bassdemon69

Update: I'd like to thank you guys for helping me out with this. Seemed as though the temperature issue is all it was. I have since found a way to prop up the back of my laptop and try the game out. So far I have been able to play smoothly and actually turned the graphics settings back up a bit higher and am still able to play it pretty comfortably around 25-35 FPS. Maybe not the 60FPS some people are getting on better rigs, but it makes all the difference to me and the game is quite playable now. I've got myself a nice laptop cooling pad on the way, and look forward to being able to actually enjoy the game now. I appreciate the help!

I appreciate the advice. The laptop does have feet that maintain a little airspace under the chassis, but it definitely gets pretty warm. I wouldn't be surprised if a bit of dust has accumulated in there as well. And I will certainly pick up a cooling pad at my next opportunity. Thanks very much!

Thanks for the responses! As far as why I chose the laptop I did: I basically bought as much machine as I could/can afford. Did I purchase a machine with the wrong combination of components? Quite possibly, but again, I don't know a whole lot about this stuff. Considering what I was upgrading from (an 8-year-old Dell tower) everything I could possibly buy seemed like an infinite improvement. EtherealN, I ran that program while I played a quick round of Instant Action A10A, and while it only had the stutters once (amazingly), I checked after I was done and got this: Type 2 Board Vendor Name1 VA70_HC Temperatures THRM Max: 101 C (213 F) Intel Core i7 3632QM Voltages VID Max: 1.036V Temperatures Core #0 Max: 99 C (210 F) Core #1 Max: 100 C (212 F) Core #2 Max: 102 C (215 F) Core #3 Max: 98 C (208 F) Package: Max: 102 C (215 F) Seems like your suspicions were correct. Is there anything I can do, or am I totally screwed? Would a huge beefy cooling pad help to any extent? Should I only play while sitting outside on my patio in the wintertime? Or should I just shelf the game until I can buy something better, and consult people here when I decide to upgrade? Hopefully it isn't the last option. Thanks again.

Hi everyone. First, I'll say that this is my first post here, though I've been a big fan of this line of games since the old LOMAC days. I will mention as a disclaimer that I'm not terribly advanced as far as "under the hood" computer workings, so consider this in your replies please. However, I have read through many of the posts here, so I will do my best to answer any potential questions with this first post. When playing DCS, I usually start out flying with reasonable, acceptable FPS readings (in the 20-30 fps range, which I guess for my rig is alright, at least the game is playable) but after playing for a few minutes, I basically always have episodes (usually 30 seconds or so) where the FPS drops to below 10, and usually it gets worse than this, with the game basically freezing, reading less than 1 FPS, and this is accompanied by intense audio stutter, which doesn't happen until these REALLY bad lag episodes. If I can manage to not crash the plane when this happens, the FPS usually recovers for a time to playable levels again, before the cycle repeats. I'm playing on an Acer laptop running Windows 8.1 Intel Core i7-3632QM 2.2GHz with turbo boost up to 3.2 GHz NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 8GB DDR3 memory. I initially assumed this was a graphics issue, but after adjusting every option in the game, including turning everything to the lowest setting, I was only able to squeeze a marginal FPS increase. I have also turned civilian traffic off. I've made sure all my drivers are up to date. I recently tried disabling my Norton AV and Firewall and that seems to make no difference. I also tried flying the plane outside the "rendered world" in DCS, hoping to eliminate any trees, objects, or buildings, seeing if I could isolate the issue. While initial FPS was higher, the stutters continued. I'm also using GameBooster to hopefully shut down unnecessary processes that might slow things down, and, after reading another thread about this somewhere (I don't remember where) I had been using TimerResolution to set the timer resolution to maximum (not sure how this works, but it seems to help marginally initially). I had also read somewhere that this could be a latency issue? To be honest, I don't understand latency, but after downloading LatencyMon, I did notice latency spikes that are being attributed to ndis.sys. I don't know exactly what this means, or how to fix it, or if that is even the cause of my problem. I know I don't have a fancy gaming rig or anything, but I did pour more money into this laptop purchase in order to be able to game on it, and unfortunately the only one I really want to play is more like Digital Kamikaze Simulator than Digital Combat Simulator. I would just like to figure out the problem causing this stutter so the game can be playable. Thanks very much for any and all help anyone can provide. If you need me to track down more specs or details about my system, I'm happy to try and track it down.