Surface Book 1 struggling with a game a phone can run flawlessly...

[Tyrekasaurus Rex]

Hey everyone, I come here in hopes of getting some help on what I can do to improve the performance on my Surface book 1 because it's becoming unbearable to try to play the only game play on pc and I dont know what to do.

 

My specs are an i7 6600u, 8gb RAM, 256 SSD, Geforce Gpu (no GTX or anything like that.)

 

The game I'm trying to play is The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth (absolutely recommend 10/10). The thing is the laptop can run the game just fine - when the window is at about 60% the size of the overall display. When I make the window any bigger, god forbid I make it full screen, the frames start to drop from a steady 60fps to an anemic 30 fps and under. I guess my question is what can I do to improve the performance? I'm only using 140/237 GB and I've uninstalled every program I don't use already so I feel like I've reached a dead end. The only programs I have installed that you could maybe call cpu intensive or anything of the like are Matlab and Orcad PSpice, and I obviously don't run them while trying to play. Another thing I figured I should mention, though I'm not sure if this is important or impactful, is that I first had a Surface pro tablet with all of my files and settings that I created a system image backup of and then recovered that backup onto this Surface Book to seamlessly move over all of my data. Aside from all that there's nothing else unusual about the laptop. If there's any other information anyone feels would be important to know to further help please don't hesitate to ask.

[Atessin4]

The thing with mobile games is that they run on a different CPU ISA. ARM's instruction words are way shorter and all the important code/data that needs to be constantly running when rendering the frames can be cached in the CPU cache. But x86's instruction words are longer therefore a lot less of the important code can be stored in cache. So the CPU needs to be constantly fetching the memory to execute new code. (that's the reason some games need some "optimisation" before releasing on a phone) You can help it by reducing the number of opened programs (using task manager. also it's wise to disable all the programs from the autorun section). And if that doesn't help, try Linux!

[Atessin4]

Let's just say it's not fair to compare mobile performance in games with the PC because the system is completely different and can do and allow things a PC can't.

[Tyrekasaurus Rex]

Truth be told I was just being a little facetious with the title but I've run this game on my old surface pro 4 with an i5, 4gb ram, and no discrete gpu just fine for the most part. The only thing that was meant to be conveyed with that is that the game itself is not intense by any stretch of the imagination so my laptop shouldn't be having issues with it.

[Atessin4]

The problem might be that you have too many programs running.

[Hon Leung]

7 hours ago, Tyrekasaurus Rex said:

Geforce Gpu (no GTX or anything like that.)

Don't underestimate it, I believe this model actually comes with a GTX 965M (given it was around $2K), which is actually still GTX, but not good. With that in mind though, you are probably running it on integrated graphics, or your attachment connection isnt that secure. Check that and make sure you are using the dedicated graphics at your Graphics Settings panel or Nvidia control panel.

[Tyrekasaurus Rex]

5 hours ago, McPlayerTeam said:

I believe this model actually comes with a GTX 965M

You would be correct if I had the performance base, which unfortunately I don't. All I have are the intel graphics and an Nvidia GeForce GPU (that's exactly how it is displayed in task manager and device manager). But yeah I'll look into what you said, thanks.

[Hon Leung]

1 hour ago, Tyrekasaurus Rex said:

You would be correct if I had the performance base, which unfortunately I don't. All I have are the intel graphics and an Nvidia GeForce GPU (that's exactly how it is displayed in task manager and device manager). But yeah I'll look into what you said, thanks.

Well im pretty sure theres no other Nvidia GPU if you are not attached to the keyboard thingy, so it appearing could just be an interface waiting to be reconnected. In that case, all graphics should be handled automatically by the integrated graphics (which is unlikely to fail on itself if the CPU is working). Still, by doing some research (Ive never played the game), it seems that its made with Adobe Flash, which according to Adobe:

Quote

Flash Player on the desktop still uses the CPU to do software rendering. Software rendering is used because drivers vary widely on the desktop, and drivers can accentuate rendering differences. There can also be rendering differences between the desktop and some mobile devices.

Look for an option to toggle "hardware acceleration" in the game or in the config files, it using CPU to render could be the reason of it struggling as U-series CPUs have significantly less performance than that of a standard or an H-series CPU within the same generation.

[Tyrekasaurus Rex]

I have a keyboard base but that base doesn't have a gtx. Acording to this page, my nameless "GeForce GPU" appears to be a 940M. Regardless, I will definitely I'm into the hardware acceleration, thank you.