably, it lasted me well over 2 years already]

 

[tweakboy]

Proper drivers would help your situation greatly

get the latest WHQL from www.guru3d.com or www.nvidia.com

Make sure direct3D 11 or 10 or 9

You should be good.. gl

 

[jvroig]

You are absolutely right. Thank you.