Aspire 5745G Nvidia GEFORCE GT420m sudden drop in performance

kagot

Hi,

I have a 3 years old laptop Acer 5745G, with intel i5 M460@2.53GHz, 4GB memory RAM, and nvidia GeForce GT420M with 1GB dedicated memory. The laptop had worked perfectly until two weeks ago. The games (Skyrim for example), which I had played for a long time on high settings without any problems, suddenly became sluggish and unplayable even on lowest settings.

I have re-installed my Windows 7, updated the GT420M drivers, turned all options in nvidia control panel to max performance (including the power savings), did the same with the Skyrim custom options in the nvidia control panel (though the problem is with all games, not only Skyrim), without any success. I have used GPU-Z for some tests. The temperature of the GPU, when Skyrim is running, increases from 45oC to 63oC, and anyway I use additional cooler. The power supply increases from 0.085 to 0.095. The Device Manager reports that the device is working properly, and the Nvidia control panel does not give any warnings, dxdiag shows no problems (though it reports information only about the integrated card) . Yet, even the integrated graphic card "Intel(R) HD Graphics" gives a better performance than the GT420M. And the 3D Graphics Windows Experience Index is 3.1, while before the problems it was 5.4.

The only program that gives some error messages is 3DMark 11 during the benchmark run:

either:

"Workload Single init returned error message: DXGI call IDXGISwapChain:etFullscreenState failed:
The requested functionality is not supported by the device or the driver.
DXGI_ERROR_NOT_CURRENTLY_AVAILABLE "

or:

"Workload Single init returned error message: eva:: d3d11::rendering::scene_renderer::render(): draw_depth_task for thread 0: File: device_context.cpp
Line: 442
Function: struct D3D11_MAPPED_SUBRESOURCE __cdecl eva:: d3d11:: device_context::map(struct ID3D11Resource *,unsigned int,enum D3D11_MAP,unsigned int)

Expression: m_native->Map(resource, subresource, type, flags, &result): DX11 call failed.

The function completed successfully
S_OK: "

Does all this mean that there is a problem with the GT420M? But then why Windows and Nvidia drivers or control panel can not detect the problem?

Or it may be some software (driver/DirectX/BIOS) problem, but it would be strange as I have just re-installed Windows 7, and the only additional programs installed on the laptop are the updated drivers, Steam, Skyrim and 3DMark 11.

It is very confusing and any help will be much appreciated.

philetus

DXGI_ERROR_NOT_CURRENTLY_AVAILABLE

Usually caused by incompatible background program; something drawing overlays or something that has a custom video driver (like remote desktop tools) that isn't DX11 compatible.

http://community.futuremark.com/forum/showthread.php?174481-DXGI_ERROR_NOT_CURRENTLY_AVAILABLE

kagot

Thanks for your replay, phileuts.

 

The laptop had been restored to factory settings and the nvidia drivers updated. No other major software has been installed since then.

 

If it isn't some hardware problem, say only a component of the graphic card to fail, which failure can not be detected by the Device Manager or the NVidia drivers, then the other option is some Windows 7 update to be the cause of all this. Which is not very likely, as otherwise there would have been a lot of victims.

 

The more I think, the more I believe it is some kind of hardware failure. The performance had been perfect one day, and very poor on the next day. Three days ago the laptop began changing its performance evry hour or two, and then I have reinstalled Windows 7 and the performance became stable, but poor.

 

The only reason I am uncertain about the hardware failure is that Windows, nvidia drivers and the CPUZ recognize the card. Therefore the card is working, just in a wrong way. Very confusing.

kagot

Hi,

 

I was able to run 3D Mark 11 and the report was Graphic Score of 746 and Physics Score of 2759. And also there was a message that: "SYSTEM INFO IS TOO OLD COMPARED TO THE SUBMIT DATE OF THIS RESULT. RESULTS SUBMITTED AFTER NOVEMBER 2013 SHOULD HAVE AT LEAST SYSTEM INFO VERSION 4.20."

 

When compared to other similar systems, the result is not so bad. And yet my laptop 3D performance is much slower than before.