Single player game performance issues whislt downloading

[barlew]

Hi guys i need a sanity check again.

As i have had so many problems with this laptop im starting to think faults may not be faults so just humour me here please.
I am trying to reinstall all my games on the system. Whilst i do this i am also trying to play games.
The problem i am having is that when games are downloading in the background my games tank (doesnt matter whether im playing GTA V, Grid 2 or the original Borderlands).

If i play the games without the download in the background they run perfectly. However if i initiate a download, It doesnt matter if i am downloading a game through Steam, Uplay, Microsoft store or Battlenet they all have the same effect on offline gameplay.

Now if i was trying to play R6 Siege and it started lagging i wouldnt question it as i am using loads of bandwidth with the downloads but i am playing completely offline games and some of them arent even that demanding.

When it happens if i check the Process Monitor the Nvidia GPU looks pretty normal and steady, the RAM is only at 30% and all three of the SSD's are below 5% however what i have noticed is the CPU usage seems to be spiking eratically all the way to 100%.

In the back of my mind i am absolutely sure this isnt right and before i had the laptop RMA'd for a broken motherboard i could download games and play games at the same time without any issues at all.

My system specs are:

Chassis & Display
Vortex Series: 15.6" Matte Full HD 144Hz LED Widescreen (1920x1080) + G-Sync
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™ i7 Six Core Processor 9750H (2.6GHz, 4.5GHz Turbo)
Memory (RAM)
16GB Corsair 2400MHz SODIMM DDR4 (2 x 8GB)
Graphics Card
NVIDIA® GeForce® RTX 2070 - 8.0GB GDDR6 Video RAM - DirectX® 12.1
1st Storage Device
1TB ADATA m.2
2nd Storage Device
1TB ADATA m.2
3rd Storage Device
1TB Samsung SATA SSD

A penny for your thoughts.
I am convinced that there is somthing off here but at the same time i am trying to talk myself out of making an issue out of it.

 

[SpyderTracks]

Hi guys i need a sanity check again.

As i have had so many problems with this laptop im starting to think faults may not be faults so just humour me here please.
I am trying to reinstall all my games on the system. Whilst i do this i am also trying to play games.
The problem i am having is that when games are downloading in the background my games tank (doesnt matter whether im playing GTA V, Grid 2 or the original Borderlands).

If i play the games without the download in the background they run perfectly. However if i initiate a download, It doesnt matter if i am downloading a game through Steam, Uplay, Microsoft store or Battlenet they all have the same effect on offline gameplay.

Now if i was trying to play R6 Siege and it started lagging i wouldnt question it as i am using loads of bandwidth with the downloads but i am playing completely offline games and some of them arent even that demanding.

When it happens if i check the Process Monitor the Nvidia GPU looks pretty normal and steady, the RAM is only at 30% and all three of the SSD's are below 5% however what i have noticed is the CPU usage seems to be spiking eratically all the way to 100%.

In the back of my mind i am absolutely sure this isnt right and before i had the laptop RMA'd for a broken motherboard i could download games and play games at the same time without any issues at all.

My system specs are:

Chassis & Display
Vortex Series: 15.6" Matte Full HD 144Hz LED Widescreen (1920x1080) + G-Sync
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™ i7 Six Core Processor 9750H (2.6GHz, 4.5GHz Turbo)
Memory (RAM)
16GB Corsair 2400MHz SODIMM DDR4 (2 x 8GB)
Graphics Card
NVIDIA® GeForce® RTX 2070 - 8.0GB GDDR6 Video RAM - DirectX® 12.1
1st Storage Device
1TB ADATA m.2
2nd Storage Device
1TB ADATA m.2
3rd Storage Device
1TB Samsung SATA SSD

A penny for your thoughts.
I am convinced that there is somthing off here but at the same time i am trying to talk myself out of making an issue out of it.

It’s writing to disk at the same time you’re gaming, completely normal, that’s why they give the setting to disable downloads whilst in game as if it’s on the same drive it will tank performance, it’s a given.

 

[barlew]

It’s writing to disk at the same time you’re gaming, completely normal, that’s why they give the setting to disable downloads whilst in game as if it’s on the same drive it will tank performance, it’s a given.

Agreed apart from its not writing to the same disk its writing to a different disk to the one i am playing the game wrong.
Sorry i should have clarified that.

Am i just imagining that this was never a problem and expecting too much of the CPU?

 

[SpyderTracks]

Agreed apart from its not writing to the same disk its writing to a different disk to the one i am playing the game wrong.
Sorry i should have clarified that.

Ah, ok.

From a search, the high cpu usage could be because steam encrypts the download stream and it is unencrypted on the fly once downloaded which would take a lot of cpu.

 

[barlew]

Ah, ok.

From a search, the high cpu usage could be because steam encrypts the download stream and it is unencrypted on the fly once downloaded which would take a lot of cpu.

Which is what i initially thought however the problem is not localised to Steam. Its the same with Origin, UPlay, Battlenet and the Microsoft store.

Like i said earlier this may just be me inventing faults where there is none because i have had issues with this laptop but i am convinced i used to do this all the time without an issue.

Ill email tech support and see what they say.

Thanks for the help Spyder.

 

[barlew]

Just to further expand I just tried the same test for a standard download to eliminate any compression or encryption overheads. I downloaded a 1GB test file and it takes the game in exactly the same way which to me is not right.

 

[SpyderTracks]

Just to further expand I just tried the same test for a standard download to eliminate any compression or encryption overheads. I downloaded a 1GB test file and it takes the game in exactly the same way which to me is not right.

But where are you downloading to?

 

[barlew]

The C drive which is an SSD. I am then playing the game off the D drive which is another SSD.

 

[SpyderTracks]

The C drive which is an SSD. I am then playing the game off the D drive which is another SSD.

For a fair test you’d need to download to a drive that is neither the OS nor the game drive.

 

[barlew]

Roger ill do that now.

 

[barlew]

Right that was a really good shout Spyder.
That test went off with no performance issues at all.
So by looks of things the encryption and compression, used by the different launchers is putting an understandable overhead on the CPU and there is nothing wrong with the laptop.

 

[SpyderTracks]

Right that was a really good shout Spyder.
That test went off with no performance issues at all.
So by looks of things the encryption and compression, used by the different launchers is putting an understandable overhead on the CPU and there is nothing wrong with the laptop.

That would be my guess, the decryption is obviously quite a fairly CPU intensive workload, if you ran something like 7zip, it would have the same effect.

That's a good one to clear up, something I'd not considered before. I always leave my downloads turned off while I'm gaming as have always found it affects performance.

 

[barlew]

Thanks again for the help mate.