Question Duplicate Steam Games in Programs and Features

[jbone8]

While talking to a few friends playing Ark we started talking ab performance and they were telling me how my pc should be doing much better than it is. That got me looking into my computer and I noticed this in my programs. I'm quite sure the best way to explain it so I just added a screenshot to show. I'm wondering if these duplicates could be a reason my computer is not performing at the level it should be. I have 16gb of ram, with nothing but this window and discord open I have 7gb used. When in game I believe that it gets up to around 13. My hunch is that the lag spikes I get are because of the memory usage. They both have 16gb and run fine, however I didnt ask if they had the same thing in programs because I didnt notice it till just now.

Specs:
Processor: Intel i7-4790 CPU 3.6gh
RAM: 16gb (I think its DDR-3)
GPU: Nvidia 1070
MotherBoard: MSI H81M-E33
Power Supply is 650w

Also note that I did check power options and it is on high performance.

There are many other games further down the list that also have duplicates.

 

[Fix_that_Glitch]

When you go in to steam game library what does the listing look like? To me it looks like it is showing the original install date and the updates date perhaps? And what kind of performance are you getting in games, and what are your expectations?

 

[jbone8]

When you go in to steam game library what does the listing look like? To me it looks like it is showing the original install date and the updates date perhaps? And what kind of performance are you getting in games, and what are your expectations?

The steam library only has one listing for each game, the original install date is something I hadn't even thought of. I have the Geforce Experience app and its optimal setting are High for Ark which I run on ab 30 FPS but i get lag spikes pretty frequently, not to the point that its unplayable its just really annoying that sometimes opening an inventory I drop to 0 frames or something simple like walking around near my base the FPS just drops to 0 the longest cases being for a minute or so. I know that rendering bases and such this type of stuff will happen but in my own base? Seems weird and the other players did agree with me. With the Specs I have as well I feel like it should be running a bit better, but I'm assuming you or someone here would be able to tell me what I should expect to get.

 

[Krytor]

to answer your question NO

Having two of the same game installed will not effect the performance on how the game runs on your computer because you are (or should be) only running one of the installed programs(game). the duplicate is just taking up space on the hard drive.

to check this... while in game use ctrl alt del > Task Manager to exit the game. you should only see one icon of the game you are running in the Windows utility bar at the bottom. if there are two of the same game icon, then you are running two versions of the same game

As for the duplicate game installed...they are only taking up disk space...
it could be just showing a duplicate in the control panel. I was checking your dates, you did something 9/2/2017, where most of your games were either duplicated or reinstalled. I would check you hard drive at the game location and see if there are duplicates of games files there. If I were to uninstall any I would pick the one with the youngest date and keep the ones with the older dates and most recent versions (the higher number). If wish to uninstall one of your duplicates remember If you delete the wrong one, you will break the link that starts the game

as for your performance...
I'm sure is in the way you set your video settings in game options, a lot of people buy a new $300 GPU and think it can handle everything and set the video settings to max setting and only to find out their getting 20 FPS. you can use youtube, search by your game "name"; your video card model and then type "best frames per second". Also check your graphic profile, you should find three settings: performance; ballanced or quality (quality always kills performance) . I start with everything at the lowest settings, run a benchmark, then start layering (adding features) little by little, when I start to see a moderate decrease in performance I stop.