Aspire A514-55 - Game framerate drops significantly when moving mouse

Kbensu77

I'm at my wits end when it comes to this problem, I didn't buy this laptop as a gaming machine but it's pretty embarrassing when even something as simple as Among Us becomes completely unplayable.

Games will run perfectly fine when I'm not touching any buttons, but as soon as I move my mouse around CPU usage spikes by at least 15% (and sometimes goes as high as 40%) and games become a slideshow (or just freeze entirely) until I stop moving the mouse. Sometimes this doesn't happen but it's completely random and eventually it starts happening again. I know it's the mouse causing the issue because games run smooth when using a controller.

I've tried looking online for any solutions when I found that turning down the polling rate of the mouse was supposed to help, but in my case it didn't change anything (I set my mouse from its usual 1200 to 200 and the problem still occurred). Turning down the graphics settings doesn't work either because the laptop is still capable of running them smoothly with a controller. I've tried reinstalling graphics drivers multiple times and even completely reinstalling Windows from USB a couple times and the issue still occurs, it seems like no matter what I try this laptop refuses to be anything other than a glorified Chromebook.

StevenGen

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/678625/aspire-a514-55-game-framerate-drops-significantly-when-moving-mouse

Your laptop has an oem Intel® Core™ i3-1215U Processor 10MB Cache, up to 4.40 GHz, with IPU and an Intergrated Intel® UHD Graphics for 12th Gen Intel® Processor with a Graphics Max Dynamic Frequency of 1.10 GHz, as that is acceptable for normal and allot of standard games, its not crash hot but it will play games.

If you want to play games and have this laptop perform better, then increase the ram to this laptop max of 32GB total into its 2x slots at 2x 16GB DDR4-3200MHz that will give you Dual Channel ram which is 100% quicker and better, as the 1x 8GB DDR4 ram that you have oem runs in single channel and its allot slower, also increase this laptops M.2 SSD to a faster PCIe 3 x4 like the WD SN750 Black as with all these upgraded combinations you will be able to play allot of games that you can’t play now with only 8GB single channel ram and a slower M.2 SSD.

Also make sure that you install the Intel® Driver & Support Assistant and have all Win-11 Home up to date. Doing all this will make your laptop perform 150% better and quicker for everything including games.