Can I have more FPS, just a little bit?

[adc.]

I swear, you've all heard this rant before, usually related to speeding up laptops, computers, netbooks etc. And this is what this topic is all about.

 

I have done everything in my reach to speed up my laptop. I just felt maybe it has some sort of untapped MOAR FPS power that I could tinker to get the max juice from it. I don't know if I had done that thing or not, but here's the details.

 

Hp Pavilion 15-n221sa

Intel Core i5

4GB ram

Intel HD Graphics 4000

Windows 8

 

-Always taken care of

-About two years old

-Always set to High Performance

-Always plugged in

-Has never overheated even once

-I am inside a room that has a cool temperature

-Set my virtual paging file size to a min of 6000 and a max of 6000

-I have the latest graphics card (maybe?)

-Regularly cleaned and checked with CCleaner and SpyHunter (once a week)

-From a 448GB HDD space, I still have 352GB free

That might be all I think.

 

Note that I won't answer to these suggestions:

-Your laptop sucks lol

-Get a new one/build your own, since laptop sucks lol

-Buy a new ram

-Turn that thing to Windows XP

 

Let's see:

-I can run Skyrim on a Low setting with an average of 35-60 fps

-Can run Spiderweb games perfectly

-Can run Fallout 3 with microstutters (probably to the 2 core problem thinggy)

 

I don't know why I'm still asking, but the next-gen games are coming, and I doubt my specs would be able to cope up with it.

 

-Ran Witcher 2 on the lowest setting possible, along with the ini tweaks with the lowest settings possible, got only an average of 5-10 fps on 1366x768 the max screen res, getting a 20-25 on 800x600, but I have to put in a lot of effort to read the font.

 

-Ran Thief 4 on the lowest settings possible, along with the lowest ini tweaks, got only 10-20 average fps from a 1024x768 res

 

I was thinking of getting an SSD, but I'll have to convince my dad to buy it, if everything else fails.

[Mistah Q]

Be on the lookout for a SSD. Prices for them should be coming a little back down to earth soon - a couple years ago there was massive floods in (Thailand I think) where most of the stuff is produced and ruint the factories. Supply issue is mostly straightened out by now, and we've got plenty of competitors starting to chip at the pricing. If anything you ought to be able to get a fantastic black Friday deal this year for once, if you hold out that long.

 

You said you didn't want to hear this one but, if you can upgrade your RAM to 8GB that would be pretty huge. No pagefile or HDD request can ever match the speed of pulling info out of a RAM. SSD can come close, in fact SSD more or less renders pagefile (and things like readyboost) irrelevant.

 

Only other suggestions I could think,

 

-Consider adding Glary Utilities to your cleaning regimen

-How often do you restart/shut down, even if you wouldn't need it for an update?

-What antivirus/security are you using?

 

-If you're insistent on paying for antivirus you're best off with ESET's Nod32 suite.

-If you're insistent on free antivirus... forget about avast, avg, etc... they're nice sure but the best on Windows 8 is going to be Microsoft Security Essentials with Windows Firewall... it's free, unobtrusive, effective, light on system resource.

[Earth]

best way to increase frames per second is to update graphic card but since its laptop its not possible or very difficult.

 

http://lifehacker.com/5851902/turn-a-low-powered-laptop-into-a-gaming-machine-with-an-external-video-card-dock

[Khoth]

Note that an SSD, although amazing for reducing load times and whatnot, will have essentially no effect on the FPS you get.

 

The limiting factor is probably the graphics hardware. Integrated graphics tends to be pretty weak compared to a separate graphics card, and options for a laptop are rather limited anyway compared to on a desktop.

[Mistah Q]

Note that an SSD, although amazing for reducing load times and whatnot, will have essentially no effect on the FPS you get.

In general this is true. But he did say he's relying on max pagefile. Where it can help is cutting down on stutter when say you enter a new area and different graphics set has to load up, etc.

 

It's also worth asking, you say i5 but is it ivy bridge or sandy bridge?

[adc.]

-Consider adding Glary Utilities to your cleaning regimen

-How often do you restart/shut down, even if you wouldn't need it for an update?

-What antivirus/security are you using?

 

I used BitDefender before, but it adds some load to my laptop. So I now use the default Windows Defender.

 

I cannot live a day without checking the laptop's resource monitor.

 

I also forgot to mention that I've disabled every single non-Windows service I could find in the msconfig.exe thing.

 

Thanks for the suggestions guys, will wait for more.

 

EDIT: I think I have an Ivy Bridge, since it is i5-3317u @ 1.7GHz

[Mistah Q]

Is probably not the issue, but have you tried stripping out all old versions of DirectX and done fresh new DirectX install?

