Troubleshooting Low Frame Rate and Stuttering Issues When Gaming on a Television via HDMI
Troubleshooting Low Frame Rate and Stuttering Issues When Gaming on a Television via HDMI
I am experiencing an issue with my MSI GS75 laptop (equipped with a 2080 Max-Q) when gaming on a Philips 43PUS6501 4K TV. Despite running games at 1920x1080 resolution, frame rates consistently hover between 20 and 50 FPS, rarely exceeding 60, even in simple titles like Overcooked 2. A Way Out exhibits similar stuttering and frame drops, fluctuating between 15 and over 100 FPS. GPU usage remains low, typically between 10 and 50%, leading me to suspect this is the root cause. I have updated my NVIDIA drivers, toggled VSync, utilized the eGPU as the preferred graphics card, tested various HDMI cables, enabled Game Mode on the TV, and experimented with different Windows display modes. CPU temperatures average 75-80°C during gaming, peaking at 73°C, which is considered optimal for a laptop. I lack alternative displays for testing. Assistance would be greatly appreciated.
The GPU can easily handle that task itself; experimentation is permissible.
You switched from driver 431.70 to 431.60 due to issues.
An HDMI 1.4 connection limits you to 4k at 24Hz, not 4k at 60Hz.
The likely cause is a combination of: the 2080 Max-Q’s power limits, which are either 80w or 90w depending on the model, and the Mobile 2080's 150w limit; the card is not capable of running at 4k. The 2080 Max-Q performs similarly to the GTX 1070, which also performed poorly at 4k.
Is this a 90W model? If the game is set to 1920x1080, will it run in 4K?
Can I monitor if it’s hitting the power limit using Afterburner? Could undervolting impact it? The undervolt is super stable on my laptop, but I've never connected it to a 4K TV to game. One last thing I noticed after playing with some settings (I can't remember which cause I was messing around a lot), is that if I duplicate the display, it locks to 59 fps on the TV, but still drops semi frequently. If I switch to only on the TV, it drops immediately.
MSI Afterburner and GPU-Z can monitor power consumption. It depends on the size of the undervolt. That's Windows doing something funny; I don’t understand it myself. If I go to Display > Advanced Display Settings, Windows will show my monitor has a 143Hz refresh rate. Manually selecting 144Hz and hitting Apply doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t really matter; NVCP shows the correct number though. With the exception of still images, browsing, movies/YouTube – the light duty stuff, the card can’t smoothly run at 4K – although they’ll advertise it as 4K capable. It’s nowhere near the performance of an RTX 2080 (desktop). What kind of cable do you have connected to the TV? DP 1.2, 1.4? HDMI 1.4, 2.0?