Sudden slowdowns, gaming in 7

[Sijmen]

Sometimes when playing games, the gameplay goes from completely smooth to utterly unplayable. I often have this with TrackMania Nations Forever and just noticed the same with Left 4 Dead 2.

It could be the graphics settings, but I doubt that mainly because:

1. It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with what scene or track I’m currently in. At one time a track plays fine, the next second the game is suddenly crawling along at two frames per second. Almost literally.
2. I tried lowering the graphics settings to a much lower level in TrackMania, but that didn’t seem to matter. The slowdowns were still there.

I have a stock 13-inch MacBook Pro. 2 GB RAM, nVidia 9400M graphics. The games run on a recently purchased copy of Windows 7 Home Premium, but the problem also existed while I was still using the release candidate.

Some notes:

• Half Life 2 plays absolutely fine. Portal had a few slowdowns like those in TrackMania but I didn’t play it long enough to say for sure.
• Rebooting is the only reliable fix.
• The laptop does not seem to be exceptionally hot. Not more so than after a session of HD trailer watching.

Did anyone else here have a similar problem before? Any ideas on diagnosing or resolving this? I thought about adding RAM but I’m not sure.

 

[adder7712]

Update your driver?

 

[Ace134blue]

Sometimes when playing games, the gameplay goes from completely smooth to utterly unplayable. I often have this with TrackMania Nations Forever and just noticed the same with Left 4 Dead 2.

It could be the graphics settings, but I doubt that mainly because:

1. It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with what scene or track I’m currently in. At one time a track plays fine, the next second the game is suddenly crawling along at two frames per second. Almost literally.
2. I tried lowering the graphics settings to a much lower level in TrackMania, but that didn’t seem to matter. The slowdowns were still there.

I have a stock 13-inch MacBook Pro. 2 GB RAM, nVidia 5200 graphics. The games run on a recently purchased copy of Windows 7 Home Premium, but the problem also existed while I was still using the release candidate.

Some notes:

• Half Life 2 plays absolutely fine. Portal had a few slowdowns like those in TrackMania but I didn’t play it long enough to say for sure.
• Rebooting is the only reliable fix.
• The laptop does not seem to be exceptionally hot. Not more so than after a session of HD trailer watching.

Did anyone else here have a similar problem before? Any ideas on diagnosing or resolving this? I thought about adding RAM but I’m not sure.

A 5200 FX? You need to check that again. Thats not right or possible.

 

[Sijmen]

A 5200 FX? You need to check that again. Thats not right or possible.

Oops, you are completely right, of course. It’s a 9400M.

 

[mikeyhu]

Since the games sometimes run fine it could be some kind of task running in the background on and off and taking resources up.

A friend noticed his framerate dropped significantly every 10 minutes or so, turns out the Windows 7 desktop background changer was running every 10 mins and since it also used the GPU it was causing the problem

 

[Sijmen]

Ah man, you may have just saved my gaming life. I’ll try that later tonight!