FPS problems, and I'M SICK OF SEARCHING

[Novikane]

I have a Dell XPS laptop:
p4 3.4 "xtreme"
1024 mb ram
mobility radeon 9800 256 mb

When I first for HL2 I was averaging 60-70 fps, rarely dropping below 40 unless there was some serious smoke spamming. All of a sudden I average 15. During firefights, spawning, using the buy menu, and pretty much anything besides standing around I get no higher than 5 fps. I've tried lowering all of my settings and am at a dead end. Does anyone know what a possible problem could be? I've ran my own servers with 1 other person/bot and I still get the low FPS rates.

 

[^Ben]

Are you running it from the mains or off battery?

Because once laptops start overheating or start losing power they throttle the CPU and the graphics card.

 

[Novikane]

I never run this thing off the battery(it has a lifespan of about an hour and a half).

 

[potatohead]

I would GUESS that you prob. have a virus and/or spyware. It is also possible that a bios setting got messed up.

 

[Novikane]

As far as I know I'm virus/spyware free. I've done numerous scans and my system seems to be clean. Anyone have any other ideas?

 

[TEDR]

it was working and you say all of a sudden you get slow fps . did you put something new on your system?

 

[dogboy73]

That's a pretty serious laptop. what sort of settings are you running? The game does get busier at later stages so maybe that's putting more of a strain .............. Saying that, I think your system should handle it no probs.

How's it look on a laptop BTW? I was wondering if you could attach a Laptop to a widescreen TV?

 

[Novikane]

Nothing that I can think of.

 

[StainlessJ-FPGA]

If it just suddenly started doing this, it is undoubtedly a 3rd party program recently installed/updated that is causing this. What other progs do you run in the background while playing games?

 

[DarkStar]

Does it do this right away when you start playing or do the frames start dropping as you continue to play? If it's at 15 FPS right away then your issue is definitely not overheating and probably some sort of 3rd party software. If you are able to reformat without too much pain, I'd suggest trying that.

Good choice on the laptop by the way, even if you are having some momentary problems, those XPS laptops are slick.

 

[BigBrother]

def the 3rd party software

 

[Dinkleberry]

Try Other games first then see if they have problems.

 

[Joppe]

Laptops arent made for gaming period.

 

[DarkStar]

Laptops arent made for gaming period.

I'd ordinarily agree with you but those Dell XPS systems are truly burly.

I hear tell they double as a space-heater though.

 

[Novikane]

The XPS is a god for gaming. As for the space heater comment...they won't heat up a room like a good desktop, but they hold their own... The only thing that bothers me is trying to get a good desktop background for the widescreen. As for my problem, I currently run only 16 processes and they are all system processes. Reformatting would be an incredible nuisance.

 

[Dumb Dude]

Did you ever run that HL2 benchmark program? I remember I did back when I had my cheap video card, and just for the fun of it, I ran that benchmark with really high settings. Well, after running that 20 fps show, I wanted to play the Single Player game. Well, I was getting 20 fps on that too. It turns out that the benchmark program adds an autoexec.cfg type of file that forces those settings no matter what. I got rid of it then I started seeing the normal fps.

 

[Novikane]

where was this file located?

 

[flankker]

i have a similar problem with mine and i remember trying the benchmark. if anyone else know where this file could be located it would be great.

 

[rado907]

all the "you MUST HAVE SPYWARE!" and "YOUR COMP SUCKS!" advise is useless, seriously people...

anyway i had hl2 and css run fine before, then after the last patch - 10fps.

i've read around these forums and have seen no reasonable solutions.

what i'm gonna do is: wait for the next patch and hope it fixes stuff, and be very unhappy with valve...

 

[Dumb Dude]

where was this file located?

The file was located here: \Steam\SteamApps\steam_account_name\half-life 2\hl2\cfg

It should be an autoexec.cfg If I remember correctly.

Also, for the above poster, to disable the effects of the latest patch, you need to type +mat_forcehardewareintotexture 0 in the launch options.