New M14x giving me 6 fps on low settings in wow. WTF?

[Windfury]

Heya, so as the title says I just invested in a shiny new Alienware m14x. It's fairly average for the current models (8gb ram, i7 2.2 mhz processor up to 3.2 turbo boosted, SSD, nvidia card 2gb with optimus, Windows 7) but it should be more than enough to run wow with no hassles at all. Only it isn't. I'm lucky to get 6fps in wow (tried various locations in game and same thing across all of them) on the lowest graphics settings in game. I've updated drivers, checked my settings, it's not the temperature, I've made sure the game is using the NVIDIA card when it runs, and can't think of what the hell else it could be. Anyone else have this problem or have any suggestions as to what I should be looking at?

Any help would be appreciated. ty

[tetrisGOAT]

What GPU do you have?

[Reguilea]

You're not in power saving mode or anything?

[Bulwarked]

a m14x comes with a 1G GT650M on the lowest model.

edit: he said he has 8GB so I guess he'd have the 2G GT650M.

[Cyanotical]

make sure it's not stuck in powersave mode, and make sure it's using the Nvidia GPU and not the IGU

[Reguilea]

Getting a good 30 fps on med/high settings 1080p on my laptop.. and it has a QuadroFX 1800m (equivalent to a GT 335M)
With an i7 640m

Soo.... the GT650M should get over 6 fps compared to my 30.. which is on higher settings even.

[Windfury]

Sorry tabbed in trying to see if it was game setting somewhere. More restarts later no difference :/

Tried turning the settings up to ultra, it handles that fine in terms of rendering the graphics, gives me the exact same fps though (6).

Still finding my way around the comp, checked power saving mode and seems to be off. Card is "2 GB GDDR5 NVIDIA® GeForce®GT 650M using NVIDIA Optimus".

And yes have checked it's using the nvidia gpu, and yeah I know it should be way better than this, this setup should have no issues with wow at all. There must be some setting/something somewhere, but I can't think what it is and it's starting to drive me crazy.

[Milkshake86]

Sorry tabbed in trying to see if it was game setting somewhere. More restarts later no difference :/

Tried turning the settings up to ultra, it handles that fine in terms of rendering the graphics, gives me the exact same fps though (6).

Still finding my way around the comp, checked power saving mode and seems to be off. Card is "2 GB GDDR5 NVIDIA® GeForce®GT 650M using NVIDIA Optimus".

And yes have checked it's using the nvidia gpu, and yeah I know it should be way better than this, this setup should have no issues with wow at all. There must be some setting/something somewhere, but I can't think what it is and it's starting to drive me crazy.

Nvidias beautiful optimus technology at its finest, >.> im not sure if you can disable it, driver update or rollback would be ideal.

[debugger]

have u pluged in the power cable?

[Windfury]

lol yup it's plugged in and running through my normal monitor.

I have updated the drivers, I'll look into rolling it back/turning it off now.

[Reguilea]

Remember to delete your gpu driver via -> Device Manager > Display adapters > (your gpu) > Properties > Driver > Uninstall

[Nidor]

I am sitting here with a MB Pro with a 650M and a quad core 2.7Ghz(3.7boost) and I can comfortably reach 60 FPS in 25 man raids with fair settings(It still looks good with the Retina screen), try downloading MSI afterburner and monitor the GPU usage. It might tell us on the forum here something I remember some time ago in my main machine one of my cards downclocked themselves because youtube was running, make sure that you only have MSI Afterburner and Wow running.

[Evil Inside]

Maybe its using the onboard video? My friend had a similar issue with his alienware(unsure of model) where the laptop was using the onboard video instead of the dedicated video card so he had to change it in the bios.

[Windfury]

After a great deal of screwing around I can report no change. MSI Afterburner didn't show anything extreme on GPU usage, barely hit 25% on anything that it monitors no matter how high I had the settings. I'm positive it's using the nvidia card. I'm finding it really weird that no matter where I am or what I'm doing I'm getting 6 fps. Is it possible that it's capped somewhere somehow?

Anyway ty for your help, I need to crash if I want to be coherent at work tomorrow, I have no doubt I'll be checking back and calling tech support tomorrow morning though.

[Azerox]

You DO have video card drivers installed i hope?

Maybe alienware has new drivers updates for your device?

edit: http://www.alienwarearena.com/forums...comment=379946

Reinstall the drivers even if you have them installed already.

Also here is someone with similar problems : http://forum.notebookreview.com/alie...ad-island.html

1. Check battery/power profile to make sure you are on max performance. If you are trying to play the game on battery go ahead and give it up as you won't be able to without bios a01 and custom power profile.
2. Go into your nvidia control panel, choose global settings TAB and set Preferred Graphics Processor to HIGH PERFORMANCE NVIDIA PROCESSOR (not integrated). Regardless of whether or not you "believe" the game is whitelisted just do this and then report back on how its working.
3. Update display driver as needed.

If i read that correctly, it seems that it disables the nvidia card when not plugged on the net. (wich would explain the low fps)

[Aldrashan]

Have you tried playing another game and seeing if that works fine or not? Just to check it's not only WoW.

[Robles]

As I do own alienware laptops,

I'm going to assume you have stealth mode on.

stealth mode can drop a game from ultra with 200FPS to Low with 2.

Check your stealth mode.

[Windfury]

You DO have video card drivers installed i hope?

Maybe alienware has new drivers updates for your device?

edit: http://www.alienwarearena.com/forums...comment=379946

Reinstall the drivers even if you have them installed already.

Also here is someone with similar problems : http://forum.notebookreview.com/alie...ad-island.html

- I've reinstalled all drivers.
- I'm 100% sure it is using the nvidia card. I set it to do it for everything. I created extra custom settings for wow in the nvidia control panel. I have checked it literally 5000 times this evening and it is always showing as using the nvidia processor whenever I've looked.
- It is on max performance.
- It is plugged in in every possible sense, to a power socket, to the net, everything.

Check your stealth mode.

How/where? I can't even find a setting for that. Fingers crossed that's it.

fml apparently the m14x doesn't have it:

http://supportapj.dell.com/support/t...=en&l=en&s=dhs

Have you tried playing another game and seeing if that works fine or not? Just to check it's not only WoW.

I'm going to leave it downloading Rift while I sleep. I'll try that tomorrow morning.[COLOR="red"]

---------- Post added 2012-09-05 at 10:10 AM ----------

For what it's worth I seem to have fixed it. I restored the entire system to factory settings, wiped all of my own stuff off of it and did a full reinstall of everything from windows up, including re downloading and reinstalling wow. It's now running wow on Ultra settings at ~80 fps. I have no idea what actually changed, but obviously something did.

Just thought I'd post because this thread comes up when I tried googling the problem, so hopefully it'll help someone else. It was annoying, but fixable. Ty all for the advice.

[Verwustung]

I ran into the same problem with my new gt60 249 us with a 680m gpu. I found this and it helped
I tried posting a link but I am a new member and it will not let me. There is a thread on the wow forums under technical support about this. The topic is titled NVIDIA Optimus fix.

[Roblivion]

Alienware... Barf...