hesido
Regular
This whole ordeal reminded me why I had switched to consoles for gaming. I'm not that incompetent with computers, I come from Amiga times so I'm OK with fiddling stuff, but I had simply gotten tired of the amount of work necessary to get games running to their full potential on PC's...
I had a lot of problems migrating my Steam to Windows 8. Old times, I'd just copy the entire Steam folder and steam re-arranged everything. But this time, I did not want to fiddle with the partitions on my new Samsung laptop, so I went against everything I know about Windows and I have a single C: partition, and Steam did not like this, games stopped working. For some odd reason, the new path was not being updated in Steam App folder's application files. Everything took several hours of looking for solutions on the internet and applying the solutions with varying degree of success (It was like baby steps but hit a wall each time) I finally made a simple regular expression search and replace on Notepad ++, to avoid re-downloading everything and manu-automatically fixed those paths in multiple files in 2-3 passes.
Things began running. Strangely, games seemed to be capped at 30fps. ( Samsung Laptop,
Windows 8 64bit,Core I7 3630 QM @ 2.4ghz, GTX650m ). Good luck trying to find the correct keywords to search a similar problem.
It turns out, it was caused by the "Eco Mode" that Samsung provides, I had to guess it by myself. So that was settled, I thought. But I realized Popcap games had also begun working on a strange resolution and at 30fps (No, I refuse to play Peggle at 30fps), as if it falls back to a non-hw accelarated mode. Good luck finding keywords for that too. Popcap support couldn't help with that problem also. I still have it. Shame, stuff is working slower with worse graphics compared to my 7 year old laptop, as far as PopCap games were concerned (other PopCap games were also similarly affected, running in strange jaggy resolution at 30fps)
Now, to test my GTX650M, which I thought wasn't too shabby, to see if it was performing as well as others and see some DX11 goodness for free, I downloaded 3DMark 11. To my lack of surprise, it made my laptop freeze. But I figured I should download the latest version which popped up as a reminder, so I downloaded an update. Oh, the update failed as I had 1.003 or something, it only worked for 1.000. But there wasn't a specific update for 1.003, so I downloaded the latest archive in full again. So nice.
But I couldn't do the benchmarks, instead of freezing, this time it managed to give an error: IDXGISwapChain::SetFullscreenState failed. The demo worked, the benchmark didn't. Ah. Eco mode was off, what could it be? Several hours of searching the internet, I found out it could be due to some applications blocking full-screen access, but I had none of the various applications that seemed to create problems. I was terminating executables from task manager to no avail, with dozens of programs working on my "vanilla" laptop, it was taking time.
But I solved that problem too, in the end. It turns out, due to a UI bug, turning of ECO mode off didn't always turn it off. Good luck trying to find that one out, I noticed by doing a test run of Trials 2 Second Edition
, which seemed to have no problems with going fullscreen but it was capped at 30fps. But the eco mode seemed to be off. Turning that on and off again and hitting the default button really turned Eco Mode off. Another mistery solved. Now I can benchmark but still, no Nvidia Tech demo works, even the one that says is compatible with Windows 8, in case there's such an issue. The tech demos claim I either don't have a supported gfx card, latest drivers, or correct version of Windows. None of which are true, I have latest certified drivers as the Nvidia Geforce Experience tells me... But there's nothing on the forums to guide about those tech demos not working either. I'm at a loss as to why they don't work.
Now, I still have that PopCap 30fps problem on their 2d games, and Nvidia DX11 demos not working. If I'm having this many problems, I'm not going be paying 50 dollars on PC games which I'm guessing are also prone to such problems as I've run into forums with so many people having similar problems not in those tech demos but games. But I really want to give it another shot. If you have any suggestions that would stop me from cursing PC as a gaming platform, do let me know!
I had a lot of problems migrating my Steam to Windows 8. Old times, I'd just copy the entire Steam folder and steam re-arranged everything. But this time, I did not want to fiddle with the partitions on my new Samsung laptop, so I went against everything I know about Windows and I have a single C: partition, and Steam did not like this, games stopped working. For some odd reason, the new path was not being updated in Steam App folder's application files. Everything took several hours of looking for solutions on the internet and applying the solutions with varying degree of success (It was like baby steps but hit a wall each time) I finally made a simple regular expression search and replace on Notepad ++, to avoid re-downloading everything and manu-automatically fixed those paths in multiple files in 2-3 passes.
Things began running. Strangely, games seemed to be capped at 30fps. ( Samsung Laptop,
Windows 8 64bit,Core I7 3630 QM @ 2.4ghz, GTX650m ). Good luck trying to find the correct keywords to search a similar problem.
It turns out, it was caused by the "Eco Mode" that Samsung provides, I had to guess it by myself. So that was settled, I thought. But I realized Popcap games had also begun working on a strange resolution and at 30fps (No, I refuse to play Peggle at 30fps), as if it falls back to a non-hw accelarated mode. Good luck finding keywords for that too. Popcap support couldn't help with that problem also. I still have it. Shame, stuff is working slower with worse graphics compared to my 7 year old laptop, as far as PopCap games were concerned (other PopCap games were also similarly affected, running in strange jaggy resolution at 30fps)
Now, to test my GTX650M, which I thought wasn't too shabby, to see if it was performing as well as others and see some DX11 goodness for free, I downloaded 3DMark 11. To my lack of surprise, it made my laptop freeze. But I figured I should download the latest version which popped up as a reminder, so I downloaded an update. Oh, the update failed as I had 1.003 or something, it only worked for 1.000. But there wasn't a specific update for 1.003, so I downloaded the latest archive in full again. So nice.
But I couldn't do the benchmarks, instead of freezing, this time it managed to give an error: IDXGISwapChain::SetFullscreenState failed. The demo worked, the benchmark didn't. Ah. Eco mode was off, what could it be? Several hours of searching the internet, I found out it could be due to some applications blocking full-screen access, but I had none of the various applications that seemed to create problems. I was terminating executables from task manager to no avail, with dozens of programs working on my "vanilla" laptop, it was taking time.
But I solved that problem too, in the end. It turns out, due to a UI bug, turning of ECO mode off didn't always turn it off. Good luck trying to find that one out, I noticed by doing a test run of Trials 2 Second Edition
, which seemed to have no problems with going fullscreen but it was capped at 30fps. But the eco mode seemed to be off. Turning that on and off again and hitting the default button really turned Eco Mode off. Another mistery solved. Now I can benchmark but still, no Nvidia Tech demo works, even the one that says is compatible with Windows 8, in case there's such an issue. The tech demos claim I either don't have a supported gfx card, latest drivers, or correct version of Windows. None of which are true, I have latest certified drivers as the Nvidia Geforce Experience tells me... But there's nothing on the forums to guide about those tech demos not working either. I'm at a loss as to why they don't work.Now, I still have that PopCap 30fps problem on their 2d games, and Nvidia DX11 demos not working. If I'm having this many problems, I'm not going be paying 50 dollars on PC games which I'm guessing are also prone to such problems as I've run into forums with so many people having similar problems not in those tech demos but games. But I really want to give it another shot. If you have any suggestions that would stop me from cursing PC as a gaming platform, do let me know!
