[kylemerosi]

Hi everyone,

I'm having an issue with low FPS in games with an external monitor. I have a late 2011 MBP with 2.0 i7, 16GB ram, AMD Radeon HD 6490M, and boot camp x64 windows 7. I recently bought a 24" U2412m Dell monitor to hook up to the laptop. While playing Tera Online my FPS is right around 15 while playing full screen 1920x1200 with 60 hertz refresh.

I feel that I should be getting much better FPS than this, does anyone have any ideas? Is my graphics card simply not capable? I've heard that one problem might be having different refresh rates on the two monitors? Though I'm not sure why this would affect the game running on only one monitor. I would like any help, as I would like to be able to take advantage of this monitor instead of wasting it's space.

Thank you for helping

 

[funfortehfun]

IMHO it's the video card. The 6490M just isn't going to cut it. Even though the other specs of your MacBook are excellent, that video card on a 1200p display is really going to stress it out over the max.

 

[kylemerosi]

Do you think lowering the resolution on the monitor a bit would allow full screen play? Or am I out of luck?

 

[GuardianDuo]

Are all the in-game settings at the lowest? If so, then try lowering the resolution. If that still doesn't provide desirable FPS, then you are indeed out of luck.

It's definitely your GPU - a 6490M is quite weak.

 

[kylemerosi]

They are all nearly at their lowest. I'll try lowering the resolution. Otherwise it might be time to start looking at a gaming desktop to match my monitor ha.

 

[pcfoo]

Try not to run both monitors when gaming, and lower the settings till you get decent fps.
MBPs are not for demanding games, to begin with, and bootcamp also further penalizes performance.

The CPU is faster than many desktop CPUs that can hold their own with fast GPUs...the Mobile Radeon - just like the GT 6xx on other MBPs won't cut it...

 

[GuardianDuo]

How does Boot Camp penalize performance? I was under the impression that Boot Camp was native Windows, not a virtual machine.

 

[Eatfoodnow]

bootcamp doesn't penalize performance. Also not every MBP has severly underpowered graphics. My MBP has a 6750M and I've OCed it to a little above a 6770M. It struggles with new titles (and I'm picky about framerate) but works fine for anything in the last year or two or earlier. I'm not playing on 1920x1200 though, which would have a serious hit on performance.

The 6490M is just not enough to handle a game at 1200p. You can either get a desktop, a gaming laptop, or wait a couple years and hope for an external thunderbolt PCIe slot for an external graphics card. The GPU is not replaceable.

 

[Ganf]

You might be able to get some decent performance out of it with Tera at 720p, excluding towns. Tera is a bit harder to run than a lot of people realize.

 

[Domino]

Well remember, with Apple, you get what you paid for. Wait...

Your GPU is next to garbage unfortunatley. You won't be able to do that resolution fluently. Can you even overclock that card; let alone, if you could, wouldn't it overheat with the MBP cooling solution? You are pretty much crap out of luck. Try lowering the resolution. Try gaming at 1440x900 or 1280x800.

 

[Eatfoodnow]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Domino

Can you even overclock that card; let alone, if you could, wouldn't it overheat with the MBP cooling solution?

I don't know about the 6490M but the 6750M deals with an undervolt and overclock quite nicely, it runs just as hot as it did at stock, in the low 80s under load.