 

Intel HD4000 is not as good as actual dedicated NVidia card but... Witcher 2 is older than your laptop, so your version, should run it good enough if you're willing to play on low graphic setting, even at normal resolution. So I have to think there must be some little issue somewhere which could be resolved. I can imagine a little more trouble with Thief 4, but no way should THief 4 run better than Witcher 2... strange

 

Edit - can it be a memory leak? Does Witcher 2 run o.k. when you first start to play, but then it starts to break down or get choppy later?

[adc.]

Edit - can it be a memory leak? Does Witcher 2 run o.k. when you first start to play, but then it starts to break down or get choppy later?

 

YES! Yes it does, which is when I first ran it, the trailer had me 'woah, dat graphics' I could move my mouse on the menus smoother than butter, 120+ fps all the way, but when I actually started playing it, it feels worse than having TF2 on an intel atom netbook.

 

Thief 4 has crappier performance than Witcher 2, or was it better? Anyhow, I'm still stuck between 10-25 fps on these two games.

 

Any more help is appreciated, if there are any remaining ;_;

[keira]

In general this is true. But he did say he's relying on max pagefile. Where it can help is cutting down on stutter when say you enter a new area and different graphics set has to load up, etc.

 

That is factually incorrect. Page File (properly known as swap space) is space on a filesystem used as ram when you run out. It is incredibly slow, and you should avoid it wherever possible (its called swap because the system uses this space to "swap" stuff in and out of ram, essentially acting as an overflow parking lot for your program).

 

The only possible way swap/pf could be useful is if you have the swap partition/file on an SSD or utilize disk striping. Even then, I doubt it'd be worth it. A swapping system is a slow system, there's no getting around that.

 

Sorry to be blunt, but if you're looking for enjoying a decent framerate or a pretty game, a laptop is not what you should go for. Get a proper desktop with a decent card.

Edited June 23, 2014 by sylae
Really, the only disk you should ever use to swap on is a ramdisk. wait....

[Mistah Q]

I was saying that where SSD will be better than pagefile for his game performance. SSD will make pagefile more or less irrelevant... SSD can't as good as the right graphics card or more RAM, but it will better than pagefile.

[keira]

That's hardly worth the investment. For the cost of a 512 GB SSD you could get pretty much all the components for a real computer.

 

You're suggesting putting a supercharger in a Geo. Its just a silly waste of money

Edited June 23, 2014 by sylae
even if an SSD swap partition helped, it'd just move the bottleneck down a bit.

[Mistah Q]

Okay, possible Memory Leak. Is your game drm managed by Steam, or outside of Steam?

[adc.]

Okay, possible Memory Leak. Is your game drm managed by Steam, or outside of Steam?

 

Outside of Steam, Gog.com

 

I was wondering why it was called good old games when I can't get a decent playable framerate.

 

You don't have to worry about that Sy, when I go to college, I'll try to earn some side cash to build my own PC. Being in 4th year highschool means I'll use up most of my time studying than crying and ranting about games, I just thought that maybe I have had an untapped potential on my laptop that I haven't discovered.

 

Thanks to all the helpful reply guys (especially to you Mr. Q +1 to you ), now I know that I'm left with no other choices but to upgrade, or get a new one.

[Mistah Q]

Alas you are near your power limit, but it still sounds like you have some other problem on Witcher... see if you can discover what module is causing memory leak or if some directX driver is gone awry, etc.

 

I had some mod on skyrim where dragon becomes Macho Man Randy Savage (OHHHHHHHHHH YEAH) but it caused game locking up, had to remove it.

 

edit: about gog. Gog is great idea but on my experience, I own Geneforge Saga on Steam and on GoG, I have it both. Steam edition, no problem. GoG have weird packager and some display issues I shouldn't expect from game with so low sys reqs.

[nikki.]

A new SSD will make booting a breeze - I go from powering on to the desktop in under 10 seconds (and that's with entering a password). It'll make opening programs snappier, and will cut down loading times in your games. They're a great purchase.

 

A new SSD, however, will not let give you an increase in the FPS you get from games.

 

I'm afraid that Sy is right. With that graphics chip, you're gonna have a hard time playing anything pretty at anything approaching 30fps. It's time to start saving for a desktop machine. Don't worry though - if you're smart, you can build a next-gen gaming machine for around the price of an XBOne or a PS4.

[Khoth]

"It's fast in the menus and slow during the actual game" is not the sort of slowdown that indicates a memory leak.

 

It's also unlikely that the problem is caused by the page file.

[Mistah Q]

Well of course. His machine should not expect to run very well Thief 4, or next generation of games. That trouble on Thief 4 is expected.

 

But he should not be having such troubles at Witcher 2. His machine is worthy to play that one fine, so I think we can try to help him troubleshoot to what is the problem on that one.

