Unvanquished Forum

This is a problem I'm not only having with Unvanquished, but with every game I play, Unvanquished is just affected most: I get 5-10 there sometimes. It makes the game about as playable as heavy warping, making aiming impossible (it seems the FPS aren't stable 5 either, probably 0 half a second, then 20 later, then 0 again, making the average 5-10). It's quite frustrating to not be able to do a thing here, and it's annoying that I get 20 FPS in games like TF2 too. I failed finding a solution using the Art of Googling. Seeing as I couldn't find anything on Google, and that the problem is also pertaining to Unvanquished, I figured I'd ask here if anyone has a solution.

Some misclellancious info:

• CPU: i3 2,52GHz dualcore
• RAM: 6 GB DDR3
• GPU: Intel HD Graphics (not great, I know, but it used to perform well enough)
• Used to get stable 125 FPS on Tremulous
• Used to get 80-125 FPS on TF2
• Used to get at least 60 on Unvanquished
• Windows 7, because some games I play aren't available on Linux, and because there's some weird framerate cap of 60 on Linux I haven't been able to disable
• As far as I can see there are no significant changes in programs running in the background
• Laptop is 2-3 months old

If anyone is able to help me with this, it'd be much appreciated :/

Well this is what I would do:

Check cpu temp
Check gfx card temp
reinstall gfx card drivers
Boot linux from cd and check performance in clean environment (consider reinstalling os if this fixes it)
Rage

The first thing I would check is the temperature (speedfan works well). If it's getting unusually high, your laptop has probably accumulated a lot of dust and you just need to spray it out. This happened to me a few months ago, and getting dust out has caused my average temperature while gaming to drop by 10-20C.

Forty-Two wrote:

• CPU: i3 2,52GHz dualcore
• GPU: Intel HD Graphics (not great, I know, but it used to perform well enough)

hmmmmmmm

I have a ATI 7590 and with Alpha 7 I would getdown to 22 fps some times from my set cap of 90.

Eve online I get 85 fps on Max. Skyrim usually around 30 with a few things turned down to high. So having 22 on a quake engine was puzzling me too. I haven't tried Alpha 8 yet, but Im sure it's much better. Part of it is definitely my bottle neck at my 2.3 dual core, and DDR2 ram.

Using laptops for gaming is iffy. If you don't have it on a cool smooth hard surface it easily overheats, and they need constant cleaning. Temps make a rather large difference sometimes, and over time with high heats (60-70C ) can seriously damage components.

Wow. I found someone who had the same problem as me.
My solution (not very helpful) is to transfer to another computer.
Another solution is to plug in the power cable. My new computer [2 years old, built for windows xp, lenovo something with 2 gb ram] lags without the power cable but in return i never get a graphics driver crash. I think it has some sort of built-in proccessing limiter of some sort.

My old computer [dell inspiron something, 504 mb ram, t2400 cpu, has graphics acceleration, bought in ~ 2005]used to take somewhere random between 150 seconds to 3600 seconds [an hour] to load atcshd on unvanquished which is a pretty massive range. My fps in-game is not good either; i would have an average fps of 22, but every 2.5 seconds it freezes for about 0.2 seconds long approximately and rises back to whatever fps it was on previously. It is not shown in the fps counter at all. Apparently i once had a spike that was actually bad enough to appear in a demo (which usually nullifies spikes).
Decreasing my video settings does not help my fps counter, and extends my loading time somehow. I don't really understand the logic behind this.
Occasionally when I stare at walls, i can peak up to about 60 fps.
Well, 22 fps is play-able, believe it or not. It only wasn't play-able when the spikes start randomly comming in [every 2 minutes, lasts about 5 minutes long]

tl;dr?

Plug in the power cable, you may have not plugged it in and has activated a proccessing limiter of some sort. It works with my computer, although taking away this limiter significantly decreases play time before my graphics driver crashes.

Thanks for the suggestions everyone, I'll be doing a lot of testing when I get home :)

Just tested Alpha 8. It's much better, there is still massive fluxes and I can get down to around 40 sometimes. Which Im not complaining 40 is just fine.

I think part of the problem is map/ model optimization? Im not sure of some of the maps look in the editor or how the models are, and Im no means an exspert int he least, but no-draws alone can really help the FPS.

This sounds like a question for people beyond us. I might try http://www.tomshardware.com or http://www.tech-forums.net/forums/

Okay, so I've had some time to test.. My CPU temperature usually stays below 60 degrees (for you Americans with your silly Fahrenheit system: 140 degrees), I haven't found software for monitoring my GPU, but as it's an integrated chip I'm not sure if it would really make a difference. Drivers are up to date. I haven't tested on Linux yet. Yes, my laptop isn't meant for gaming, but it used to perform fine. In fact, it's performing fine again now, even though I've made no changes that I can think of. Power cable made no difference.

So it seems it fixed itself for now.. guess I'll have to wait and see if it stays this way :)