15 R4, GTX 1060, look so bad graphics-wise?

Question

Hello. I just bought a new Alienware 15 r4 laptop. It’s a GTX 1060 i7 256 SSD model. Out of the box, it looks amazing, but I downloaded some games and they run absolutely terrible. The lag is horrendous. There’s a lot of grainy textures and pop-ins and jagged lines. The games I tried are GTA V, Mafia 2, and Mafia 3. All three games should run amazing on a GTX 1060. I’ve tried updating the drivers and using the Nvidia control panel. Nothing works. I even ran a diagnostic and it said the computer was fine. This laptop cost over 1,000 dollars, so you can imagine my disappoint. Is there anyway to make the games look like how they should look on a high end gaming laptop?

jphughan · Answer

@Pgl99 do you happen to be running a display through a docking station? If so, which one? If it’s a DisplayLink-based model, that will be the problem.

Pgl99 · Answer

No, it’s just running through the laptop screen. There’s no special add ons or anything. Just the laptop and cord.

jphughan · Answer

@Pgl99  ok, then I would objectively quantify this issue by running a popular benchmark tool like 3DMark to see how this system scores and compare it to other scores from the 15 R4 equipped with a 1060.  Laptop Mag happens to have a review of that system with that configuration here. The 3DMark slide just under the Overall Performance heading includes several other results if you click left/right to go through them.  As long as the 3DMark version you're running has the same tests as the one Laptop Mag used a little under a year ago, that should be a useful reference.  If your system is scoring significantly worse, one possible issue might be severe thermal throttling caused by an issue with the cooling system.

Pgl99 · Answer

It was scored 4/5.  It said heats up quickly, but it said that it has great graphics and an overall powerful performance. It doesn't even get that hot exactly. Just warm.

Pgl99 · Answer

There aren't any number scores, exactly. Just stars and descriptions.

jphughan · Answer

@Pgl99 wrote:

It was scored 4/5. It said heats up quickly, but it said that it has great graphics and an overall powerful performance. It doesn't even get that hot exactly. Just warm.

@Pgl99 are there other scores? Note that in the Laptop Mag review I linked, on the Fire Strike test the system scored 14,522, and on Ice Storm Unlimited it scored 168,472. Can you run those same tests to get a comparison point against those scores? And since you mentioned GTA V, Laptop Mag also tested that. They ran it at 1920x1080 resolution at Very High settings and got 74 fps.

jphughan · Answer

@Pgl99 wrote:

There aren't any number scores, exactly. Just stars and descriptions.

Ok, maybe 3DMark has changed since that review was written. In that case try using GTA V at the same settings that Laptop Mag used and seeing what your frame rate looks like. If GTA doesn't have a native way to display that, there are third-party utilities like FRAPS that can display frame rate as an overlay on your game. The basic question to be answered here is whether your system is significantly underperforming or whether there's some other explanation for what you're seeing, but determining that requires some sort of objective measurement that can be compared against a reference point.

Pgl99 · Answer

Alright, so the lag problem is no more, now all of the games run smoothly as expected. But for some reason, they still have the dotted textures, jagged lines, and pop-ins(Like the games are aliasing BAD) I was talking to Alienware and tried everything from resetting the computer, to uninstalling and reinstalling drivers, to doing a FACTORY reset on the computer. It’s strange, because I feel like there’s a simple solution (like a switch) I have to hit to fix it, but I just don’t know.

jphughan · Answer

Very strange.  This sounds a bit like the symptoms I saw with an old system that had an NVIDIA GPU that turned out to be part of a massive GPU recall.  The system behaved fine under regular workloads, but under heavy gaming all sorts of visual artifacts and other graphics corruption occurred.  I don't know for sure that what you're seeing suggests a hardware issue, but if you've already been through a full factory reset and updated your drivers AND you're still seeing this on multiple games, I don't think there's a magic switch to flip here either.  Do you know what exactly fixed the lag issue?

Pgl99 · Answer

I’m not exactly sure, to be honest. I guess I just reinstalled the driver correctly. The whole issue is frustrating, because it being a BRAND NEW GTX 1060, it shouldn’t have these issues. The fact that for the most part, the FPS rate is high, but it has all the jagged lines and pop ins in the game is so strange. It’s almost as if visually, it’s a low end gaming computer, but frame rate-wise, it’s high end.

Eimy_B · Answer

Hi @Pgl99   Can you attach a video of the issue please?

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15 R4, GTX 1060, look so bad graphics-wise?

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