Brand New Gaming Laptop - Hardly Runs Anything

[Sublyme]

Hey all, new here

Before I get this started, YES, I got the new Razer laptop. I got it for college this coming year. Please avoid voicing your opinion about Razer in the comments. I really don't want to hear it-- no one wants to hear it. Thanks.

Anywho. I just didn't understand a few things, and wanted to see if there's a remedy.

This laptop is loaded up with an i7-6700HQ, a 1080, 32-some-gigabytes of RAM, and 2TB SSD.

But when it runs a simple game like League of Legends, which can run on my Surface 2, it chugs like crazy. I had to lower all the graphics to low which made it run from 200-300 FPS, but 50% of the time it'd drop below 30 and stay there for a little bit.

The laptop can hardly even run CSGO and Overwatch. I'm going to be attending a game-heavy college since I'll be going for game arts, so I need this thing to actually perform.

What's the problem, and is there a fix?

Edit: the laptop is 4k, not sure if that really is an issue, but,,,

 

[kmanmx]

Hey all, new here

Before I get this started, YES, I got the new Razer laptop. I got it for college this coming year. Please avoid voicing your opinion about Razer in the comments. I really don't want to hear it-- no one wants to hear it. Thanks.

Anywho. I just didn't understand a few things, and wanted to see if there's a remedy.

This laptop is loaded up with an i7-6700HQ, a 1080, 32-some-gigabytes of RAM, and 2TB SSD.

But when it runs a simple game like League of Legends, which can run on my Surface 2, it chugs like crazy. I had to lower all the graphics to low which made it run from 200-300 FPS, but 50% of the time it'd drop below 30 and stay there for a little bit.

The laptop can hardly even run CSGO and Overwatch. I'm going to be attending a game-heavy college since I'll be going for game arts, so I need this thing to actually perform.

What's the problem, and is there a fix?

Edit: the laptop is 4k, not sure if that really is an issue, but,,,

You won't get amazing FPS at 4K, even with a 1080, but it shouldn't "chug". Should be playable on most games. Anything lower than 4K and you should be hitting 60FPS easy. Some things to check:

• Make sure you are on 'High Performance' power options
• Make sure you're not resting your laptop on a soft pillow or something. It'll overheat basically straight away and down clock
• If you are running on battery, make sure GeForce experience isn't limiting fps to 30FPS with it's Battery Saver mode
• Make sure in Nvidia Control panel you've set it to use the Nvidia GPU rather than any onboard graphics, and set it to Maximum Performance mode

Nothing really wrong with Razer laptops afaik. They are a little more expensive than the gaming laptop competition, but then they have the nicest design and quality so it's not surprising.

edit:

Well actually yeah games like CS:GO should fly with very high FPS, even at 4K. Check the above and let me know how you get on.

To me it sounds like you are running the onboard Intel 530GPU. Which it's fair to say is probably about 20x slower than a GTX 1080.

 

[carnageX]

Make sure in Nvidia Control panel you've set it to use the Nvidia GPU rather than any onboard graphics, and set it to Maximum Performance mode


To me it sounds like you are running the onboard Intel 530GPU. Which it's fair to say is probably about 20x slower than a GTX 1080.

+1 to this

It's probably just defaulting to the IGP instead of the dedicated GPU.

 

[Sublyme]

You won't get amazing FPS at 4K, even with a 1080, but it shouldn't "chug". Should be playable on most games. Anything lower than 4K and you should be hitting 60FPS easy. Some things to check:

• Make sure you are on 'High Performance' power options
• Make sure you're not resting your laptop on a soft pillow or something. It'll overheat basically straight away and down clock
• If you are running on battery, make sure GeForce experience isn't limiting fps to 30FPS with it's Battery Saver mode
• Make sure in Nvidia Control panel you've set it to use the Nvidia GPU rather than any onboard graphics, and set it to Maximum Performance mode

Nothing really wrong with Razer laptops afaik. They are a little more expensive than the gaming laptop competition, but then they have the nicest design and quality so it's not surprising.

edit:

Well actually yeah games like CS:GO should fly with very high FPS, even at 4K. Check the above and let me know how you get on.

