Video Lag G74sx-3de

[ghostx87]

Just recently I have been experiencing video lag on some games (Call of Duty 4, Crysis). Everything seems to be running fine 50-60fps and then it just freezes for a second while the audio continues to play. It does this every few seconds. I have tested other games (BF3, Skyrim) and they all play just fine. Any ideas?

[BrodyBoy]

If you have an Atheros WLAN card, update the driver. You'll find links to the newer ones in the Drivers Thread.

It may seem odd to update the WLAN card for a video problem, but these issues are often the result of DPC latencies, which can be caused by any driver. It's known that the Atheros driver that ships on the the G74s causes serious latency issues.

[dstrakele]

Have you tried turning Vertical Sync and Antialiasing off?

Otherwise it could be those games need an update. Have you checked their forums to see if others are reporting similar issues?

[ghostx87]

Yeah. I don't run any games with vsync turned on. These are both extremely old games and they worked fine a few weeks ago. At first I thought it was my video card, but games like battlefield 3 run flawlessly.

Edit: Games should be up to date both are on steam.

[dstrakele]

If they worked fine a few weeks ago, perhaps a Microsoft Update changed their behavior. If so, you could try Windows System Restore to restore your system to an earlier time before you had the issue. If it resolves the problem, then carefully choose the Microsoft updates one-by-one to find out which one changed the behavior.

[X-ROG]

Are you playing them online over Wireless? or single player? Did you try updating the wireless drivers if so?

Also - try turning off the HDD sleep, or making the time longer. It could be the HDD goes to sleep/parks the heads and it has to wait to restart.

[ghostx87]

I tried updating the WLAN driver and I still have a latency issue. Do you think this is what is causing the in game stutters?

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/42/g74sxdpclat.jpg/

[fountainhead]

Sounds like you're having the same issue as me. Do these freezes usually happen right when the game is loading a sound (like when you fire your pistol in Crysis) or spoken dialogue? See my posts in this thread. I'm almost sure it's related to the hard drive. What kind of drives are in your laptop? Mine are Seagate Momentus 7200.4 SATA.

[ghostx87]

To be honest I am not exactly sure what hard drives are in this computer it is completely stock. I’m beginning to think it might just be the game (corrupted save file maybe), because it happens in COD4 which is extremely old and games that are much more hardware intensive run just fine.

Edit: It doesn't freeze when loading a sound you can play for about 15-30 seconds even up to 1 minute sometimes with no issues. It seems to be just random.

[fountainhead]

ghostx87 wrote:
Edit: It doesn't freeze when loading a sound you can play for about 15-30 seconds even up to 1 minute sometimes with no issues. It seems to be just random.

That sounds about right. Pay attention to your hard drive light when it happens and let us know. FYI, I'm still trying to sort the issue out on my end, but I've narrowed it down to either something to do with the hard drive or a background application or service accessing the drive way too much.