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.
