My games are lagging badly on my Acer Nitro 5 can't seem to find a solution.

angel850

I've updated my game drivers, windows and even checked if any background apps were secretly running. But it didn't fix anything. Games that had no lag are now lagging tremendously and some are even unplayable like GTA V. Backgrounds not loading, everything taking longer and some games freeze. I have to power my laptop off since the program won't close. Keep in mind this is with the highest performance mode set on my battery as well. It's been like this for days, I'm just frustrated at this point and can't seem to find a solution.
[Edited the thread to add issue detail]

sri369

Open up task manager and get us back with your CPU usage graph over a period of 5 mins with your laptop on idle.

angel850

here you go

sri369

How does the laptop bare when power is set to balanced mode? Personally I am not a fan of high performance plan.

angel850

I've set it to balanced mode, there was some slight improvement in performance like less lag but not good enough. Textures look blurry in game. I've had it on balanced mode when I first got the laptop and I didn't really like it. Since then I've switched it to highest performance because it was more smooth and just overall provided a better gaming experience. I ran a benchmark test just now and it appears that my graphics card is performing below expectations. Same with my Hard drive. Which is absurd since I ran another test yesterday and the only thing that was performing badly was my hard drive but it honestly feels the same as yesterday performance wise. It's been like for days now.

GAMING6698

@angel850
I think your CPU is overheating!
Follow these steps-
1)Open nitrosense then minimize it 
2)Play your game for 5mins then close it
3)Open nitrosense then post screenshot here

sri369

Thanks @GAMING6698

@angel850
If thermal heatup is infact causing this, try the below thread. It lists out what I did to reduce my max temps of 90s (used to thermal throttle) to a max of low 70s (over 20 degrees max temps reductions) without opening up laptop.
https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/627441/guide-thermal-throttling-on-nitro-7-model-an715-51-mitigation

angel850

@GAMING6698
That's the only thing I can think of too since I've tried everything else. There was this Sata Disk Error that kept popping up everytime I started my laptop though. So I formatted & cleaned my hard drive last night and redownloaded some games back and it appears to be working normal again when I had no issues. Good thing Cloud Save was enabled or I would have lost my saved files. I'm still going to send you my nitro sense results in a bit. Just in case, I can't be too sure. Again thank you for the help! 

@sri369
I appreciate it! I'll check the thread out if anything seems unusual.

angel850

@GAMING6698

So I played the game for five minutes, things still seemed a little unusual but it was more playable than before. Here is the screenshot of my temps

GAMING6698

@angel850
Your temperature going high too soon.
Performance will get worst in games if you more than 5min.
-You can try to disable turbo boost then check your game performance.

Check this for solving disk error
https://www.diskgenius.com/how-to/windows-detected-a-hard-disk-problem.php

angel850

@GAMING6698

I turned off turbo boost but performance is still the same, I'm also not getting any disk errors anymore for some strange reason.

GAMING6698

@angel850
What are the temperatures when you play game for 10min?
(Turn boost turn off)

angel850

@GAMING6698

These are the temps when I play for 10 minutes, honestly I think it's a hard drive problem. My friend originally gave me it and had told me that it was at least a few years old. He just had it stored somewhere and asked me if I wanted it, this was around when I first got my nitro 5 laptop. I'm thinking of just buying a new hard drive, I've done some research and apparently (old / damaged) hard drives cause slow texture loading & random bits of lag. What do you think? 

sri369

They do. And games are best when played off SSD. Get a good HDD if you are replacing... some brands can give better performance at 5400 rpm compared to others at 7200 rpm.

angel850

So the problem was my HDD, I redownloaded a game into my C Storage and I was having no lag, fast loading times. Knowing that, I got my old damaged HDD replaced recently and installed a new SSD I bought. It's a Samsung 870 EVO 1TB. Gameplay is really smooth now, probably even better than my HDD prime days. So that makes me happy. I heard SSD's are generally faster than HDD's and are more advanced so I'm glad I made my choice. Again thank you guys for the help! If I haven't had tried to find a solution, I would't have known what was wrong.  

Jatin1212

Hi, I am facing the same problem earlier when I had bought my new laptop I download games like GTA 5 , FIFA 21, and some more they all used to work smoothly. But now since a month back I am facing lagging issues. GTA 5 still lags even when I keep my Nitro sense boost to MAX and High performance. Now I play FIFA 22 and that does not lag much but to play that as well I have to switch to MAX and high performance which was not the case before it used to work well without doing any changes in the Nitro sense. I need a solution for this. Or do I have to format my laptop just like what @angel850 did.

leonaip

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/634171/my-games-are-lagging-badly-on-my-acer-nitro-5

1. use nitrosense... set the fan control to MAX and mode to PERFORMANCE...
2. uninstall programs that you are not using... use IOBit Uninstaller or other similar uninstallers.
3. limit the programs that run on startup... open task manager then startup apps and disable some unneeded apps. (restart the computer to lighten the CPU and RAM load)
4. install additional RAM... if you have 8 GB RAM, add another 8 GB RAM to make it 16 GB of RAM to cater the load demands. much better if 32 GB of RAM.
5. when running the game, try low and medium settings in the graphics to see if it works. change also the refresh rate to 60 Hertz.
6. the ultimate solution is to sell your laptop and purchase the latest ones that have the 12th /13th gen Intel processors (preferrably i9, Intel performs much better than AMD in terms of multitasking and heat issues), latest NVIDIA RTX 4060 GPU (16 GB) to solve your problem. 😉

leonaip

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/634171/my-games-are-lagging-badly-on-my-acer-nitro-5

set the battery power mode to BEST PERFORMANCE.

Jatin1212

I will try what you said.

The ultimate solution sounds good but I bought it on June 2021 I guess it should at least work fine for 3 years.

Jatin1212

I have tried that but does not change anything. I guess the only option I am left with is to format.

leonaip

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/comment/1171948#Comment_1171948

try the following:

1. insert a usb flash drive to your laptop or desktop computer. (be sure to backup the contents of your usb flash drive)
2. download rufus https://rufus.ie/en/, then run it.
3. left click the drop down arrow next to the word "SELECT" and left click "DOWNLOAD" to download the original Windows 11 ISO from Microsoft. Watch the full tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me-GmdIlbgc&ab_channel=PortalSeven
4. after that, press START. wait for it to finish.
5. close rufus, open your usb flash drive then run the setup executable.
6. be sure to backup all the files in Drive C: or any drive partition where the operating system resides before doing step 5.
7. be sure you have a good internet connection for the contents of the flash drive to be updated to the latest.
8. as the setup runs, select delete all files, like you are installing a fresh operating system.
9. wait and trust the process to complete.
10. after that, download the latest official drivers from Acer. https://www.acer.com/us-en/support/drivers-and-manuals
11. download the serial number detection utility/tool to obtain the device serial number or SNID
12. download all the drivers, extract each, then install.
13. hopefully, your problem will be solved.
14. driver problems happens when you restore your operating system using the recovery image.
15. after all the drivers installed and working properly. make an image of the whole drive using macrium reflect, aomei, easeus, minitool and many others. Watch the tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9BGn4MivJw&ab_channel=BracerJack
16. the purpose of making your own backup image of the whole drive is to shorten the restoration process in case of problems or malware attacks.