Consistent, massive frame rate loss

Any 3d game I have tried suffers from an issue where, every ~5 seconds, frame rate drops down to 15-20, from anywhere from 30 to 130. It may only happen on my external monitor, but it doesn't appear to be a resolution issue as i have tried a couple resolutions and I have successfully used a 1080p tv, and my laptop screen doesn't seem to have issues either (1080p) It seems to only be the 1920x1200 monitor (even if I set the game to 1080p).

SS depicting the interesting logs.
http://i.imgur.com/DSYwqu8.png

I have ruled out heat as I can produce it at any temp, but I guess it could be a broken sensor for thermal throttling somewhere?

Specs: i7 3610qm, 8gb RAM, 650m.

 

Yep the FPS drops are due to the core clocks oscillating wildly. One possible cause would be an incorrectly configured power target although it looks more like the video card is toggling between 2D and high performance modes. I would flash an unlocked vBIOS or tweak around in NVInspector, though being from the "red team" my knowledge with your video card is limited at best..

 

Yeah i figured it was doing some kind of throttling for some reason. I can fix the issue by
A) capping the game at ~around 25fps, and then it will not drop below and lag
B) underclocking the crap out of it, which gets me around the same result as frame capping.

Going to try experimenting with different monitors and not using an external monitor at all.

 

All the best! Be sure to keep us updated.

 

Turns out it happens regardless of monitors attached. Which is odd because I swear during this issue i played sleeping dogs at a solid 30 at a friends house on his 1080p tv.

If i turn the quality down and run at 120 fps in older games it is much less noticeable, but if i turn the quality back up to run at ~40 frames it is a huge problem.

I will probably have to contact hp and send it in at some point, but as I am working from my laptop now thats not currently an option...

 

Yup, just tried an emulator and it ran at full speed, which would be cpu limited, so it must be a discrete gpu error.

 

I posted on the HP official forums but since I am out of warranty I did not want to contact support directly, since they charge a fee.

Unless someone there has experienced this before I will probably just go ahead and use this as an excuse to build a gaming desktop for intensive games and keep this laptop (which performs amazingly everywhere else) for 2d/indie games and to take to work with me.

Thanks for trying

 

run HWMonitor while gaming and post here, it's a hp so overheat may be the answer..

 

CPUID HWMonitor Report -------------------------------------------------------- - Pastebin.com
http://i.imgur.com/A8P7NDI.png

Doesn't seem bad to me.

 

Too cool.. It's as if the CPU and GPU were never under any load at all. Most troubling for me is that max. GPU voltage was 0.925V. According to this post, the max GPU voltage should be 1.1V. If that's true, it means your GPU never did enter high-power state. Which could be a glitch with Optimus..?

If it's not too much trouble, could you obtain similar graphs to those in the link I pasted?

 

are you sure you let it run WHILE gaming !

 

http://i.imgur.com/CqeoWSg.png

Also that link looks really promising, too bad there was no reply.

Haha I can take a SS of the game open in the other monitor if you want

 

Thanks for the additional data. Just to draw an analogy, when I manually restricted the power limits of my video card from 84 W to 40 W, I observed the exact same behavior with clocks and voltages fluctuating wildly between two states.

Given that thermals are not the limiting factor for your case, I would presume that some kind of power limit has been reached and the GPU is toggling between the high-power state and the next highest state, which unfortunately sits around a mere 200MHz or so.

I would suggest trying 3 strategies in the following order:
1. Extend the power limits on the GPU.
2. Set the second highest power state to be a tad below maximum clocks.
3. Underclock the card just enough for it not to throttle.

If none of the three options are possible due to locked down BIOS etc, I'm kind of at my wits' end..

 

I tried messing about with the other power states but it led to instability and crashed. If I wasn't using this machine for work I would be happy to keep tinkering but right now it is 100% mission critical.

Under clocking does work but it obviously drops the frame rate by a good chunk, which isn't so fun.

Until I can get around to getting a (gaming) desktop I can't risk changing my production system, so I will probably have to put this on hold for a bit.

 

Is it possible that another program is running in the background? Have you looked at your cpu usage when not doing anything, to see if it has a small spike every five seconds? I would run process explorer and turn on the graphs for each process, and see if one is spiking.

 

By power states are you referring to the actual voltages of the processors or the battery power setting on the PC? I found that sometimes I would accidently leave the PC on powersave and end up experiencing a similar problem, but all I would need to do is change the power settings to "Gaming" or what have you.