Horrible Performance from ATI HD3400 card in T400! Help!

[Dizzy149]

I got my loaded T400 last night (Vista Business x64, 2.53ghz, 4gb Ram, 7200rpm drive, turbo cache).

I went to play World of Warcraft on it, and I'm barely breaking 20FPS on medium settings!!! The specs on my T400 are slightly better than my desktop and I run THREE instances of WoW on my desktop at much higher resolutions with no issue.

I have the power management set to high performance, and the Display Settings says it's using the ATI card. I even went into the BIOS and set the default boot device to PCIe, and set it to Discrete Graphics to force it to use just the ATI card. No help, still same results. What in the world is going on with this thing? This is about the same performance I got from my X41 playing WoW and I'm going to be HORRIBLY disappointed if it's the best this thing can do.

Someone please help!

[Marin85]

Also check out Vista native power management (yes, additionally to Lenovo Power Manager) and the Catalyst Control Center (the powerplay tab) and post back.

Marin

[Dizzy149]

Well apparently last night when I was messing around in the BIOS I didn't save the settings (it was 5am, so that happens).

I went into the BIOS, set the top to PCIe (I THINK that only has something to do with the dock, but oh well). I set the graphics to discrete, and disabled the switchable OS.

When it booted back up and I go into my display settings I only see two monitors now (vs the 4 I had before).

I checked Vista and Lenovo power settings and both were set to performance. In the Catalyst Control I think I moved a slider one notch to the right, but Powerplay was enabled.

Now I get OK performance. I must admit that I'm still horribly disappointed though. WoW runs so much better on my friend's HP with worse specs all around, and he's usually running two instances. I don't know if it's drivers, or some obscure setup or what. If it's setup, then it's really bad that they hobble 3D performance THIS bad by default.

[emwe]

Well, the 3470 has a 64bit memory interface. This is a garant for no great performance at all, no matter how much memory it has.

With my aging Samsung X20 and its old Radeon X600 (64bit only, too, due to stripped second memory module) I am always using the mobile catalyst directly from ATI/AMD. Dunno if this might help you, or if ThinkPads are very picky about non-Lenovo drivers:

Direct ATI/AMD Mobile Catalyst Download

Michael

[Marin85]

For the experiment sake you can try out completely switching off powerplay from within CCC.

[FarFromUrth]

ummm... should get delivery of my new t400 on Monday or Tuesday, that is if they dont ship it back to Anchorage, Alaska for a third time...

but I digress...

I bought a Thinkpad after 4 years of Macs because of the battery-life/durability issues, not gaming performance. Can I expect decent gaming performance with the ATI Hybrid graphics?

All the reviews say yes, but what have you all experienced?

JVM

[Dizzy149]

Well so far I'm not impressed what-so-ever. It barely performs better than my old X41!

I did run into some other issues over the past few days, and now I'm doing a full restore to start from scratch. Maybe something I installed didn't sit well, hopefully this will go better.

[CarrerCrytharis]

I dunno, I was playing Portal on mine and it looked gorgeous. (Keep in mind I am running Windows XP.)

[burtonman]

I love Thinkpads for their durability. Still, I travel and love to relax with some time on WoW.

I've noticed that the only way to get WoW playable is to disable shadows (or at least set them to low). Even so, the performance isn't great.

This T400 has Vista 64, 4GB RAM, a 2.8 Ghz processor and a 7200 RPM drive. It *should* blow the doors off of my year old MacBook Pro with 2.6 Ghz Santa Rosa and ATI discrete graphics running 10.5. Nope. The MacBook runs WoW superfast, as always, even with all the options maxed. The T400, even with shadows off and turning down a few other options doesn't come close.

I don't understand.. Is this a Thinkpad issue or another part of the Vista experience?

[burtonman]

I did some checking, mostly to try and understand why an older macbook pro was at least 2x faster at WoW when the CPU and memory specs on this T400 are so much better.

Here's what I found:

- For games, the T400 is clearly bottlenecked by the ATI card. While the cpu, memory and disk are humming along, the graphics system starts to choke quickly. Compared to my MacBook pro 2.6, the video card is about half as capable (64 vs 128 bit memory, less rendering capability, etc). In fact, the ATI graphics are only about 2 - 2.5x better in performance than the built in Intel 4500 according to the graphic card profiles on www.notebookcheck.com

- World of Warcraft has also been tweaked for more eye candy in the recent release. Shadows hit the GPU really, really hard and I can only play decently with them set to the lowest setting. Also, the max level of the old settings is higher than the max used to be. If you make the settings a notch or two lower than max, that's about where WoW used to be when you maxed everything out. Now that I have shadows low and I've moderated some of the other settings, I can get decent performance (easy 30fps most of the time).

So.... I think this thing is a computing powerhouse for most everything except it's no gaming box. I had hoped for more graphic horsepower, but it's just not in there. As far as I'm concerned, that's a bit of a blessing, since a great gaming rig would just be a bigger distraction from the real purpose of getting real work done.

[bill bolton]

So.... I think this thing is a computing powerhouse for most everything except it's no gaming box.

The W series are intended for users who specifically need screen graphics horsepower, and are prepared to put up with the other attributes that implies (size, power consumption etc).

The T series are for users who have general purpose business applications and need good mobility attributes more than pure graphics performance.

Cheers,

Bill B.

[nykobing06]

Though I haven't checked this, I am told that the T500 has better discrete graphics.....

How much better are they?

I'm very close to buying a computer and am contemplating T400 or T500.


I have a T42 and its ok with graphics...played wow on it for a while. I've gotten "dumbed down" since I don't have a desktop anymore...I couldn't even tell you how the new games on powerhouses look. But I suppose I'm content. Although a T-series with gaming quality GPU would be AWESOME. The W-series is simply too big for portability.