California Dreams

A while ago I noticed that Dell had an updated nVidia driver – 84.30 – for my GeForce Go 6800 card (3DMark says that is the Ultra model even, but I am not sure which is correct). My laptop was shipped with 78.51, which is fairly old compared to the update.

I went and installed the new driver, and went to try America’s Army. At first it seemed like the upgrade was great: my fps went from 30-35 to 40-60! But then I started noticing problems. First, everything was a bit jerky, as if the fps figure was lying. The biggest problem was terrible mouse lag. In head-to-head, one-on-one fights the mouse lag basically made it impossible to hit anything.

I eventually tested with 3DMark05:

• 78.51: 3409
• 84.30: 3055

After downgrading the driver (phew, worked!), America’s Army was again rolling smoothly without mouse lag.

While researching the issue I stumbled onto several resources that I might eventually try out when newer games no longer get decent fps with this card:

• http://www.laptopvideo2go.com - These guys have figured out how to install any nVidia driver on your laptop (the drivers are the same for all cards, but the .inf files need to be changed to fool the installer into installing). Some great benchmarking resources, performance tweaks, overclocking advice and so forth.
• http://3dgpu.com/archives/2004/08/09/geforce-6800-tweak-guide/ – Tweak guide specifically for my card.
• http://tweakguides.com/ – Amazing, detailed manuals/reference guides on anything that could be tweaked for more optimal game performance.

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