EzDevInfo.com

Why are my games slower on battery power, even with the power plan set to High Performance?

My laptop is capable of running most games on high settings at decent frame rates. However, if the power cable gets unplugged while I'm playing, the game immediately starts slowing down, even if I'm using the High Performance power plan.

Why does this happen? Is the battery not able to keep up with the power demands of the GPU? Is there any way to fix this?

What was the purpose of the turbo button?

What did the turbo button on old PCs do?

Nvidia Quadro 5600 fx, and high end games

I bought the above card for work purposes. I was shocked to find its not as good as the geforce series for gaming. Given its spec, i assumed this would be fine.

I am trying to use the card for certain games, and although the graphics seem fine, cinematics within the game stutter badly.

Ive been having a play with settings, and different drivers, but i cannot get rid of the stutter. What can I do to mitigate the problems I am facing?

The games in question are:

wolfenstein, the old blood Wolfenstein new order

My system:

Dell Precision T3610 16GB DDR XEON 3.7 processor 1TB HDD Nvidia Quadro 5600 FX

Change Windows Resolution for Certain Program

So, I'm trying to run a game, and it only supports the resolution of 1280x768 (as well as a few lower ones) and my laptop (Windows 7) supports that resolution, as well as my normally used one of 1366x768. Essentially the question is is there some sort of program or hack that will automatically change my windows resolution when that program is being run? Or perhaps even when it is only in focus?

If needed, my graphics card is a Nvidia GeForce 710M with latest windows 7 drivers installed.

Why did adding memory significantly increase gaming performance on an AMD APU?

To be clear from the beginning, this is not a problem. This is just something that I really want to know the secret behind.

System specifications

• CPU: AMD A10-6790K 4.0 GHz
• GPU: AMD Radeon HD 8670D 1 GB (integrated GPU)
• RAM: 2 x Team 4 GB 1600 DDR3 = 8 GB

Of course, I'm using a 64-bit OS to make use of my 8 GB of memory, but my question is: Before I got the additional 4 GB RAM, games like Mafia II ran at the highest settings at an average of 22 FPS, but when I got the additional 4 GB RAM, I noticed a very decent increase of the frame rate to 40 FPS even though the game didn't appear to use more than 4 GB of RAM.

What is the secret behind this?

Why do lots of games have Direct X 9 and 11 options, but NOT DX10?

I don't really know much about DirectX other than it is responsible of having better graphic options for games, for example, tessellation and Ambient Occlusion in DX11.

But my question is, why some games (most recent games I've played at least), have the option of choosing DX9 (default) or DX 11 (with advanced options, and obviously with compatible video cards), but there is NO option for DX 10?

Is DX10 a version that never got released? was it defective? or what about it? why those games don't show an option to use DX 10 along DX 9 and 11?

Are there ANY games that show those 3 options? or do they just 'jump' from DX 9 directly to 11? why?

thanks

Mah Jonng game on Archive.org from 1991 will not run

I am trying to download v3.5.1 on archive.org of Mah Jonng. I have no idea what is wrong with it but here is the error when I try to run it:

Okay, this game is from 1991 and maybe it will not run correctly on Windows 8, so I tried the compatibility mode and got the following error:

So I asked on an IRC channel and I was told that it is very likely the game is 16-bit, and since the PC it is being installed on is 64 bit it may not work. There are option likes using a virtual machine, however there is a problem with these solutions. I am trying to install this game for an older lady who used to play this game on her old computer and loves it. She would be very upset if she couldn't play it, however she is not at all good with computers, so the above solutions are not very user friendly.

What options do I have here? Here PC is Windows 7, I am testing this on Windows 8.

Setting up a junk PC for classic PC gaming

I recently bought a computer from a local computer store that sells referbished/cheap PCs. I'm trying to set it up to play old DOS games I have on 5.25 and 3.5 inch floppies (DOS versions).

The PC includes the following:

motherboard with BIOS support for both 5.25 and 3.5 drives
5.25 and 3.5 floppy disk drives
Windows 98 SE set to boot directly to DOS (altered MSDOS.SYS file)

I'm able to format 5.25 floppies just fine and verified that I can copy DOS files to/from these floppies I create myself. However, when I put in an old DOS game (Pool of Radiance is shown below), the disk contents as displayed by DOS look wrong, and aren't accessible:

I realize there could be a number of things wrong with my setup, but I'm not sure where to start fixing things. My first thought is that the DOS version that comes with Windows 98 SE isn't a true DOS stand-alone OS, and I'm going to have to obtain a copy of DOS 6.0 or 6.22 if I want to get these old games to work.

