Hi I bought my laptop a couple years ago and it's a beast of a laptop loaded with 16 GB of Ram 2.8 GHz processor, and two Nvidia GTX 780m's running in SLI (equivalent two GTX 680's). Unfortunately when I bought it I had a company overclock it for me using MSI afterburner and Riva Tuner Statistics and I think they did it wrong or it needs to be updated. I know people running the same games I am with a 680 on maximum settings with no problems but my computer can't run them on low settings without lagging a lot. Games Such as GTA 4 and 5, Mad Max, any of the Arkham games, LA Noire, Max Payne 3, Trials Fusion, Tomb Raider, Etc. I know I should be able to get enough performance to run these at max settings with no problems but that is not the case. So I ask for your help, please help me set this up correctly so that I can get what I paid for and not feel like an idiot.
In order to investigate what is causing the stuttering issues you are experiencing, we'll need some more information about your laptop. What Geforce driver are you using? What gaming resolution are your using and general framerate you are getting? What storage drives are you using (All SSDs, SSD with hard drive, or only hard drive)? I know it's common practice, but if you are running your games from hard drive, then defragmenting after installing or uninstalling a game can help keep the hard drive at top speed. If your running 500GB+ SSDs in your laptop only then Windows will disable defragmenting. What temperatures are you getting for your GPUs? I would recommend going the MSI Afterburner settings, then selecting the monitoring tab and checking the box to log history to file (choose a location to easily find). You can look in the Afterburner monitoring log history file for the highest temperature achieved, then check if there is any thermal throttling.
I'm running GeForce Game Ready Driver Version 355.98 I'm running my games at 1920x1080 (it also keeps switching to 24 Hz instead of 60) and getting 25-30 FPS in most games. I'm using two 1 TB HDD's running at 7200 RPM in a Raid 1 configuration. My computer automatically defragments once a week. GPU 1 is getting up to 100 degrees while GPU 2 is getting around 55 degrees.
GPU 1 is hitting 100 degrees Celsius, which is close to or at the temperature range where throttling will happen to prevent the GPU from being damaged. Have you ever cleaned the heatsink vents and fans on the laptop with compressed air cans and tweezers or cotton swabs (to remove clumps of dust from heatsink vents)? I think dust out the laptop and remove dust clumps clogging the heatsink fins your GPU 1 temp will drop and not throttle because of overheating.
I cleaned it recently in fact. It actually has extra heat sinks built in too. Although, there isn't much space for air to float around and get dust in there. I think that temperature is the all time high, from back when I accidentally left it running with something blocking the fan. It usually runs lower than that at around 70-80.
Oh, so it usually runs at 70-80 degrees Celsius, which is very acceptable for a laptop, so I would rule out overheating with this information. Which OS are you using Windows 10, 8.1, or 7? If the laptop ran properly until recently, then install the previous graphics drivers you used before using the "clean install" option in the driver installation wizard. I had decent performance with the 347.88 drivers, but tried the 353.62 drivers. You can try the 347.88 mobile graphics drivers: Win(7,8,8.1 64bit) Geforce 347.88 If you are using Windows 10, try using Geforce 353.62 drivers.
It's not that it's not running well when it used to run well, it's that it never ran well, it has always been laggy. I've always blamed the SLI but that doesn't make sense.
Does the stutter stop when you turn off SLI and use only one 780m GPU? Although, GTA V I heard has really good SLI support. You can try using custom SLI flags located in this thread: Here. You need nvidia Inspector located in the Guru3d.com downloads: nvidia Inspector (download links at bottom of page). Then find a custom SLI flag, copy and paste into nvidia Inspector game profile then click apply. If this info does not solve your issues, perhaps posting your original post in this thread will offer another perspective: Nvidia Geforce Thread.
Okay, so I feel stupid, slightly. Apparently I've been playing games for the past month or so without SLI being on. I turned it back on. The difference was that both of my Graphics cards are now running at 90-95ish degrees and I gained 10 FPS, I'm using Max Payne 3 as my reference for now. The problem of stuttering and whatnot has been an issue since I got the computer though, which is why SLI was off, I was trying to troubleshoot. I did take my laptop case apart a bit and clean it out again to be sure, I also did a disk check and made sure my computer had defragmented recently (Two days ago) so I'm back to square one.
I decided to go back again and check a couple other problem games I've been dealing with after turning SLI back on. Seems like Mad Max jumped up to a 65-90 FPS range. Max Payne actually fluctuates between 35-80 FPS, and LA Noire Is still stuck at 28-30 despite my best efforts. Still a lot of fluctuation and Although it's better than before I still feel like it should either be more stable and a higher average FPS.
Still looking for help if anybody is willing. Realize I've had these problems for three years now. I really don't want to give up now.
Perhaps you need a motherboard BIOS update. Who is the manufacturer/model # of your laptop (ASUS, MSI, Dell, Lenovo, Gigabyte, Acer, Alienware, etc.)?
I found the drivers page for your laptop: Sager 9390 drivers page, there does not appear to be any BIOS updates. I saw there was chipset driver update version 9.4.0.1027 and Intel Management Engine Interface (MEI) driver update version 9.5.15.1730, both posted posted on Nov. 11, 2013. You could try updating your chipset and MEI drivers from the laptop manufacturer for Windows 8.1 and see if performance improves.
