Why does my laptop get so slow for a few minutes when I play games?
Why does my laptop get so slow for a few minutes when I play games?
My friend is using a laptop and the screen works fine when he starts playing, but after about five to ten minutes his game drops down to just 10 frames per second instead of 60 or even 70. It stays at this slow speed for two to three minutes before it goes back up normally. I checked both his CPU and GPU temperatures while he played, but the temps didn't change much when the problem started. I also ran a disk scan through his command line and that looked fine too. Honestly I don't know why this is happening. We tried all the fixes we could think of on our own without luck. Can you help us figure out what's wrong? Here are his laptop details: He has an Intel Core i5-8250U processor with 1.60 GHz speed, 4 cores, and a graphics card that is an Nvidia GeForce MX110. It also comes with 8 GB of RAM (I guess it's not working in two channels).
Have you seen how things go wrong with the monitor right now? That's where I'd start looking. Eight gigabytes of RAM looks like a lot of space actually.
I haven't tested it myself, but I'll have someone try it for me. Also, the laggy frame rate problem has been going on since my laptop was bought one year ago.
Nvm actually we fixed it and ram was fine. Memory usage is perfect too. We looked at every running service in Task Manager but didn't find any weird stuff there. The games we tested were just not that powerful either, like Brawlhalla which should run smoothly on this laptop anyway. Even Roblox and Fortnite are acting the same way with no issues at all.
I'd just pick either overheating, which isn't a big deal, or running out of memory for pictures. Could you try installing Afterburner or something like that to watch how much picture RAM is being used? Sometimes I've seen the same thing happen and had to turn down some settings so it didn't use up as much stuff until the behavior stopped coming back.
Here is how my friend describes his problem: When using a heavy app like video games, if I keep the battery at best performance, the game runs smoothly for a while at 60 fps. But after a few minutes, the whole laptop starts lagging and the frame rate drops to under 10 fps. This stays about 2-3 minutes before it stops lagging again and goes back to normal smoothness. Then this cycle repeats every 5 or so minutes. It doesn't just make the game lag; it makes the whole computer slow too, though if I keep the battery at better performance instead of best, that usually won't happen even if the game isn't running smoothly (around 30 fps). When I use it for normal tasks like watching YouTube or searching on the internet with my laptop's built-in fans, this doesn't happen. It only happens when using heavy apps. My friend also has an external fan, which makes a big difference because without it, he feels the lag much faster than when he uses the fan. He thinks it might be thermal throttling, but when they checked the temperatures, everything was actually normal.
I installed HWinfo to see if my laptop's CPU gets too hot while playing games. Sometimes the heat builds up really quickly, so the cooling system slows down just a little bit before it trips over and stops working fully. On top of that, when I looked at MSI Afterburner, nothing was showing up as throttled there either, but in HWinfo, it definitely said thermal throttling was happening.