G74 Performance Hiccups? Help :(

I have been very happy with my G series laptop since I bought it a month ago, but recently I began noticing frequent, severe, 1 second frame rate drops in many games. I have no idea what is causing it. In fast paced games, this is pretty annoying!

The games affected so far are Old Republic, L.A. Noire, Reckoning Demo, Dawn of War 2 Retribution. All of these games run very smoothly at a smooth 30-70fps or so depending on the game..and aside from the first two, these games are not particularly demanding. When the lag happens, the game drops to about 10 fps momentarily, and the sound cracks up.

If anyone has had issues like this before and found the culprit please let me know what it was so I can look into it! thanks.


EDIT: Did some digging on the subject. First of all, Im am sorry I did not do this before posting because it seems like this issue has been discussed before. I am going to try doing this:

http://ultimatecomputers.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3644

to disable the win 7 core parking feature. Also ran a defrag and found that the drive i store all my games on had a "49% degree of fragmentation" I dont know what that means for performance but im guessing its bad as opposed to good. Ill check in again later to announce the results in case anyone else is having the same fps issue.

 

49% degree of fragmentation is extremely impressive especially if you have only had it a month lol defrag it pronto. Nice work.

Yes the core parking is a good thing to try to prevent the old micro stuttering especially in games that are CPU intensive I found it fixed this problem for me in Skyrim.

How are your temps?

 

Lol yeah I have installed a ton of games at once since my old comp couldnt run anything. Most of them I havent touched yet, but now it looks like they might be weighing down the ship.

The temps seem normal so far. The highest iv seen the GPU go is 64C.

 

I would go for the defrag and the unparking then fella that should sort you out it does sound as though your HDD is down the pub on his 10th round at the moment so most probably the reason for the skipping

 

Never heard of that trick before.

How does it work ? Is it the same thing as Throtlestop ?

 

Core Parking? Its quite a common thing.

If you go into task manager and performance and select CPU and then look at the 8 graphs on the right hand side if any of the graphs have ''Core Parked'' at the bottom that means the core is not active.

It is just a way to run the CPU at as low power consumption as possible but it can cause a decreased performance if cores are parked and the software you are running does not trigger whatever it is intel uses to park cores. Its a bit of a myth however but for me it did improve my benchmarks by 500pts.

 

Well i just did both, it seemed to help a lot. The freezes are far less frequent now. Still happened once or twice in my 1 hour reckoning demo playthrough, but they did not last as long, and the sound didnt break.

Speaking of sound, has anyone else tried the reckoning demo on steam? My character makes no sound when swinging a sword, charging up her staff to blow up the entire screen, or when she gets hit. Also, sometimes the sound effects seem delayed even though the frame rate is smooth. I heard the demo was really glitchy, but did anyone else experience this?

 

I tried that demo and it is filled with bugs are you sure it is not the game instead of your laptop causing the problem?

Even so I was expecting a lot more from the game and after playing the demo I think I will just go for the Jagged Alliance and wait for Diablo 3

 

True, it was pretty damn buggy. The 100% mute character and somewhat unimpressive graphics kind of put me off too. Im sure the mute thing was a bug though, because in the game trailers, the characters at least grunt when they attack. But yeah, not quite as excited as before. I was expecting another skyrim

.. though it may prove to be as epic as skyrim yet! We'll see at release I suppose.

 

Yup sadly these people have been making games for several years and then BOOM Skyrim comes out and their hearts drop haha.

Highly recommend two little games I am addicted too at the moment Pay Day the Heist is quality and Orcs Must Die.

 

Wow. 49% defragmentation. A defrag of your hard drive should definitely help.

Do your hiccups usually happen at the very beginning of games or when you enter into new areas of the games? This is actually pretty common and it happens when your hard drive needs to load new textures or whatever to your video RAM on the fly. It's usually manifested as a sudden, severe drop in frame rate during normally smooth gameplay. Not all games load such information on the fly so this isn't universal, although Source engine games are notorious for this kind of stuttering. I have a slow 5400 RPM hard drive and I get this kind of problem during the beginning of certain games but it clears up once everything has been loaded into RAM. I'm sure getting a faster hard drive or even an SSD would reduce these kinds of stutters.

 

Again just to say congratulation on that framentation to put it into context that is 248GB worth of hard drive

Agreed ^ an SSD would be a very good choice OP just remember that there are only around 1 billion writes allowed on an SSD so you could be replacing it within around 3 months if that is the case! Bwhahaha.