Is this the best place to start to get this system operable?

Thanks for your help.

Gaming over LAN, VNC alternative?

Okay, I've done more than a little homework about this and am starting to think that the world is somehow opposed to this idea.

I have a laptop in my house, SB Core i3 with a GMA HD GPU which is utterly terrible for everything visual, and I would like to stream video from my desktop rig of a 3D nature (ruling out RDP and other hook based protocols).

Most people's first answer to similar threads is either bandwidth or processing power related. I've been trying first and foremost over a Gigabit lan, and my desktop rig has an overclocked 3930k so I am of the opinion that there SHOULD be a balance between CPU grunt and bandwidth that would allow me to get at least 20FPS of fullscreen refresh. So far I cannot using TightVNC, testing by playing a video in fullscreen on the host machine.

So to sum things up, with over 30x the bandwidth of OnLive, how exactly do I create an even choppy level of video feed over LAN in my own home? Is it possible and how?

Mixing stereo audio signal into one headphone can. For computer games [closed]

Hello I'm deaf in one ear but I love to play competitive FPS pc games. The problem is I can't pinpoint where people are in the game. Which makes it hard to shoot them in the face before they shoot me in the face. I can kinda make do buy swing around wildly with a wide stereo spread to locate sounds, which is how i find things in real life like my cellphone. What i wanted to try was to mix both channels into the same ear piece, but add an effect or some unique eq setting to only one of the channels to allow me to tell which side it represented.

help!

Games on windows 8 in bootcamp lag even on lowest graphics

I've been playing Crysis 2 and Skyrim on my Retina MacBookPro (10,1) for months now. The two games used to run super smoothly even on nearly maxed out settings. This laptop has an Nvidia GeForce GT 650M graphics card inside, it runs great.

But I recently replaced my Windows 8 consumer preview with the retail copy, and since then, 3D games lag in this odd way, no matter what the graphics settings. Every second Skyrim and Crysis alternates between running smoothly and lagging. It's a cyclical lag that comes and goes like clockwork. I can turn the graphics down to 800x600 with no antialiasing and low texture quality, and it runs much smoother on the "up" motion of the cycle, but every second it moves back into this lag spike.

I've tried installing beta graphics drivers, re installing the operating system, re installing the bootcamp support software, and freeing up space (I have about 20 GB free). I can't figure out what suddenly caused this other than some obscure difference between the consumer preview and the retail version.

What can I try? Is my video card failing? Are there some other drivers I can install? This isn't normal lag from maxing out the card, it

ETA:

New info on the lag. Everything starts fine, but gets progressiveness worse after about 10 minutes of play, and I left it go for an hour once, and it was REALLY bad. This is bizarre.

So I've reformatted and installed Windows 7 Ultimate. Only thing on this machine is the OS, Steam, Chrome, Bootcamp Support and beta drivers. I don't get it, literally everything runs like shit. Every 3D thing has the same cyclical lag. Even CSS 3D transformations in browsers do it, I'm beginning to think it's a hardware failure. Does anyone have any other suggestions I could try? I've been at this for almost a week, it's deteriorating my state of mind.

ETA 2:

So I did some further snooping around, and it would appear others have my same problem:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4374957?start=0&tstart=0

http://appleinsider.com/articles/12/11/13/some-15-retina-macbook-pro-users-complain-of-graphics-issues-after-efi-update

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1452267

It came from a fairly recent EFI update for the rMBP that dramatically lowered the threshold for CPU down-throttling as the internals heat up during gameplay. Basically when I games are played, the laptop heats up and the EFI upgrade forces the CPU to slow down to save the MacBOok from hardware failure, despite the fact that no users complained for overheating prior to the EFI update.

Some have said resetting the SMC and PRAM solve the problem on the OS X side of things but not the Windows side. I experienced this when I tried that fix. Downgrading to 10.8.1 worked for one person, but it could've been a flook.

The verdict is people aren't sure if Apple is working on it or not. Generally is seems intentional to save Apple form replacing lots of expensive laptops if parts fail, but Apple store employees have said Apple is aware of the issue and working on it.

Until that time, the solution needed is an EFI downgrade, which is possible but extremely risky. Does anyone have any suggestions as how to proceed? This basically disabled my computer for all Windows gaming.