To me it sounds like you are running the onboard Intel 530GPU. Which it's fair to say is probably about 20x slower than a GTX 1080.

Thanks a lot for your reply.

I resized the UI after going through the geforce experience and nvidia controls and all that. Couldn't really find anything you were talking about other than the Battery Extreme Saver Extreme Mk. II thing in GeForce Experience, so I just fiddled around a bit.

And as for CS:GO, yeah! It's weird - that and League, too. It wasn't even FPS lag (Except League). It was 100% input lag. For League, I'd have moments of 200+ FPS then it'd drop <20 FPS. So weird...

Also, another question: I have it all at 1920x1080 and the scaling is set to 100%, but everything is super fuzzy. Any remedy for this, or will I have to just get used to it?

 

[kmanmx]

Thanks a lot for your reply.

I resized the UI after going through the geforce experience and nvidia controls and all that. Couldn't really find anything you were talking about other than the Battery Extreme Saver Extreme Mk. II thing in GeForce Experience, so I just fiddled around a bit.

And as for CS:GO, yeah! It's weird - that and League, too. It wasn't even FPS lag (Except League). It was 100% input lag. For League, I'd have moments of 200+ FPS then it'd drop <20 FPS. So weird...

Also, another question: I have it all at 1920x1080 and the scaling is set to 100%, but everything is super fuzzy. Any remedy for this, or will I have to just get used to it?

Huh, odd. That sounds a bit weird about the input lag, you might want to contact their support.

1080P on a 4K will probably look a bit fuzzy yeah. You can try using Nvidia DSR super resolution in the nvidia control panel which can sharpen things up a bit.

 

[luke127]

Huh, odd. That sounds a bit weird about the input lag, you might want to contact their support.

1080P on a 4K will probably look a bit fuzzy yeah. You can try using Nvidia DSR super resolution in the nvidia control panel which can sharpen things up a bit.

Question, if you've got a 1080 and a 4K panel, why the fu** would you be running 1080p on that monitor? You get 4x more screen real estate with 4K! More room for more stuff! D: Secondly, everything looks wayyy more crisp

 

[iFargle]

^ gaming.

If it's a 15" panel, 4K is absolutely tiny.
I have two 27" 4K monitors at work and I have to almost sit awkwardly close to actually see it

 

[carnageX]

^ gaming.

If it's a 15" panel, 4K is absolutely tiny.
I have two 27" 4K monitors at work and I have to almost sit awkwardly close to actually see it

This + 4k gaming on a single 1080 (depending on the game) won't give you 60+fps.

 

[Sublyme]

Question, if you've got a 1080 and a 4K panel, why the fu** would you be running 1080p on that monitor? You get 4x more screen real estate with 4K! More room for more stuff! D: Secondly, everything looks wayyy more crisp

Sorry to see you didn't actually read my post. It's a laptop - size of the screen would actually just be 1920x1080, but I needed something 4k, so this was just perfect.

^ gaming.

If it's a 15" panel, 4K is absolutely tiny.
I have two 27" 4K monitors at work and I have to almost sit awkwardly close to actually see it

!7".

 

[Sublyme]

This + 4k gaming on a single 1080 (depending on the game) won't give you 60+fps.

Yeah. Honestly, I never really worried about 4k anything since I never planned on getting it for my desktop since I knew parts to actually do things on 4k were just too expensive for me. So I expected a 1080 to handle it, but with an HQ processor rather than K...I'm sure there're some issues going on.

Plus, I know Razer'll have to do something to the 1080 and i7 to account for thermals and throttling and stuff, so it only limits the performance more.

But it's okay! Not like I'm particularly sad about losing the 4k gaming performance I would like. After all, most of my life has been spent gaming on sub-1080 systems. Only got my desktop just 3 years ago, after all! Before then, it was some 720p notebook that couldn't run more than one window of Chrome, and sub-720p TVs for Xbox 'n stuff.