Surprisingly Bad Gaming Performance

[ryot09]

Hey everyone,

I picked up a SP3 last night and am seeing some really surprising results with League of Legends. My SP2 on medium settings and 1080p gets a at least 45 fps, even when thins get really crazy. The SP3 with the exact same settings commonly gets below 20 fps. When I lower the resolution to the lowest and use very low settings it still only gets around 45 FPS.

Something's seriously wrong. As far as I know the SP3 (i5) and SP2 have the exact same GPU, so either the firmware, or drivers are very broken.
I was doing some searching and found one review that said they got similar performance in Lol, so I don't think it's just me.

I tried the latest generic driver from Intel's website, and used the Intel control panel to turn off all battery saving stuff, but no difference.

Does anyone have any ideas? Anyone else noticing poor gaming performance when compared to the SP2?

I love the device, but I play Lol a few times a week, and the surface is my only device, so if I can't figure this out, or if Microsoft/Intel can't fix it, then I'll probably not sell my SP2 after all.

 

[ZachBui]

I usually run the surface on high performance, but that's something you probably already did. I'm enjoying the speed I'm getting with playing smash brawl and blazblue so far. Do you think it has to do with any ingame settings in League of Legends like shading, textures, and what not?

 

[ryot09]

Thanks for your reply ZachBui. I'm assuming you're talking about power plans when you mention high performance, right?

If so, there is no such thing, at least not on my SP3. The only power plan available is balanced. Verified this with a command prompt, run powercfg /l. Do you have something more than just balanced?

My gut feeling is that MS made sacrifices to get the slightly better battery out of the same chipset/battery size. I just can't figure out how to turn it off.

I'm pretty sure it's nothing to do with the game, because every possible setting turned as low as it can go only gets me into the 40-50 FPS range. That's only a little better than a quad core atom gives you (like the Asus T100). Those same settings on the SP2 get me into the 100+ range.

 

[Cupcakes]

Yeah I was disappointed when according to CanIRunIt, the graphics card did not meet the minimum requirements with Dragon Age Origins, which is probably a 4 year old game.

But then CanIRunIt has been getting a lot of speculation with working with companies to get you to update your graphics cards and parts. I do want to play that on there. It sucks tho they gotta put the Intel HD 4000 in there again.

I got a gaming laptop, but this is more portable to play games on on the go when I am not doing schoolwork or something since I travel a lot.

 

[IlbeRevolution]

I've been running some games on both devices, and I did notice the performance drop on SP3, but not by a lot.

I ran Starcraft II at 1280x720 with low everything except textures at high, and I get around 55-60 FPS on SP3. I usually get 60-65FPS on my SP2.

The fan is also really loud once it starts going. I noticed that SP3 gives low FPS when you first run the game, but once the fans kick in, the FPS actually goes up...

I did not test League of legends yet, but are you sure you're running them both on the same resolution? Also, if you have the 4GB model, once your availiable free ram threshold (3.6~3.8GB) is reached, there can actually be a performance hit on your machine. I've noticed the SP3 has much higher RAM usage compared to SP2.

I'll post my BF3, Skyrim, LoL results as soon as I get them installed.

 

[Dayton]

There is probably some aggressive throttling currently in place.

 

[Cupcakes]

I've been running some games on both devices, and I did notice the performance drop on SP3, but not by a lot.

I ran Starcraft II at 1280x720 with low everything except textures at high, and I get around 55-60 FPS on SP3. I usually get 60-65FPS on my SP2.

The fan is also really loud once it starts going. I noticed that SP3 gives low FPS when you first run the game, but once the fans kick in, the FPS actually goes up...

I did not test League of legends yet, but are you sure you're running them both on the same resolution? Also, if you have the 4GB model, once your availiable free ram threshold (3.6~3.8GB) is reached, there can actually be a performance hit on your machine. I've noticed the SP3 has much higher RAM usage compared to SP2.

I'll post my BF3, Skyrim, LoL results as soon as I get them installed.

That'd be real nice for you to post those results. I got the 256/i5/8GB one. Last generation, I had the 126 GB one and yes I can really feel the difference, even though the difference is just a mere 4GB of RAM. The Surface is just faster overall.

And yes, that fan kicks in like probably a few minutes after putting in a game and it was loud, but it really cools lol. I was concerned at first, but it put thru.

 

[be77solo]

ryot09 sir, are correct! I have unfortunately reached the same conclusion... the SP3 is absolutely horrible at CPU/GPU intensive tasks like gaming!

I also have a SP2 that I was expecting to replace with the SP3, but for reasons I can't figure out, the SP3 performs significantly worse in games than the SP2, despite having the same CPU/GPU/RAM. All I can assume is they sacrificed performance for the thin size. On the SP2, I hit 81C where things throttle and settle down with acceptable performance, yet on the SP3 I hit 90C and things are significantly slower than the SP2 running beside it.

I too have tried different drivers, settings, as well as enabling the "High Performance" profile (it didn't help at all). I initially thought it was power saving related, but am now thinking it is simply the new design can't handle the temps so it throttles way more than the SP2 ever has to.... I have notice in games that they start out ok, but then start to stutter a few minutes in where as the SP2 remains stable for as long as I want to play.

Unfortunately, for me this is an absolute deal breaker!! I can't possibly "upgrade" to a slower device, even if it has a nicer screen!

EDIT: Instructions for enabling High Performance, but it didn't help:
http://www.surfaceforums.net/forum/...slow-wifi-speed-after-udpate-3.html#post65226

 

[ctitanic]

There is a graphic driver update coming from Intel that fixes issues with some games.

Also, as for as I know, it seems that the latest update we got was not a good one. There are Wifi issues reported and now these performance claims.

Any way, the SP3 is not a gaming device and it's using a different display than the SP2. May be that plays a role too.

 

[be77solo]

There is a graphic driver update coming from Intel that fixes issues with some games.

Also, as for as I know, it seems that the latest update we got was not a good one. There are Wifi issues reported and now these performance claims.

Any way, the SP3 is not a gaming device and it's using a different display than the SP2. May be that plays a role too.

The newest Intel drivers don't help, and if you play at the same resolution (in my case 1280x720p) the new display doesn't matter.... only if you actually try to play at native resolution.

The SP2 wasn't a "gaming device" either but none of us expected significantly worse performance from the new version!

 

[ryot09]

The newest Intel drivers don't help, and if you play at the same resolution (in my case 1280x720p) the new display doesn't matter.... only if you actually try to play at native resolution.

Exactly.

I realize this isn't a "gaming" device, but having a full i5 that only performs slightly better than an atom processor is a very, very bad problem.

For me it's a deal-breaker too. It's a shame, it's better than the SP2 in so many ways...

 

[ZachBui]

Yeah I only had balanced before, but after installing some updates from windows updates I was able to see high performance under the power options