 

If right now he do not afford the new machine, there are still plenty games which you can enjoy from current and prior generation. Every SPiderweb game of course, and then you can check Baldur's Gate II, Titan Quest, Fable, Bioshock. (Bioshock 1 is great. Biochock 2 is subjective. Bioshock 3 is disappointment). Tropico 3 can be worthy experiment, and I'm sure members here can recommend plenty other.

 

About building new machine: everything is ruled by your own preference of course, but I can offer a small advices:

 

-Alienware = waste of money. If you stay interested in the future gaming, better to build stationary machine for that, and keep a tablet or notebook for travels. $2000 Alienware last year, is $1200 Toshiba this year, and $700 Viao next year. Of course every computer will face obsolescence but, upgrading and replacing the high end laptop components is far less practical than perform upgrade to stationary machine when necessary.

 

-Solid state = overpriced right now, but if you'll patient those price dynamic will soon change. I will bet that you will see some nice sales on the black Friday and beyond. If you do not physically abuse that SSD then it is an investment, because you can keep it next time you upgrade or build new machine. They had terrible disasters couple years ago in Thailand but Moore's Law is never turned away for too long.

 

-One place to never sacrifice the quality for a cheaper part is POWER SUPPLY UNIT (and surge protector).

 

-Don't become too enamor by top end specs. $60 gfx card can give you same practical application as $200 one. Decide if you want performance or if you really need that last shadow from falling acorn at the distance. Same on processor... don't buy some $350 processor. You can get some bundle around $150 of motherboard and processor together, which would suit you for a good few years.

[keira]

One word of advice for GPUs if/when you do go shopping: looking at the clock speed alone is rubbish. The most important factors in a GPU are memory amount (although your average card is usually more than enough, unless you go for EXTREME TEXTURES OF DOOOM), and clock*CUDA cores (as in, multiplied together). A lot of people get hung up on "oh, but this GPU has .2 GHz more clock speed", when, meanwhile, it has half the cores. The reason GPUs are so powerful is because the operate in parallel. How good is a 90-mph highway if it only has one lane.

[adc.]

But he should not be having such troubles at Witcher 2. His machine is worthy to play that one fine, so I think we can try to help him troubleshoot to what is the problem on that one.

 

You're... serious?

 

Wow, I've never thought that I could play a game like that on this thing, I've searched for countless solutions from Steam to GoG, and most users' answers were the typical "turn off the ubersampling crap" and their problem is solved. But not mine D:

 

Although, I did noticed when I switched the game res to 320x240 which is pretty much the most ridiculous thing, I got about 30-45 fps, no keyboard delays, no mouse delays, everything was perfect on that tiny game window.

 

800x600 with 20-25 fps was good for me, but it seems like I have to decipher the jagged letters from the screen, windowed or not makes no difference at all.

 

I think I'll go and search for more solutions, and I might just reply to this thread if I found any.

[Alorael at Large]

But he should not be having such troubles at Witcher 2. His machine is worthy to play that one fine, so I think we can try to help him troubleshoot to what is the problem on that one.

I disagree. That's a very pretty game, and a very resource-hungry game. Thief is newer, so even hungrier, but The Witcher 2 is just three years old. Trying to play it without a graphics card is asking a lot of a computer, and I'm not surprised that a non-gaming laptop is struggling.

 

Others are the optimization experts, not me; I don't optimize agressively and don't use Windows much anyway. But I think the best you can get from that laptop may be better but still not very good for what you want to play.

 

—Alorael, who thinks Sylae is really giving the right suggestion. If you can get someone to spring for expensive fancy hardware you might as well try to agitate for a powerful desktop. Maybe you can plead for it as a going-to-college present? If you feel up to building your own desktop, and it's not terribly hard nowadays, you can build a sleek gaming machine at a reasonable price. And if you intend to take any classes with graphic design, very crunchy computation, or film editing, it's even a useful tool!

[Xaiya]

There's a quite massive range of games you can play on your laptop as is. Your best bet is probably to be satisfied with those until you have the capability to build/buy a proper gaming computer, rather than get frustrated trying to squeeze out an extra 2-3fps. You'll be waiting to play those next gen games, but that's a good thing anyways, as you can get them during sales. Only the dedicated or rich go for full price.

[Khoth]

Well of course. His machine should not expect to run very well Thief 4, or next generation of games. That trouble on Thief 4 is expected.

 

But he should not be having such troubles at Witcher 2. His machine is worthy to play that one fine, so I think we can try to help him troubleshoot to what is the problem on that one.

He's below the minimum system requirements for it, so I wouldn't really expect much in the way of performance.

[adc.]

Ok, calm down guys, I've seen some weird stuff over here.

 

I played Witcher 2 again, with auto-detect settings and my max (1366x768) res. Opened up task manager and found out that it was using only 15-20% of my memory, it isn't a memory leak if you ask me. Wait, what's memory leak?

