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Hello. I have these very irritating FPS drops in DOTA 2 and I was wondering if anyone more knowledgeable than me could explain what issues could cause my problems.
So here's the deal. Let me preface this by saying that this issue was occurring like 6 months ago, which caused me to stop playing for awhile because it was so frustrating. Then I started playing again 2 months after that, and it had been fixed/changed/whatever, it wasn't happening anymore. Now it's happening again (last month or so).
I don't lag when playing. But almost EVERY SINGLE GAME, at some point, my fps will drop to 30-50 range when I usually have it at a constant 60 (and limited by vsync). This makes the game very laggy, stuttery, and it's very very obvious while playing that it is happening. If I restart Dota, it goes away and everything is lag free until it happens again. This occurrence has 0 consistency; it can occur 2 minutes into a game, not at all, or at the end. It's not related to there being a large amount of action on the screen. Sometimes, and this is only SOMETIMES, if I minimize and maximize over and over after 10-15 tries it will go back to a stable 60 FPS and stop being laggy.
I've changed my graphics settings to lowest everything, highest everything, medium this and low that, nothing makes any difference. My GPU is not overheating when I play (52C right now as a I type this while Dota is minimized and speccing a game). Sometimes Dota2 has something like a GPU memory leak (probably the wrong terminology) or something and it shoots up to like 90C and then plummets back to 55C when I restart Dota (usually stays @ 55 the entire time I am playing). I have an ATI HD 5850; many of the problems that other people have had seem to be related to AMD cards with Dota.
Any thoughts? To sum up: the timing is not consistent, it's not based on whats on the screen, my GPU is not overheating, my cpu/ram use are both around 40-50% during a game, and minimizing repeatedly sometimes fixes it.
It seems odd that minimizing over and over sometimes fixes it. What could that be? I know nothing about hardware/software beyond how to plug things in so I don't know what could be happening. I've seen some people who have the same issue on the dev forums and restarting/minimizing fixes it for them. Something about memory ram being improperly cleared? Hell if I know.
Thanks for any responses.
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something you might want to try that saved me when my computer was doing the same thing playing sc2. download a program called throttlestop. apparently what was happening to me is my computer thought it was overheating or whatever sop would throttle the performance to make up for it. the thing is nothing was ever wrong with my comp, the sensors or whatever must have been working improperly. throttlestop keeps my cpu running at full capacity which got rid of all lag i was getting. to be honest, im hungover as **** and didnt read your full post but to anyone who experiences non constant lag, id say try throttlestop because then you can find out if it is your computer scaling down its performance because of a perceived and usually false issue or if its something else
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On January 02 2013 02:34 mdoubles wrote:
something you might want to try that saved me when my computer was doing the same thing playing sc2. download a program called throttlestop. apparently what was happening to me is my computer thought it was overheating or whatever sop would throttle the performance to make up for it. the thing is nothing was ever wrong with my comp, the sensors or whatever must have been working improperly. throttlestop keeps my cpu running at full capacity which got rid of all lag i was getting. to be honest, im hungover as **** and didnt read your full post but to anyone who experiences non constant lag, id say try throttlestop because then you can find out if it is your computer scaling down its performance because of a perceived and usually false issue or if its something else
I would strongly recommend against using such a program. Thermal throttling exists for a very good reason: To protect your hardware from being damaged due to high temperatures. Removing this protection leaves you open to such risks. Even if it's actually a bad sensor (how do you know?) and you bypass throttling, what happens when your fan decides to fail one day? Replacing a fan is cheap, replacing a dead CPU / GPU is not.
Anyway, in response to the original problem: I have had issues with a AMD 5000 series card not applying the correct performance-profile in the past (The AMD cards use different modes with different clockspeeds that are selected automatically when certain content (3D game, video, etc...) is detected). Check the clockspeeds of your card while the lag starts to see if it is, for some reason, switching out of the gaming profile. Unlikely to be the case, but worth checking.
Also, the temperatures you mention? At which point do you measure them? The best point to measure is just when the fps drops start to occur, because if it is throttling down due to overheating, this is when the temperature will be highest (and afterwards it'll be cooler again).
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so i totally have the same issue. I run on a jank laptop. I'm in the process fo building a new comp. but i run on a laptop that runs amd integrated graphics a 2.1ghz processor 250G HD and 8GB memory. Minimizing repeatedly helps me also. But what has really helped me is the Razer Game Booster. Go download that that monitors heat and maximizes game performance i'm not sure why minimizing helps so much?
