My Helios 300 is lagging in games it shouldn't

Shayd

Hello. I'm new here, but I have found the same issue for myself and others, and that these fixes have helped. You can try:
1. Optimize your windows. You can try this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTPMwQKlfPE and his other videos are very helpful as well, such as undervolting using ThrottleStop.
2. Optimize your games using Geforce Experience. You can try enabling Whisper Mode. The default FPS cap for whisper mode is 40FPS, but you can go into Nvidia Control Panel and adjust the Whisper Mode FPS cap with a custom program setting.
3. Download an older Nvidia driver that is known to be stable. I personally use driver 388.35. Also, to get a clean uninstall and install, download DDU(display driver uninstaller) and restart the PC in safe mode. Run DDU and select Clean and restart. Then you can restart in safe mode again(I recommend, but possibly not needed) and perform a clean install(Select Custom, then check Clean install box) of the Nvidia driver. This is what fixed it for me recently.
4. Check your Nvidia control panel settings. If you have your Preferred graphics driver and Phys-X set to auto, try setting them to the GTX 1060 and test it. If your FPS is significantly better, your PC may be switching your preferred graphics to the Intel for some reason. This one also worked for me the first time I had the issue. I was able to set it back to Auto afterward, and the fix seemed to stay.

Most likely, your issue is with the Nvidia driver. A lot of the newer drivers have been a bit bugged and not stable. Windows optimization, even if it doesn't fix it, will generally help, and I recommend you do that regardless. I hope something here helps you. Good luck.

Cinix

Shayd said:

Hello. I'm new here, but I have found the same issue for myself and others, and that these fixes have helped. You can try:
1. Optimize your windows. You can try this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTPMwQKlfPE and his other videos are very helpful as well, such as undervolting using ThrottleStop.
2. Optimize your games using Geforce Experience. You can try enabling Whisper Mode. The default FPS cap for whisper mode is 40FPS, but you can go into Nvidia Control Panel and adjust the Whisper Mode FPS cap with a custom program setting.
3. Download an older Nvidia driver that is known to be stable. I personally use driver 388.35. Also, to get a clean uninstall and install, download DDU(display driver uninstaller) and restart the PC in safe mode. Run DDU and select Clean and restart. Then you can restart in safe mode again(I recommend, but possibly not needed) and perform a clean install(Select Custom, then check Clean install box) of the Nvidia driver. This is what fixed it for me recently.
4. Check your Nvidia control panel settings. If you have your Preferred graphics driver and Phys-X set to auto, try setting them to the GTX 1060 and test it. If your FPS is significantly better, your PC may be switching your preferred graphics to the Intel for some reason. This one also worked for me the first time I had the issue. I was able to set it back to Auto afterward, and the fix seemed to stay.

Most likely, your issue is with the Nvidia driver. A lot of the newer drivers have been a bit bugged and not stable. Windows optimization, even if it doesn't fix it, will generally help, and I recommend you do that regardless. I hope something here helps you. Good luck.

Hey man, thanks for the response.
No improvement what so ever though might even felt a bit worse with the whisper mode.
I'm just going to ask for a refund I think for not meeting the expectations and hope I actually get a refund... I mean 'Play the latest games' and bf1 etc isn't even that new, other games aswell.

Shayd

That sucks man. Only other thing I can suggest right now is, as a last ditch effort, you could join a facebook group I'm in and ask for advice. It has a lot of support for people with the Predator Helios 300 laptops. You may be able to find your answer there if you haven't on these forums, and the owner/admins are awesome. If you're interested, here's the link:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1969145569968592/?fref=nf

Hope you figure it out, whether it's a fix or a refund.

Cinix

So i've contacted Acer and they are going to invastigate it. I hope that they'll do more then just benchmarks and stresstests
I'll update this once they send me their results.

Cinix

Hey guys, So after all the trouble and the laptop being away at the repair center(they had no results and could not replicate the problem wich is bs) I've found the problem myself.

In certain games the 7700HQ CPU would max out and by maxing out it hurt performance bad like 40 fps when it should be 80.
My laptop only had 8GB RAM, some people said that it's not enough, others don't have problems with it so I wasn't sure the RAM was the problem since the CPU was maxing out and the memory went to 7.8+-GB and then dropped to 5GB after a while.

Today I've added a second memory stick in the hope that this would resolve it all, and it did.
CPU went down to 70% in BF1 and RAM usage went to 9 - 10 GB.
All problems are gone now wich is awesome.

The theory behind this(correct me if I'm wrong) is:

If your RAM is on the edge of maxing out it'll make the CPU work harder since it needs to get info from the SSD/HD directly wich in turn causes performance issues since those are allot slower.

Thanks to the guys here that tried to help

sri369

@Cinix Windows 10 uses about 3-4 GB of RAM for itself own working. So you are left with 4 or less GB RAM. I would recommend getting RAM upped to 16.
One other thing you could do, is since your primary is an SSD, allocate a chunk of virtual memory in it - 1.5 times the amount of RAM present. Since it is SSD, the swap out times between RAM and it should be pretty low, and help you until you get the RAM upped.