 

EDIT: It uses about 600-700 MB memory

[Earth]

memory leak is that some program uses memory more and more when its running and eventually uses all available memory (even pagefile) if it runs long enuf.

[WLDD]

Bro, download Game Booster

[Lilith]

Bro, download Game Booster

 

don't bother, they don't actually do much

[BMA]

I've such a crippling lack of RAM that my laptop can't even afford a background Game Booster. Before playing an intensive game I manually open up the task manager and kill all non-system processes

 

Doing this doesn't get you past any unsatisfied minimum requirements though, it's just a couple of extra fps that's only noticeable on lighter systems.

[Juan Carlo]

Buying an SSD or more memory would be a waste. Most of the games you mentioned are video card heavy, so your video card will always bottleneck your performance.

 

Baring buying a completely new PC, you have two options:

 

1. Play older games. There are tons of older games that will run on even the cheapest laptop. Plus, many indie games don't have great graphics.

 

2. Look into a cloud gaming service. They aren't popular, but if you have a fast internet connection you can stream games you own on steam through onlive (they made a partnership with Valve for that, although not sure if they've implemented it yet). Which means you can play "The Witcher 2" on max settings on a cheap laptop, provided you have fast internet, as the onlive servers handle all the graphical rendering of the game. The service probably has a monthly fee, though, I don't know as I've never used it.

[WLDD]

don't bother, they don't actually do much

They actually do if your computer have a lot of trash program running and you have no idea which ones you should turn of in the task manager I keep my PC really clean of everything though it is pretty old IBM ThinkPad and it greatly improve my GTA

[WLDD]

don't bother, they don't actually do much

And I just realized that you have joined this community long ago

[Earth]

And I just realized that you have joined this community long ago

 

she's been posting since early of this century and quite likely in last century too (on old old boards).

[Randomizer]

Lilith goes back to the days when the board used carrier pigeons to transmit posts.

[keira]

They actually do if your computer have a lot of trash program running and you have no idea which ones you should turn of in the task manager I keep my PC really clean of everything though it is pretty old IBM ThinkPad and it greatly improve my GTA

Or just get rid of the "trash program" and then there's no need for some seedy program that will also pull resources from your game? Win7 and Vista made this pretty easy with a task manager that provides descriptions of what processes do what. And there's been a great Services control panel in Administrative Tools since the beginning of time.

 

Y'all seem to think there's going to be some sort of "get FPS quick" solution to solve all your problems, but there's not. Every system is different, every game is different, but in all of these cases, on low-spec systems you will have to fight tooth and nail for every bit of performance you can pull out of that system. And even then it probably won't be enough to satisfy you. In which case you just need a new machine. But since that's not an option for a lot of people, you just need to learn your system. What specific settings are you trying to improve? What resources does that setting consume? Where is your bottleneck? How do you reduce the load at that bottleneck? What are the consequences of doing so?

[WLDD]

Or just get rid of the "trash program" and then there's no need for some seedy program that will also pull resources from your game? Win7 and Vista made this pretty easy with a task manager that provides descriptions of what processes do what. And there's been a great Services control panel in Administrative Tools since the beginning of time.

 

Y'all seem to think there's going to be some sort of "get FPS quick" solution to solve all your problems, but there's not. Every system is different, every game is different, but in all of these cases, on low-spec systems you will have to fight tooth and nail for every bit of performance you can pull out of that system. And even then it probably won't be enough to satisfy you. In which case you just need a new machine. But since that's not an option for a lot of people, you just need to learn your system. What specific settings are you trying to improve? What resources does that setting consume? Where is your bottleneck? How do you reduce the load at that bottleneck? What are the consequences of doing so?

Well I am not the one who needs help, my low lap top is working pretty good for what I need it

[WLDD]

Lilith goes back to the days when the board used carrier pigeons to transmit posts.

haha nice one

[adc.]

I think this topic is done for now.

 

I didn't do anything to speed up my PC, I guess I'll leave it just the way it is. Playing TW2 with 20-40 fps at the cost of having 800x600 screen res. I guess I just got used to Skyrim's "get more performance without sacrificing your graphics thing".*shrugs* I could play on even the lowest settings possible but the tiny font makes my eyes bleed.

[Trenton.]

I think this topic is done for now.

 

I didn't do anything to speed up my PC, I guess I'll leave it just the way it is. Playing TW2 with 20-40 fps at the cost of having 800x600 screen res. I guess I just got used to Skyrim's "get more performance without sacrificing your graphics thing".*shrugs* I could play on even the lowest settings possible but the tiny font makes my eyes bleed.

Ah. But tis just beginning. For instance: -Buy a new ram

Why not just download it? c:

[adc.]

Ah. But tis just beginning. For instance: -Buy a new ram

Why not just download it? c:

 

Download a ram wth trintan