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yeah i guess i forgot to add a disclaimer in there saying that it could be dangerous to your hardware. i know thermal throttling is there for a reason but theres many cases where it doesnt work as intended or its way too sensitive. if, as you said, your computer is not overheating as you checked the temps then throttlestop is at least worth a try. i played sc2 with this lag for months and considered giving up on it but now it runs crazy smooth. nothing else worked for me but that did so i think, based on your post, that its worth a try
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On January 02 2013 03:22 Rannasha wrote:Show nested quote +On January 02 2013 02:34 mdoubles wrote:
something you might want to try that saved me when my computer was doing the same thing playing sc2. download a program called throttlestop. apparently what was happening to me is my computer thought it was overheating or whatever sop would throttle the performance to make up for it. the thing is nothing was ever wrong with my comp, the sensors or whatever must have been working improperly. throttlestop keeps my cpu running at full capacity which got rid of all lag i was getting. to be honest, im hungover as **** and didnt read your full post but to anyone who experiences non constant lag, id say try throttlestop because then you can find out if it is your computer scaling down its performance because of a perceived and usually false issue or if its something else I would strongly recommend against using such a program. Thermal throttling exists for a very good reason: To protect your hardware from being damaged due to high temperatures. Removing this protection leaves you open to such risks. Even if it's actually a bad sensor (how do you know?) and you bypass throttling, what happens when your fan decides to fail one day? Replacing a fan is cheap, replacing a dead CPU / GPU is not. Anyway, in response to the original problem: I have had issues with a AMD 5000 series card not applying the correct performance-profile in the past (The AMD cards use different modes with different clockspeeds that are selected automatically when certain content (3D game, video, etc...) is detected). Check the clockspeeds of your card while the lag starts to see if it is, for some reason, switching out of the gaming profile. Unlikely to be the case, but worth checking. Also, the temperatures you mention? At which point do you measure them? The best point to measure is just when the fps drops start to occur, because if it is throttling down due to overheating, this is when the temperature will be highest (and afterwards it'll be cooler again).
I will try looking at that if the problem occurs, thanks. As for when I measure it, I just had a gadget on my 2nd monitor that reads my GPU temperature and other stats and displays it. I look over at and it stays pretty much around 55-65C most of the time. I'm trying something today that I read on the dev forums where I put my CPU max performance at 85% instead of 100% because it overdoes it or something like that. I also limited Dota 2 to dx9 (I think?). I'll try playing some games with that and see if it gets laggy or not. Thanks.
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Hello, here is the common and most indefinite fix. Do not download any more garbage, like throttlemenot or anything similar.
Open up IE,FireFox, or w/e you use, goto youtube. Find any video it really does not matter, then right click on the video goto settings, next goto the first tab of the little pop up it should be Display, it has 1 option enable hardware acceleration. Disable this option, and you will never again have the ALT tab frame drops. Flash is forcing your GPU to 2d acceleration instead of 3d, its been around for ages. It is not limited to Nvidia or ATI(AMD) either it is a FLASH issue.
p.s. this has nothing to do with heat that is why it happens when you alt tab, and only comes back if your lucky by repeatedly alt tabbing again to try and get the game to wake your gpu up. This problem is so prevalent that it is commonly over looked by people who know the fix because its been around forever at this point. Very simple fix and I'd be almost willing to bet money on this so mundane fix working.
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On January 04 2013 03:19 oivoodsio wrote:
Hello, here is the common and most indefinite fix. Do not download any more garbage, like throttlemenot or anything similar.
Open up IE,FireFox, or w/e you use, goto youtube. Find any video it really does not matter, then right click on the video goto settings, next goto the first tab of the little pop up it should be Display, it has 1 option enable hardware acceleration. Disable this option, and you will never again have the ALT tab frame drops. Flash is forcing your GPU to 2d acceleration instead of 3d, its been around for ages. It is not limited to Nvidia or ATI(AMD) either it is a FLASH issue.
p.s. this has nothing to do with heat that is why it happens when you alt tab, and only comes back if your lucky by repeatedly alt tabbing again to try and get the game to wake your gpu up. This problem is so prevalent that it is commonly over looked by people who know the fix because its been around forever at this point. Very simple fix and I'd be almost willing to bet money on this so mundane fix working.
AMD cards of the 5000 series don't care whether you enable or disable hardware acceleration in Flash. It's a known issue that I encountered with my previous machine. Whenever Flash video was playing, it would use 2D clockspeeds regardless of what else was being done (like playing a game). I contacted AMD support about this and they said that they couldn't fix it, that it was an issue with the 5000 series and was no longer present in the 6000 series. I fixed it by flashing a custom BIOS to my card that set the clockspeed for video-decoding-mode to the same value as 3D-mode. Worked fine afterwards.
In my first post in this thread I recommended watching clock speeds of the GPU, because that's how I originally noticed the problem. Flash video active (even in background) -> Lower clockspeeds & fps-drops ingame.
Still, I'm not convinced that this actually is causing the issue that the TS is having. But it's worth checking.
