Borderlands runs at low FPS randomly, any ideas why?

Hello all,

I have been playing borderlands on the HP in my sig (turion II 2.2 ghz, Radeon HD 4650, 4gb RAM) since I bought it about a month ago and sometimes the game runs significantly slower randomly. The framerate usually stays between 20 and 30, not perfect, but good enough to fool an untrained eye (casual gamer).

Sometimes, usually when I'm playing online using Gameranger, the FPS drops pretty low, high teens maybe. Not exactly an interactive slide show, but low enough to be pretty distracting and disruptive. It doesn't happen all the time, But I'd like to find out what's causing it. Any suggestions?

 

Possible overheat? Scans/defrags running etc?

 

when looking from one edge of the map towards another?

 

At first I thought it might have something to do with an overheat, as the first time I really noticed it the laptop was running much hotter than usual. Then I noticed it again last night, and the area around the gpu was pretty cool.

And no, the framerate drops are not map specific. Today I went back to the same area of a map that we were playing last night (which was fairly tight with very short draw distances) and framerate was significantly smoother.

 

If Im not mistaken your FPS can be affected by the host of an online game. So your lower FPS could be your connection to the host and it trying to send/receive information.

 

^^ Indeed.

Although I noticed the game really suffered a performance hit after the first patch. I went from smooth as buttah with high settings on my laptop to almost unplayable tripe with everything low or off.

On my desktop I was getting all kinds of shadow popping and texture errors after the patch as well. Boy that was some patch, lol! Luckily I didn't have far to go to finish the game... haven't touched it since. Got the PS3 version coming for xmas for some split screen co-op with the wife.

So... if you haven't already, update your drivers yadda yadda. See if that helps *shrugs*.

 

I play with a friend of mine, and since I play as the sniper, I host the game to ensure pinpoint accuracy with my rifles, so i don't think that's the problem.

I just generally hate unreal engine 3. Epic's engines are always poorly optimized, but great developers wind up using them anyways cause the dev tools are supposedly very easy.

 

Any chance that you can post here the cpu and gpu temperature you are getting while playing games?

You can use CoreTemp or RealTemp for CPU

Note: Run the CoreTemp or RealTemp before playing any games.

Thanks

 

This game makes my laptop run 3-5c warmer than other games not sure why, but for a long time it ran very choppy and I kept reducing the settings. Till one day I remembered it was doing a lot of popins like crysis warhead does on lower settings. So I turned everything up to high and the popins went away and so did the low frame rate.

 

Man, I couldn't agree with you more... I have yet to figure out why the Unreal Engine is used so much, as it scales horribly in my opinion and is just not that good. Personal opinion of course, but I think it sucks

Band of Brothers caused me issues as well, and Borderlands is nowhere near the performance it should be for comparible graphics with other game engines in my opinion.

 

Borderlands runs blazing fast on my desktop (AMD Phenom II 955 w/ Radeon HD 5770) and moderately fast on my laptop (C2D P8700 w/ Radeon Mobility 4650) but they both experience occasional hiccups (a temporary stop or major decrease in fps). I thought it was network issues, but it occurred during single player. I tried a few fixes (closing all background apps, overclocking, lowering settings) and nothing changed it. It also isn't temperatures as the CPU maxes at 44C (idle 18C) and GPU maxes out at 60C (idle 34C). It could be the Catalyst 9.12 drivers, but I haven't bothered to revert to 9.11. I'm not sure but that fact that is persists on both computers is odd, it also implies it isn't entirely hardware related.

 

my desktop receives no issues whatsoever running and hosting this game.

try port forwarding, and shutting off other processes you don't need.

a major problem hosting this game is that hosting a game from your computer uses a large amount of CPU power and bandwidth from your machine, thus, unless you have a decent computer to host a game, it will lag a bit and provide you low FPS.