DELL E6400 w/ NVIDIA Quadro NVS 160M -- Horrible FPS!

[heylarson]

I'm not much of a gamer, but I broke down and bought 'Street Fighter IV' for the PC because of how much I loved playing it on my iPhone. I looked around and saw that the game could be played on machines with less resources than mine. When I fired up the game, it was doing between 11- 13 FPS. Real crappy and slow. So I lowered all the settings to the min, and still not much better.

I have my laptop docked with the Dell E/port simple port replicator w/ a DVI and VGA connected to two HP W2207H 22" LCD displays.

I updated to the most recent version of drivers from NVIDIA's website and tried again. Not better.

I un-docked and played, and had slightly better results, but not what I was expecting.

If anyone has suggestions short of getting an entirely new computer, please let me know! Thanks.

Here's the specs of my laptop:

* Intel Core 2 Duo T9600 with VT, 2.80GHz, 1066MHz 6M L2 Cache, Dual Core
* 4.0GB, DDR2-800 SDRAM, 2 DIMM
* NVIDIA Quadro NVS 160M, 256MB dedicated
* 250GB Hard Drive 9.5MM 7200RPM FFS
* Windows 7 Professional, 64-bit

 

[Maziar]

Well,your card performs like 9300MGS which is a low-end card for gaming,so that's why your FPS is low.
Try lowering the resolution too and it should be playable.
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-Quadro-NVS-160M.11908.0.html

 

[heylarson]

well that sux. is there any reason why it would play better when off of the dock? I had the resolution set to the same both on and off the dock.

 

[Maziar]

I'm sorry but by dock you mean the battery dock? if so,then i don't see any logical reasons why you get better performance because laptops perform the best while they are connected to AC power.

 

[heylarson]

Yep, the dock provides power, 1 DVI and 1 VGA video port, as well as a few USB ports. Below is a link to a picture of it:

Front:
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41Tykd2QcoL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

Back:
http://snpi.dell.com/snp/images/products/large/430-3326.jpg

When I had the laptop undocked, I had it running on battery. So i'll try another scenario: undocked, plugged in and see if that helps.