Random Lag drops

Ok i been having lag drops in games like COD4 and GTAIV,etc even on a notebook cooler first the games been running smooth and then its drop to like 5 FPS for like 15 sec and back to normal again and i know my vents are clean and the temps when playing games is in the low 80Cs without undervolting and with undervolting its in the upper 70Cs but one question is im getting these lag random drops because of lack of RAM and will a RAM upgrade to 3gb or higher will help my problem?

Btw GTAIV is very playable on a HD3450 and you can see youtube vids of people with a DV5z with a HD3200 playing it with no lags

 

Update:

i bought a 2GB stick from newegg so i can have 3GB of RAM imma see its a RAM problem or not if not i dont know what else the problem is

 

What settings do you run the games on when this occurs, and have you tried to see if the lags happen when you run on lower settings?

 

It's not game settings. I believe it's the common but relatively unknown DPC latency problem. Download the DPC Latency Checker and let it run while doing normal stuff, or start a game and leave it in the background. When the game starts lagging, exit it and look at the latency checker. If you see red bars in the graph and it says "one or more drivers in this machine behave badly" there you have your problem.

Fixing it, is gonna be another matter.

 

Right, but the question about the game settings can help in that regard, because DPC latencies aren't going to be causing lag if you're running a game at low enough settings that the GPU can easily handle it. Given the repetitive, regular nature of the lags, though, I would tend to suspect latencies caused by polling hardware such as wi-fi, bluetooth, or even the battery.

 

Yup the lag still happening i put COD4 on all low settings turned every option off and put the resolution to 640x400 same problem imma download that DPC latencies program that you guys recommend if its a driver problem i hope it is and not a hardware problem

UPDATE: Ok at running it on low settings again the highest it went to is yellow i tested it at my usual resoultion at 1024x600 and it got to the red so its a bad driver problem

 

Hopefully that's what it is; unfortunately, it may not be something in the firmware itself that _HP will simply not fix.

But, let's not get more cynical that the circumstances warrant. Have you checked on the _HP support webpage for your system to manually make sure you have all of your drivers, your firmware, and your BIOS up-to-date?

 

Well my bios is already updated and most of my drivers are updated to the latest versions but i havent updated some of them its still kinda of weird that a non game related drivers is causing this problem i'll update them all later maybe the probelm that i installed drivers that windows update offered me the optional ones but im not sure

 

You shouldn't try updating anything, instead you should try removing stuff.

I had the same with mine on its preinstalled Vista Home Premium. I now have Windows 7 RTM 64-bit and there are NO slowdowns and no red bars in dpclat.

Some advice for you:

Install 64-bit Vista, or try out Windows 7 RTM 64-bit, it's very good and it's coming retail soon. 32-bit seems to have issues on the DV5, besides, 64-bit is noticeably faster.
Do not install anything you do not need. For example, Windows 7 handles the touch buttons and all Fn key combinations by itself, so i did not need to install HP's "quick launch buttons" (dunno if that's what it's called but too lazy to check now). You will lose on-screen display of brightness, volume and whatnot, but that OSD tended to slow everything down to a crawl so it's actually better without it.

I do not need QuickPlay so i did not install it. I did lose the QuickPlay button because of that but it does not bother me. (You can map the button to another application, but this still requires QuickPlay to be installed).

Try these suggestions and let me know of the result.

To help you better, here's a list of what i DID install/update from HP's site:

Touchpad driver (from Synaptics site)
Sound driver
Video driver
Wireless driver
Infrared (remote control) driver
Card reader driver
HP ProtectSmart.

And never use Windows Update for driver updates again. Please. I dunno who designed that feature but it shouldn't have been there in the first place, it's up to the computer manufacturer to provide drivers, and Windows installs generic ones that may (and will in most cases) adversely affect performance and functionality.

 

First, it's not weird at all that it's a non-game driver; anything that takes up too much time on the CPU or the FSB is going to have ramifications for everything else that's running.