Thanks.

Crysis on Windows 8.1 triggers low-memory warning

A more specific case of "How do I make the Windows low memory warning less sensitive?". Please don't migrate this post to Arqade; I was directed to post this question here from Arqade.

I just got a new top-of-the-line Sager/Clevo laptop running Windows 8.1 Pro, and it passes the Crysis (2007) benchmark maxed out with flying colors. However, I'm getting low-memory warnings from Windows:

Close programs to prevent information loss

Your computer is low on memory. Save your files and close these programs:

Crysis.exe

Crysis is definitely not using an inordinate amount of memory. According to the Task Manager, the system has 8 GB of RAM of which less than 3 GB are in use, with Crysis having allocated only 218 MB of memory. Obviously, this warning is not justified. Why is Windows giving this warning, and what can I do?

The specifications of the Dragon as follows:

• CPU: Intel Core i7-4800MQ, 4 cores (8 threads), 2.7 GHz
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M, 4GB GDDR5
• Memory: 8GB DDR3 1600 MHz (2x4GB)
• Storage: 750 GB 7200 RPM hard drive
• OS: Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit

When buying a video card, what specs should I compare/which are most important?

I'm currently deciding on if I should upgrade my current video card or not. I know I will find myself in this situation more times in the future, so I figured I would educate myself.

What should I be looking for as far as specs are concerned and which are most important? From a basic one monitor setup to a multi-monitor gaming PC setup. I would love a hard and fast way of comparing specs. Such as Card A has 123mhz of SpecA and 2gb SpecB, so it will perform better than Card B with 100mhz of SpecA and 1gb of SpecB.

As an example, how would I quantitatively compare the specs of the following cards:

1. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121660
2. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814131544

I understand that sites like videocardbenchmark.net exist, but I would like to be able to compare specs even if I don't have access to these types of resources.

TLDR: What video card specs are most important and how can I compare them?

Thanks!

Is my recently acquired GPU broken?

A little more than a week ago, I acquired an ASUS Strix GTX970 4GB OC. I've been noticing alot of sporadic stuttering whilst playing games and I'm kind of puzzled to what it could be. Very frustrating.

I've monitored my system with HWiNFO64 and saw no abnormalities in CPU, GPU and RAM usage. Nor did I see any in CPU and GPU temperature. A friend of mine said I should look for abnormalities in temperature as he suspected that throttling would be the issue. I've also run Furmark but did not observe any faults either.

What I am noticing while booting up or playing games, is that the VRAM usage indicator on ASUS's GPU Tweak 2 goes no further than 6% an most of the times just idles at 0%, which is why I suspect the GPU to not function correctly. Could there be something I've missed?

Could it be the the powersupply that I recently purchased? I felt the need to purchase a new powersupply as my old one only delivered only 25A on the 12V rail. The minimum seemed to have been 28A and it said 38A was recommended on the card's box. I had no money to buy me a really good one, so temporarily went for a Corsair CX600M. I know that the chance of the powersupply being the culprit is very slim, but I thought I should state the potentially necessary.

I'll state the specifications of my system below to give you guys more clarity on this matter and help you answer my (very) vague question:

• Antec GX300 case
• ASUS P8H67 Motherboard
• Intel i5 2400 processor
• ASUS Strix GTX970 4GB OC
• Mushkin 240GB SSD
• Samsung 500GB 5400rpm HDD
• Corsair CX600M PSU

The system was recently clean-installed with Windows 7 Ultimate edition. Games tested include GTA V, MS Flight Simulator X and CS:GO.

EDIT

As suggested by Psycogeek, I have checked the current Link Width in the Main Board section of CPU-Z and saw something that might be remarkable:

The card installed into the lower PCI-E slot of the motherboard. Could this slot be defective? Should I try the other slot?

Networking - Games can't see/join anyone else's LAN servers, unless I host

This happens with various games, from Battlefield 2 to Trackmania and therefore seems to be some network configuration error:

When anyone else hosts a LAN game I am the only one that can't see their server in the in-game server browser, nor can I join it with a direct IP connection. However, when I host the game everyone else is capable of joining my server without any problems. I am also the only one on the network experiencing these issues.

Things I already checked:

• Windows Firewall is set to allow each application (and the problem still happens when it is completely disabled)
• Other networking an internet programs like browsers, e-mail, ssh and ftp are working perfectly fine
• Various static/dynamic IP address/subnet mask and default gateway settings don't fix the problem