Stepmania lag spikes

[xxXitsunexx]

Okay so I got my ancient Acer laptop fixed from 4 years ago, booted it up and played SM 3.95 on it only to find my gameplay has annoying lag spikes which screw up my accuracy. The average FPS would go from 390, and then drop to 200, and then go back up to 390.

I'm pretty sure I have enough RAM and all. I mean, I can play CoD MW3 perfectly on my pc on the the lowest graphic settings without lag. Plus, my old Dell laptop which is even older than my Acer runs SM smoothly with no issues whatsoever.

Can anyone help me on this?

[xAlphaWolf]

390-200 isn't lag, you should neither be able to see difference, a game is considered playable on 30fps,you have 10x it but I think you can try to set your graphic card to performance mode, or check temperature, maybe energy plan too

[xxXitsunexx]

390fps to 200fps was a sudden drop which caused the lag spike. I set StepMania in Task Manager to a Above Normal priority and my battery plan is High Performance. Things seem to be working well. I'll come back here if I experience any more issues

[xxXitsunexx]

bump because too lazy to edit the previous post. Stepmania still lags even though I have no other stuff running in the background and all. Any suggestions anyone?

[Mollocephalus]

This is a issue happening with some specific computers and no one that i know of ever found out why it happens

[xxXitsunexx]

Oh well, that means I have to stick to my dell laptop for playing SM then.
RIP Acer.

[Devilchilly]

Well, Keith, if you are using Windows XP or Windows 7, switch it to Classic mode, which is the main essence of how my SM doesn't lag even if I have the geek window on.

[Staiain]

Turn off opacity and all fancy features on programs and there should be no lag even on low end computers

[Izzy]

Or use windows 8 because it removes all those bloated explorer visuals that slow things down.

Also something interesting to test for stepmania would be a G-Sync monitor that evens out frame rate and eliminates fps spikes. (Lag is an internet term).

[Charlo]

I get these too, rarely. Whether or not I have other concurrently running programs does not seem to affect when it happens. I sometimes wonder if it has to do with SM having to read something off the hard drive, although SM preloads songs so that shouldn't happen. I wish I had an SSD to test with.

[choof]

Originally Posted by xAlphaWolf

390-200 isn't lag, you should neither be able to see difference

390-200 isn't lag but it's indicative of a temporary bottleneck somewhere which can definitely cause lag when it jumps back up to 390

[choof]

Originally Posted by Izzy

(Lag is an internet term).

when talking about network lag, sure
hardware can and does lag behind other components (a good example of this is a shit north bridge)