Is the age of my system impacting performance?

[Funktoon13]

Hi all,

First post but hoping to get more involved in PC gaming.

I was wondering how the age of a system can affect performance? Basically I've got an old Lenovo Z50-75 and I want to play early Xbox 360 era games on the go (Assassin's Creed, Farcry 2, Mercenaries 2).

On paper it's more than enough - 1GB dedicated GPU, 16GB DDR3, SSD, AMD FX-7500 with Windows 10 64bit. But with certain games like Saints Row 2 and Mercenaries 2 the frame rate stutters sporadically during gameplay, especially when the I move the camera quickly.

Is the age of my system the issue? Is it something like GPUs or CPUs degrade as they age? Is the later version of Windows choking my system resource? Or are there some settings I can adjust to get things working??

Final note - good graphics are great, but smooth frame rate is way more important to me.

 

[Funktoon13]

Hmmm, that's interesting. Thank you.

So do you think that the CPU is not sufficient for these games even though the system is in the region of 4x the minimum specs? Given the limits for power and cooling?

I cleaned the fan out when I put in the SSD but might open it up and make sure I've been thorough.

 

[Funktoon13]

Download msi afterburner see what your gpu, cpu and memorry are doing when stutters occur.

Downloaded, just got to figure out my way around it. Guess I need to record some logs and then review them? Or just figure out how to get the FPS counter displaying and track that?

I would say that your GPU is the biggest problem. The AMD R7-M260DX in that laptop is pretty poor with performance around that of a Nvidia GT730 and with only 1Gb of memory is going to be next to useless with any demanding games. Any res over 1280x720 and low settings is going to be dire. The cpu as already mentioned is not very good either.

Saints Row 2 and Mercenaries 2 both have problems with the former being a terrible port and the latter having issues with Windows 10.

That's going to make things awkward. If the GPU isn't good enough to run games that only need 256mb/512mb of it's 1GB memory then it must be a shockingly bad bit of kit. Suppose I'll look for games that call for 128mb and have smaller environments :/ Interesting feedback about Saints Row and Mercenaries though, thank you.

 

[Funktoon13]

As others have rightly said its the weak graphics with a 7 year old cpu doing the damage. A new £600 GTX 1650 laptop is a world apart and would play super smooth if you have the cash?

Well I could get the cash together but I was hoping to do a bit with this one first. I figured I could use it to play decent older games (2006-2007) when I travel for work next year, and if I keep going then I'd upgrade to something more meaty. But looks like I'll be playing decent old-old games for awhile. Oh well, never did finish Morrowind the first time round...

Edit: Added years of the games I wanted to play.

 

[Funktoon13]

Minimum gaming specs for games are like the official MPG efficiency from VW and other manufacturers - never accurate.

you CAN play the game with those specs but it won't be fun. Think of the min specs as the basic requirement to make sure that you can start the game, not for smooth game play.

I understand, I'd just hoped that games that call for 256MB GPU would run okay on a 1GB GPU. Sounds like I'm caught between a poor performing GPU and a couple of imperfect games. Luckily Farcry 2 and Risen 2 both look like they're running well so I'm goig to get stuck into those and forget about Saints Row and Mercenaries. If there's no tweaking that'll get them running smoothly then I'll just not bother and be happy with what works.

 

[Funktoon13]

Can you lower the resoloution of struggling games ?

I'd had a go at adjusting the display settings, I had Mercenaries down to 800*600 and it was still having issue. It looks like that and Saints Row have got specific problems that don't relate precisely to the spec of my system. Was hoping that there might be a particular setting that needed changing to smooth them out but doesn't look like that's the case. If I really want to play them then I might check on the Steam/Origin message boards for fixes but it would probably be easier to get out my 360 XD

 

[Funktoon13]

Have you downloaded hwmonitor so you can see the temps of the cpu and gpu whilst gaming? if there is badly applied thermal paste the chips could be throttling and not performing as well as they should. You have already had it open once ,did you see if the heatsink is easy to remove? Lenovo do not go out of their way to make it impossible to repair their products like other do.

To check if the system is working as intended use a free benchmark like Heaven and loop it to see if it gets worse over time. Can then check your scores to see if they are in the ballpark of equivalent systems.

This is excellent feedback and within my skill level so I'll take a look at this tonight. Thank you very much!

I didn't really do much looking at the internals tbh, I just swapped out the memory & HDD and cleaned the fan. But it's easy to open up so can be quickly checked. Coupled with hwmonitor this should give me a good insight into the system's performance and temperatures. I've not noticed that the CPU or GPU are running hot from what I've seen so far but I'll keep an eye on it.