Choppy/laggy games

[stinger316]

Hi, when i play any games on my computer, be it max payne 2, any half life mod or TFT, after playing for a few min it all becomes very choppy, the reaction time is very long and the game becomes very slow and appears to be laggy, ex: if i move my cursor i will see it move a few sec later and the screen will be choppy. This has only been happening in the past 1-2 months with all my games... what can i do ? sound familiar?
this happens on both single player and multi player online :O
i'm on a 1.6 GHZ, 512 mb ram with 32 mb ram for video, <-- laptop

[Chaos150]

This could mean that you need to tweak your game's video settings.
Try experimenting with the graphics detail settings to find out which one works best.
Normal is the best setting.

Also, make sure you have all of the latest drivers for your graphics card.

[stinger316]

I've done this, i've put them all on LOW... seriously and i've never had these problems 2+ months ago :O

[sinclair_tm]

dude, your laptop is serious lacking in the graphics department. no wonder its lagging. mp2 should require at least a 64mb card. are you sure you have all the video settings in the games turned down to their lowest?

[elf]

Have you checked for spyware/viruses yet? Often if a computer starts to run slower than it used to, it is because of an infection of some sort. Other than that, you might try using disk cleanup, and defragmenting your hard drive (which will help a little, but is probably not the cause of your problems).

[kinbard]

Also, you might want to consider setting your performance options to best performance while playing games. It helps with me.

[ebackhus]

The simple thing is that laptops are NOT gaming machines. When I play Guild Wars on mine it gets to the point where I gotta kill them game to let it cool to normal values.

[Indoril Nerevar]

Agreed. Laptops are designed for mobility, not performance. As sinclair said, I think the main thing killing your games is the video card. 32Mb is enough to handle business applications, but not games.

[gamerman0203]

ditto to the previous posts. A heat issue could also be contributing because your vidcard and cpu are trying to push out sooooooo much that they are heating up terribly. I play games like Call of Duty 2, HL2, and Oblivion on a laptop, but I have a P4 w/ HT and a dedicated 128MB of VRAM. I'll admit that laptops aren't gaming machines, but sometimes one can get away with it. You, my friend, however, can not. Sorry....

[rahulprabhu_it]

Originally Posted by gamerman0203

ditto to the previous posts. A heat issue could also be contributing because your vidcard and cpu are trying to push out sooooooo much that they are heating up terribly. I play games like Call of Duty 2, HL2, and Oblivion on a laptop, but I have a P4 w/ HT and a dedicated 128MB of VRAM. I'll admit that laptops aren't gaming machines, but sometimes one can get away with it. You, my friend, however, can not. Sorry....

Hi,
I recently bought the ACER Aspire 5562NWXMi laptop which has the following specs -
1.6 GHz Centrino duo
1 GB Ram
80 GB SATA HDD
ATI Radeon Mobility Radeon x1600 - 256MB hyper memory (all tests like Splinter Cell2 diagnostic tests show that GPU has 512 MB memory)
Win XP SP2 (fully updated)

The laptop performance is fantastic but whenever I try to play any game like Splinter Cell2, or Splinter Cell3 or Prince of Persia Warrior within, I find that the game runs very slow. I mean the whole motion of the game while moving around is choppy and slow. The surprising and the most weird thing is that whenever I try to decrease the resolution to make it easier for my GPU to play the game, at times it makes the situation even more worse and unplayable. As per whatever I have heard and read from the internet this GPU is more than capable to play these games and if not then at least on low resolutions it should be able to. I am terribly frustrated and till date I have tried a variety of things like -
1. Updated the bios to v1.15
2. Tried drivers for my GPU from the Acer drivers CD - v8.204
3. Tried drivers for my GPU from the Acer website - v8.233
http://www.acer.com.my/service/drive...ype=Windows+XP
4. tried the latest omega drivers - rad_w2kxp_omega_38252_7z
5. Tried the latest drivers from ATI site for mobile GPU - 6-6-mobile_xp_dd_ccc_enu_33680 (driver version - 8.263.0.0)

None of the above things have helped and the game still continues to play slow. I am totally confused and am running out ideas. I tried booting with no items in the startup and trying to play but still the problem persists. My PC is definitely free of spy ware because I am using windows defender beta 2 (updated)

I know this is a really strange problem but I want your views and what you think might be causing this problem.

Thanks!!

[gamerman0203]

@rahulprabhu_it

'Hyper memory' is shared memory beyond what is physically installed on the card. Your card has 256MB of physical memory, but it also allocates another 256 from your system memory. Anywhotski, that was just a 'thought ya'd like to know' kinda thing, really doesn't have anything to do with your issue. Look around the laptops settings (BIOS, video card settings, performance settings, etc.) and turn off any power saving options that are in place.

[rahulprabhu_it]

Well the problem is partly and surprisingly solved.

I installed Win XP on another partition. I din install install anything else like SP2 or the drivers or antivirus, firewall etc. I just installed ATI drivers, Sound drivers, directX and chipset drivers.

And now when I try to run games they are running very very smoothly. Seems like atleast one of the softwares on my previous installation of Windows was causing the problem. Any guess on which software or driver that might be?

[gamerman0203]

possibly an anti/virus or some kind of software that scans your system for things. Spyware even.