Determination of issues during gaming

[cacherd]

Hi,

I am new on this forum and I have a question regarding the specs of my laptop.
I am not a beginner on this subject, but I am unable to determine the specs of my bottleneck.

Now, when I say bottleneck, this isn't a regular bottleneck during gaming. On most games, I get a decent FPS. I am specifically interested in the game PUBG in this case, but my issue certainly is not limited to it.

To start off with, my FPS in PUBG is really decent. I do realize my laptop isn't exactly the best build, but it is able to run the game at 50 - 100 fps on low.

My issue, however, consists of two parts. The first part being the loading time. It takes incredibly long for the game to load sometimes. At some point, it didn't even load at all, although I was still able to hear the background noise of the game, the loading screen did not go away. Personally, I am thinking that the loading time is caused by my HDD (1TB 5400 RPM). What are your thoughts on this?

The second part of my issue is basically the "multitasking" aspect of gaming. Firstly, during the loading of the game, I am unable to do anything at all. Alt-tab, taskmgr, or even chatting in Steam, my PC won't respond at all, as if it is frozen. Now, when I am actually in-game, similarly, multitasking is really slow. When I press shift+tab to talk in Steam chat, it is pretty slow. When I alt-tab, my PC even freezes for a while until it has actually completed the task. And, the most annoying part, I am not able to use Nvidia Shadowplay in-game, simply because my PC does not respond to it due to the fact that it is too slow. (I have verified this, the issue is not with the software.)

Now, my CPU usage is around 60 - 90 % when I am playing PUBG, and my RAM usage around 80 - 90%. In other games like CSGO, my CPU and RAM usage is way lower, but the issue still persists. I have updated all my drivers, especially my graphical drivers, but that did not resolve the issue.

My PC specs:

CPU: Intel Core i5 5200U
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 950M 2GB
Memory: 8GB
HDD: 1TB 5400 RPM
OS: Win 10

I would be thankful if anyone could assist me with a potential solution to this or mention the cause of this bottleneck.

 

[Sedivy]

Considering it's only with this game, it's either its optimization (possibly crappy and up to the devs, meaning not much you can do about it) or maybe the way default video settings from within a game are determined is really bad for that game and need changing (ramping down). It could be some specific setting (like vsync etc.) that's throwing it off too. This might help with that possibly: http://www.pcgamer.com/best-pubg-settings/

 

[Solandri]

1) 5400 RPM hard drives definitely have slower load times. Unless you can upgrade to a SSD (don't bother with 7200 RPM - it's only 33% faster), about the best you can do is leave at least 25% of the disk space empty and defragment frequently.

Your multitasking problems probably have two causes.

2) Lack of RAM. 80%-90% RAM usage is way too high. Windows tries to keep about 10% free for a disk cache, so you are basically out of RAM. When this happens, Windows starts to write unused memory pages to disk - a process called swapping to virtual memory. When you try to multitask back to the apps which were paged to disk, the computer has to write new memory pages to disk to clear up RAM, read the memory pages for the app off the disk, and load them into RAM before you can "switch" to that app. All of this is very slow, doubly so with a 5400 RPM HDD. Either buy more RAM, or close all unnecessary apps and go through your startup list to remove any nonsense apps (like Acrobat auto-update) before starting the game. That'll free up more RAM and hopefully you won't end up swapping.

3) Dual core CPU. While a dual core is usually sufficient for playing a game, you're really pushing it trying to multitask while gaming. You can try assigning the game to just one core (set the affinity to just one core, or one real + one virtual core on hyperthreaded CPUs). That'll free up one core for non-game tasks. But with a dual core CPU that leaves the game running on just a single core, which can lead to stuttering. A quad core is much better if you plan to multitask while gaming.

https://www.windowscentral.com/assign-specific-processor-cores-apps-windows-10