Frame rates not what they used to be

[DonutSteel]

I've got an HP Pavilion dv6 with an ATI Mobility Radeon 5650, Intel Quad Core i3 processor, 4 gigs of ram, and around 400 gigs of HD space. A few days ago I was playing games like Amnesia and League of Legends on high at 60 frames. Yesterday, the frames decided to drop from 60 to 30 no matter what graphics settings I use. This laptop has switchable graphics, between the ATI and Intel integrated. I've been switching this more and more, as I've been using it at school. I've tried updating the drivers (HP customized the drivers, which hurts performance and update capabilities) but they were from last year. What happened? Is it because my battery isn't at full charge? ( I notice that video performance drops when not plugged in) Is it because I'm still somehow on the Intel graphics? This is very annoying, and is taking a toll on my gaming.

 

[geofelt]

You might want to check out the power profile in the windows control panel.

It seems reasonable to me that lower performance is warranted to extend battery life when not plugged in.

 

[DonutSteel]

It's doing it now even while plugged in. Very confusing.

 

[bucknutty]

Are you playing on steam? The last steam update messed me up where steam.exe was using like 50-80 of the cpu. There was an update 2 weeks ago and another last week. Both were doing it. The only way i was able to fix it was to opt in to the beta update. Open task manager when the game is running poorly hit proccess and sort by CPU usage.

 

[mightymaxio]

For one there is no quadcore I3, only dual cores with and without hyperthreading which can be why there is high cpu usage. Second you should check temperatures on the graphics card and CPU to make sure they are not throttling down. Third when you enabled all the highest settings in those games did you restart the game before benchmarking them? If you didnt alot of the texture settings might not have been applied which would result in a higher performance because of the lower textures.

 

[evarty]

First off why U playing games in the class room LOL.
Your Power Profile will do that when you unplug your laptop(you can change that in Control Panel->Hardware and Sound->Power Options)
Check and make sure your laptop aint overheating(Download HWINFO) This might not be the problem since LoL dont use all of ur GPU's Power, but maybe!?!?
And finally dont use HP, Dell, Acer etc. updating tools they suck and are always behind with the right drivers. Go to each individual Manufacturer's website and get the latest drivers from there(HWINFO will also show you what u got in ur system & provide links... carefull tho those links dont always take you to the right page)