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Hi!

Yesterday I installed TF2, after having a 2-3 month break. What I found is that the game is unplayable for me because of massive FPS drops. For every 4 seconds I have full FPS, like 200 (or 100 in firefights) and then, for next 4 seconds frames drop instantly to 60-20 FPS. It makes the game lag like shit, feeling my sensitivity is halved and it just makes it unplayable. The strangest part is the constant interval – 4 seconds of full graphics and then 4 seconds of lag, over and over again.

My specifications (I play on laptop for more than 2 years now, never had problems before):

Samsung RF511
Nvidia GeForce GT 540M (340.52 driver version)
Intel Core i5-2450M @ 2.50 GHz
6 GB of RAM
1 TB HDD (but I believe it is worthless information)
Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium (original)

I downloaded latest drivers, done -autoconfig to TF2, deleted all custom HUDs, PREC plugin, sounds and so on. Nothing helped. Additionally, in Nvidia Control Center I set everything to maximum performance, forced to disable all FXAA and whole other options – still no change. Then I decided to launch Nvidia Inspector (something like GPU-Z) to see if the card is overheating. There I could run graphs of temperature, usage, voltage and so on. And the graphs do look very strange. Usage changes from 100% to about 30% in those 4 seconds interval in TF2, L4D2 and surprisingly in FIFA 14 (though I didn’t notice any FPS drops there), while Outlast drops from 100% to about 80% (also no noticeable drop in FPS) and old Need for Speed Most Wanted uses about 50% GPU at max (with slight drops), which is also strange, because I run it on lowest settings and the framerate is not smooth.

I provided both screenshot of GPU-Z graphs and a 20-seconds long video of FPS drops in TF2 recorded by my phone:

http://imgur.com/8HFZoTJ
http://www1.zippyshare.com/v/1458485/file.html

The temperature was nearly 90 degrees while in game and it stays about 45-50 when not playing anything.

I don’t have any antyvirus program installed and never had such problems before. I have no idea what’s causing this and how to fix it. Therefore, I would be very grateful if someone could help me out.

Laptops always overheat.

Your options include but are not limited to:
– capping the fps so ridiculously that it doesn’t overheat (shit fps, but stable)
– learning to play with the lags
– only playing demo from now on
– various cooling mods varying in effectiveness and ghetoo factor
– crying like a little bitch

i have problem something like this. but my fps drops lasts to 1~ second max, i have gtx 660 msi twinfrozr3, i7 2600k 3.4ghz, 8gb ram, 1Tb hdd seagate. also additional cooling to cpu. any help? :|

if my fps woudnt be perma 30 i would already be in prem B)

Last resort option, but try to reinstall Windows, drivers and stuff after, then follow up to this guide, it will make your tf2 settings “factory reset” .

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showpost.php?p=32519048&postcount=15

After that, install your configs and such and that should get rid of a problem.

As Animal said, it’s most likely due to overheating and the automatic throttling due to that.

You could give additional cooling a try, like a desktop fan or something (I know it’s not viable in the long run, but it will help you rule out other possibilities)

If overheating indeed is the problem, I dunno how much there is to do really. (Seeing as judging by the components you’re playing on a laptop?). Maybe just wait for the winter or do your best to clean up all the vents and so on. Or try to setup a custom fan profile which will cause the lappy to constantly scream at 100dB :p

The problem seems to have been resolved after I had installed antyvirus and run a full scan (it detected 2 minor files). And the temperature stays about 75 all the time (when fully working). Also, I set fps_max to 132 and I’m running on windowned mode (which causes my framerate to be about 60% compared to full screen by itself, though).

I have no idea which of the above helped or was it random.