L4D2 and FPS drops?

I have the M11xR2 with i7, 260.99 driver, and when I start playing everything is really smooth. (60 FPS) But in 10 minutes or so it'll just randomly drop to 20/15 FPS, I am not sure what is causing this so can anybody help?

 

turn off vsync maybe... what are youre settings. can you take screen shot? plus is l4d2.exe added to whitelist in nvidia control panel?

 

L4D2 is a VERY VERY weak GPU game. Most vAlve games depend on CPUs. The only time I get a low FPS is when I join a listen server and have the i key binded to the cmd "boom" which drops a active pipebomb out your *urhm*. Is your M11X throttling? I have a R1, you shouldn't be getting those low FPS rates.

 

Well it's actually happening to other games as well. How can I tell if my m11x is throttling?

 

The R2 always throttles unless your using ThrottleSTOP.

 

If it's happening after some amount of time in game, my thought would be that it's getting hot and throttling as others are suggesting. I have an R2 as well and L4D2 runs amazing at 1600x900 with everything cranked. I am using the stock dell drivers as I found issues with l4d2 and every other driver version ;p I used to play lotro and Dragon Age Origins on my 13" mac book pro and it would run great for a few minutes until it got really hot and the fps dropped. Finally the fan would kick on cooling the machine and the fps would shoot back up again.

You might want to log your temperatures while gaming and see if you notice any correlation between temperatures and frame rate. But defiantly give ThrottleSTOP a try. (If your temperatures are not too high) By now allowing the cpu to throttle down you may create excess heat and there is a small chance you might roast your fingers(Most likely) or maybe burn out your chip(Less likely) Best of luck.

Report back when it all makes sense.

 

I can confirm that this does occur *sometimes* with the 260.99 driver. It's basically a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation with the 260.99 driver and Left 4 Dead 2.... If you go with this driver, your shaders will work correctly but you'll be stuck with pretty crappy performance.

The latest verde drivers run Left 4 Dead infinitely better, but there is a documented shader issue with Left 4 Dead 2 that results in crashes and shiny white guns. I created a steam support ticket about this several weeks ago and the tech assured me that they were aware of this issue and that they were "investigating it further"

It's definitely a driver issue. I get very stable performance with the latest verde beta drivers and "medium" shader settings....if you can put up with the strange visual quirks until Steam gets around to fixing this bug.

 

I didn't know this. I thought it crashed no matter what. +1 rep, thanks!

 

This sound a lot like the problem I am having. My m11xR2 is about 3 months old. For the first 2 months it ran everything flawlessly and I played TF2 constantly. Suddenly, I started getting weird fps drops from 60ish to 20-8 and it would spring back up later. I started recording temperatures and the seem to be normal ( 50-60C idle and up to 80C gaming, I got people saying it was normal and some say it is way too hot ). After various tries to fix it I found that, 1. Laying the computer flat helps the fps...sometimes. I usually have the laptop on this wooden board and on my knees slanted. Then I tried sitting up and laying it on my legs and the FPS went up. 2. Its a lot worse for source based games. Also I installed the new driver to play just cause 2 then uninstalled it because it made fraps bug out.

 

Did you update to new drivers?

 

Yea, that problem seems to occur a lot. I recently reported that problem to dell, and they gave me a hard drive replacement. However, the problem isn't fixed. I still get really bad lags spots. This goes for all games. My cooling pad is basically a whole fan. I've used throttle stop, but no overclocking..... arg maybe I need to report this thing again...

 

broke computer, broseph of aramathia

 

I did at one time but it messed up 2 things for every 1 improvement so I reverted back.

 

As much as I love updating to the latest to get performance boosts, etc. I can safely say that the Dells drivers for the R2 (257.30) seem to be most stable when gaming, youtube HD videos, etc. And I didn't buy this machine to be at school and I can't get on L4D2 because everything looks shinny or I am getting 30 FPS because GPU not kicking in. For now until Dell updates the drivers (like 263 with the R1) I'm not even going to touch the 260 series anymore... Stick with Dells

 

Truth sir. I have found lots of grief with the other drivers and haven't found a set of drivers other than the stock that work as well with as many different games. Maybe I should be putting in an application for nVidia to help write better drivers ;p Here I was thinking AMD drivers sucked... lol

 

Common problem that has affected a lot of people over the past 2 months. It might have something to do with one of Valve's annoying mutator updates, you should probably check the L4D2 forums.

 

yeah op i have the same exact problem... i get about 50-60fps on about medium settings... and next thing u know it just suddenly drops to 8-20 and stays there... its really annoying not to mention sometimes it would stay up on 50-60 until i leave l4d2 and when i open it back up again it does this... its like winning the lotto.

 

Run a ThrottleStop log file while gaming. For the R2, using ThrottleStop is highly recommended even if you don't have any throttling problems.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m11x/524257-how-supercharge-m11x-core-i5-i7-um-cpus.html