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Well, recently when I open a flash video and have dota 2 running dota 2 lags like hell. A couple months ago I would watch a stream on my second monitor and play Dota 2 on my main and have 0 lag. This was really noticeable and it only happened a month or so ago so I don't know if it's what you described above or not.
So I went through this long process of uninstalling my drivers, using this driver sweeper tool in safe mode to delete anything left over, deleting dota 2/local data, reinstalling dota 2. Now I get the same lag issue but the FPS DOESN'T drop. So the FPS stays at 60+ at all times but I still feel the same kind of lag as before. Very frustrating.
At one point I tried something someone on the Dota dev forums had said (although this is likely for more powerful computers than mine) and limited my cpu maximum power to 85%. This actually completely slaughtered the game. When I returned it to 100% the game ran as before. This leads me to think my CPU is limiting my ability to play? Isn't it almost always GPU that is the bottleneck, not CPU? But if that's true, I'm using RealTemp 3.7 to monitor my CPU load and it's never above 50% when I play and yet lowering the max use to 85% slays the game, so what's up with that? And as before, my GPU stays around 50-60 C and isn't being unduly stressed. My CCC (the ATI control board) says that my GPU is at 37% load right now in a Dota game.
I got this laptop about 3 years ago now, so I'm sure it's showing its age. The thing is that when I first started playing Dota 2 in March of 2011 I never had any problems of any kind and now I have a plethora of problems that have started occurring with the introduction of each new patch.
I don't really notice any issues when I max out all my graphics vs keeping them where I actually prefer it (even when I can max it out), which is with low textures and 100% rendering and all other settings off (AA, shadows, etc).
I've actually noticed this problem here : http://dev.dota2.com/showthread.php?t=66663 occurring to me now that I've reinstalled my video drivers and dota 2, with the in value going to 1000+. I don't think the in value really matters, though, cause it can also be in the lower range and be lagging. So I don't know if that's a new thing or not, but I don't believe it was happening before. The reinstall process I did is the one detailed in that first post, although I don't think the registry cleaning stuff really matters. I did that, defragged, etc.
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United Kingdom20326 Posts
I'm using RealTemp 3.7 to monitor my CPU load and it's never above 50% when I play
Starcraft puts a quad core to like 30% load (at maximum) and an i7 to half of that (because % utilization measures hyperthreaded cores indiscriminately)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/2uHNO.png)
Im not sure how Dota2 utilizes CPU but those readings will tell you the average load% on all of the cores that your OS recognizes, nothing more, and that's not very useful for determining how reliant a game is on CPU power or many other things
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I think it must be something with my CPU if putting the max @ 85% completely ruins the game but I'm not sure how to go about figuring that out. I guess I need to wait for the next time I start lagging and see if my CPU is getting hosed.
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Quick suggestion: next time your CPU is getting "hosed" - immediately tab out, and check task manager for any programs (sort processes by CPU usage) that are using anywhere from 5-15% CPU usage. That indicates something is actually running in the background that put enough (15% load) like you said manually setting your CPU to 85% "hoses" you) So maybe a program is actually utilizing anywhere up to 15% in the background while you're playing.
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Do you guys think there's any possibility that having a second monitor might be having an effect on my problems?
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Just an update, although I don't know who I'm updating for...lol. No other processes are taking up any processing power that I can see when my game starts to lag. For now as soon as it happens and there is an appropriate time I just ask my team to pause and restart, which takes about a minute, and when I reconnect it's usually fine for the rest of the current game.
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I read through this pretty quickly and I noticed you mention your GPU temperatures. Did we ever find out what your CPU temperatures were when you were getting "hosed"?
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According to the program I use my CPU temp is around 50C pretty much all the time. I don't see an appropriate jump in my CPU or GPU temperature/load when the lag starts to occur but the testing I've done almost certainly links it to the CPU. Actually, when I put Dota on high priority in the task manager it makes it laggier, I don't know if that should happen or not.
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Hey I know this post is pretty old but I wanted to share my solution to the same problem I've been having as you. Been plagued by this dropping fps off and on for a few months at random times. Did all the stuff the guys above me suggested. Downloaded throttlestop but wasn't comfortable with running it. What worked for me is I noticed there was a background process running called msmpeng.exe soakin up a lot of my processor. The description was anti-malware software. I looked into it and it's part of the Microsoft Security Essentials (I run Vista Home Premium). I uninstalled MSE and used a different antivirus program and my computer has been running fantastic ever since. Sorry for bumping an old post but I know how frustrating this problem can be and I hope it helps someone.
- Also, I downloaded a program called CPUCool and it has been cooling my cpu much better than without.
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it still always if you minimize the game, never had it and now it happens!
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EPT
