New Laptop, Left 4 Dead has extreme lag spikes, Half Life 2 also lags.

Hello all,

Dell just sent me a vostro 1510 laptop pretty well upgraded to replace my vostro 1400 with the following specs...

Intel Core 2 Duo T8100 @ 2.1GHz
256MB NVIDIA® GeForceTM 8400M GS (64 bit) Graphic Card
3 GB of RAM
15.4" UltraSharpTM Widescreen WUXGA (1920 x 1200) Display with TrueLifeTM

The first thing I did was formatted the HDD and put windows XP Pro on it.

I didn't have any say in what they sent me, I thought I would recieve a new 1400 but got a 1510 with better specs (I guess they don't make the 1400 anymore). They gave me a 15.3 inch laptop with 1920 x 1200 resolution. This is rediculous, I don't know how anyone can use such a high resolution on such a small screen. I have tried to call Dell to have them replace it with the 1440 x 900 but they wouldn't not, they can only replace the same res or higher.

Anyways on to what's bother me with games. I was running Left 4 Dead on my vostro 1400 on native res (1200 x 800 ) at more than 30 FPS. On the 1510 at 1200 x 800 ( you don't want to know what native on this was like with the 8400gs) I get around 20 FPS. Does this have to do with my native resolution being so high?

lastly When I run Left 4 Dead at the lowest settings possible or "recommended" something weird happens. The game runs at 50 FPS but it stutters sometimes and I get huge lag spikes where the game freezes for a few seconds (never happened on my 1400 ). And this is in the single player, not online. Though FRAPS tells me I still have 50FPS. Note: I do not get the spikes in Half Life 2 though it does stutter even when I have 50 FPS. Halo CE doesn't suffer from any of this.

Things I have tried to fix this issue that haven't worked...

Disabled multicore rendering
Set affinity to one CPU
used lowest settings possible
DLed a whole bunch of video drivers (official from dell and laptopvideo2go)

Any ideas what might be happening? Also this computer doesn't seem to run as fast as my 1400 with it's 1.7 GHz core duo did. It's odd.

Thanks.

 

there are lots of little tweaks to vista that will make a little diffrents in game, but to be honest the graphic's card is not up job in hand that is why you are having problem.You could try updating the drivers from dell that may give you a boost.

 

The new Left 4 Dead patch causes a big performance drop.


Hopefully they will fix it soon.


(Btw never alt+tab out of a Source game, it kills the fps)

 

How so, I alt tab out fine all the time and have on all my source games.

On l4d, what is your paged pool. I leave multicore on and set page pool to low and get much better performance. Does this happen during "horde" moments or just kind of at random?

 

Same here, I alt-tab out all the time to browse sites and change a song in my music playing. FPS stays exact same

 

I'm positive it isn't my GPU, I ran it fine on my vostro 1400 at native res without hiccups or spikes. The spikes don't seem graphical at all, my FPS is consistent then all of a sudden the music starts looping and it freezes for 5-10 seconds. This happens even when I'm standing in a room with nothing else in the room moving, and no other objects in the room.

 

Hmm that's strange. Maybe it's just a problem with my system.

 

turn off multi core rendering.
l4d has issues with it. try turning it off in other source games as well, and it WILL solve the 10-15seconds frezzing for a few.

 

try lowering your settings and see what happens and he said he installed windows xp on it, did your old computer have xp on it and make sure you have the highest battery settings on

 

Your problem is that 8400, its not meant for gaming. I use an XPS m1530 with an 8600GT, and I get good frames on all medium, and the 8600GT is much better then an 8400.

I'd say putting it on all low settings is the best you will get. Maybe you should shell out $800 dollars or so on a budget desktop? that would run it very well.

 

Please read my posts, I have used the 8400GS for the past 2 years, I know it's limitations.

I got rid of the lag spikes by disabling the multicore rendering as you all have mentioned. I guess the first time I tried it I switched the vsync accidentally instead of multicore rendering. The game runs around 35FPS on all medium setting (high character detail) at 1200 x 800. Thank you for the posts.

I hope valve will fix the multicore problems in future updates.

 

UPDATE:

I decided to install SP3 for XP, now Left 4 Dead runs a lot smoother for some reason, even with multicore rendering.

 

thats good to hear some games still run alot better on xp then vista great job

 

replay doom 3

 

^This

(lololololololololol)

 

I get the same issue with my 9600GT. So Xp made it better, huh?

 

Well, I had the exact same problem as OP with XP + SP3. I was using Dox's driver 180.25 (sorry, just reporting facts here) and it would freeze out for 3-8 seconds, and then occasionally speeds up for a bit until everything catches up. I noticed the fps didn't dip and it was only me, since all the other member of the team was moving around. (after the freeze everyone would be ahead of me by some distance, or horde cleared out, etc).

I fixed it by going back to 178.25, I heard that the new 180's drivers have problem with l4d (so it is not isolated to Dox's drivers) and it seems to be true according to my experience. Also, in both case, Multicore support were enabled.

 

WOW so XP fixed the problem, thats cool.