And do not, whatever you do, accept the driver updates that get offered to you by Windows update. You always want the drivers that were written with your particular system in mind, not the generics that Microsoft dishes out; I have had this problem with the Realtek driver on my new DV7-1285dx, I let Windows update push what it thought was the latest driver for that device and installed it, only to find that it caused a problem and that I had to go back to the _HP site and reinstall the real up-to-date driver that I had originally updated with, and which got scotched by the Windows update junk.

 

Thanks for advice guys imma do a reformat its has been a long time since i last reformatted it and this time i will not install any of the drivers that windows update offered me and see what happens and if i still have that random lag drops imma just install Win7 RTM 64-bit btw i already did a clean install of vista 32-bit when i first got my DV5 about over a year ago hope it work

 

Okay, good luck. I just tested my new DV9700 (see sig) and i am getting red lines in dpclat on the just barely restored Vista Home Premium 32 that it came with. So they come badly configured from the factory.

I strongly recommend you to do a clean install and not use the factory recovery option.

 

Ok i finally reformatted it with a clean install of vista 32-bit like i did before and installed all of my drivers and installed the windows updates except for the drivers they were offering me and you were right i installed the COD4 demo to test it and i dont have the random lag drops anymore and the game was running super smooth without any lags at 1024x768 all most settings on high with stock ATI drivers

 

What settings do you run your gta iv and how many fps do you get, can you use fraps to test the fps. Thanks cause i always thought this gpu could'nt handle that game.

 

I get decent FPS on low-ish settings at 1024x640, but for some reason when i drive it works well for a couple streets, then the video "hiccups". It stops entirely for about half a second, then it goes back to fairly decent framerate. Every couple streets it does this. It's very annoying.

That's on the DV9700 with the 8400GS which falls into "the bare minimum" anyway and also has only 256MB memory which GTAIV easily maxes out. My friend is going to bring me my DV5 back tonight, so i'll test on that and report the results.

PS. You only get 2096 with the HD3450? Is it the 256MB or 512MB version? Coz i get 2300 with my 8400GS overclocked. Haven't tested the 3470 though, will do tonight.

 

Have you tried completely turning off/disabling the wireless, any bluetooth it might have, and as an extreme measure, pulling the battery and running solely off of the A/C adapter?

 

Those things would work if i had DPC latency issues, which i did my best to get rid of. I always run on the AC adapter alone when i'm at home, no reason to heat up the battery when i don't need it.

But never mind, patching to 1.0.4.0 fixed it. To answer the guy above me, i'm getting 17FPS in the benchmark, resolution is 1024x640, texture quality low, all other settings below it medium, draw distance 7, detail distance 40, vehicle density 25 and shadow density 0 (doesn't seem to do anything anyway), definition and vsync on. It's not exactly smooth but it's playable. Lowering settings past this has next to no effect, with all at minimum i would get 18FPS.

However i still don't understand how they could make a game that both looks bad and runs poorly.

 

Well, you've got video "hiccup" that happens at regular intervals. That almost certainly sounds like a driver polling its hardware and blocking at a very high priority level until it hits its timeout; by doing that, such a driver would tend to cause the hiccuping. Checking to see if you'd discounted the more obvious sources of polling hiccups already. You may have minimized the amount of DPC latency you're seeing overall, but DPC latencies are an effect, not a cause, and so lack of general DPC latency issues does not in and of itself mean that the source of the problem has been fixed, merely attenuated to some degree.

 

Yes, but i already had wifi/BT and any other potential source of trouble off. I know how to deal with my OS, in this case it was a bug in GTAIV. As i said, patching the game to 1.0.4.0 solved the hiccups.

 

Yeah the card can handle the game but make sure you updated ur video card drivers and download GTAIV latest patch first before you play before i was running at 800x600 with textures at meduim and some settings at medium because of the random lag drops i been having i havent got the game installed yet since my random lag problem has been fixed idk how well it will run now i hope its runs very smooth

 

Thanks,
I have the 256mb version of the hd 3450 mobile. Is that better than your 8400 gs?
Also the king, can you run a gta iv benchmark of 800 res and all settings low, how does the game look?

 

The 256 meg you say. Well, it'll probably be on par. GTAIV doesn't work all that well on 256MB cards. I believe my HD3470 512MB will do better.