best performance for games?

[hoorhay]

Hi

I'm using an 860M which for me has always maxed out skyrim quite handily. I however recently have been trying to play oblivion which is much older and should be a lot less demanding, however I'm noticing a bit of chug when there's actual combat going on.

I've turned AA down from 8x to 0 and nothing changes. I have my laptop power set to high performance(is there something better than this?)

Also another question. My laptop always seems to perform better in games when the charger is actually connected. Doesn't matter what battery life it's at, it just performs better when plugged and I don't know why. Is that normal?

 

[USAFRet]

Many laptops will downclock components (GPU/CPU) when on battery power, to get better battery life.

 

[StarChief]

There are two separate power settings for when the laptop is plugged in vs on battery. Set both to high performance and you should be ok. As far as oblivion, it's an older game, probably less optimized then skyrim, hence the choppy gameplay sometimes.

 

[hoorhay]

Yeah, the stuttering difference between plugged and unplugged with oblivion is like night and day. Whereas skyrim plays smooth on both.

Love technology xD

 

[GMDS44]

Those "chugs" could be related to your drivers, but perhaps it is good to check and see if anything is bottlenecking your system.

Install MSI afterburner and check your graphics card usage. Similarly, check your CPU usage (in the same application or in Windows task manager).

I've had gaming laptops before and I can confirm that they perform better when plugged. This could be for one or all the reasons below:

-The battery pack cannot provide sufficient power to the computer and therefore throttles the performance of the CPU/GPU to compensate.
-Check your windows power options (advanced power options->Processor power management). You should see many parameters like maximum processor state and min processor state that can be configured for when you're plugged and for when you're on battery.

I suggest you keep your computer on the BALANCED power plan as it will automatically dial-down your performance when you don't need it, this is a more energy efficient solution (lower temperatures & energy cost, longer battery life when not plugged, etc.) and I never had any performance issues using BALANCED.

May I know which laptop do you have?