DrunkOnEstus said:
Getting rid of bad shit:
Even if you have Defender or Norton (you shouldn't have Norton or McAfee), there's free programs I highly recommend that pick up a lot of stuff that gets past the filters.
Update and run Malwarebytes Free
https://www.malwarebytes.org/ and SuperAntiSpyware Free
http://superantispyware.com/. Malwarebytes gets rid of a lot of malware, adware, spyware, tracking cookies and blah blah that slows things down. SuperAntiSpyware picks up what makes it past there and is great for getting rid of "piggyback" programs that come with installers like toolbars and things that waste memory. Update and run these 2 about once a week.
I've heard of Malwarebytes Free but not SuperAntiSpyware.
Also, who the hell would use Defender or Norton that is also a gamer looking to improve performance? Anyone in that position must know enough of the bare minimum to know to never use those. I could understand the average person, but a gamer specifically looking to improve performance?
You'd be amazed. The "bare minimum" computer knowledge one would expect varies wildly, and depends on people's comfort level and how they've been informed. Some people buy an Alienware or other pre-built because they want to game on a PC and feel safe knowing that it has come with "protection". Truth be told, I haven't run a 24/7 antivirus in
years without issue. I had AVG back when it was the big free thing, and all it ever really did was use resources and get in my way. If you don't open e-mail attachments from strangers or go to ghetto warez/porn sites, and have "as needed" scanners at the ready, you shouldn't have a problem. If you aren't comfortable with this idea AVG and Avast free are good options. I still recommend weekly scans with Malwarebytes and SuperAntiSpyware for the tracking cookies, adware, and social media shit that is hard to outright avoid.
DrunkOnEstus said:
Discussing defragmentation
When I took my laptop in to be repaired and upgraded to 8GB RAM I also replaced the HDD with an SSD. While I don't need to worry about it as you say, should I still bother doing it at all? Will it help at all? You know, it's unfortunate. I had to get a smaller size one to save money. It only has 119 usable GB. Thankfully, I have 2 external HDDs at 500 GB each and a soon to be third one.
Don't worry about defragmenting your system drive if its an SSD, Windows should be taking care of that maintenance for you. It wouldn't hurt to see if the externals are fragmented for the sake of speed when accessing them. I find this upgrade path quite odd if you're wanting to game on the laptop, but you're kind of stuck seeing as the GPU isn't upgradable.
DrunkOnEstus said:
Make sure your graphics drivers are updated.
I try to do this, but I haven't checked in a while.
It's one of the biggest things you can do to increase performance short of buying faster hardware. I HIGHLY recommend going to AMD's site and getting the newest mobility Radeon driver. Here's why it's such a big deal, in case you were interested:
Almost every PC game ships...kinda fuckin' broke. The developers can't easily account for every possible hardware configuration, or changes in GPU architecture during the years of development. On consoles, developers get to code "close to the metal", meaning that the code is directly speaking as closely as possible to the exact hardware in the machine, and they also know exactly what hardware is in every PS4/X1.
On PC, the developers are talking mostly to DirectX or OpenGL, which talks to your GPU with draw calls. The launch code for most PC games usually spends some time in the hands of Nvidia or AMD (hopefully both, but certainly not always), so that they can release a driver near or at the launch date that can best communicate that code to their GPUs as quickly and efficiently as possible. This is why we have shit like Witcher 3 "hairworks" causing massive drops in FPS, or games like Tomb Raider that seem to favor AMD hardware (it's worth noting that AMD's hardware is in all 3 current gen machines).
I'm sidetracked here, but basically having up to date graphics drivers is incredibly important right now because an out of date driver can do a shit job at communicating the game to your GPU needlessly. DirectX 12 with Windows 10 is supposedly aiming to bring more of a "close to the metal" coding experience to PC, and AMD's Mantle was a similar experiment in attempting the same because for whatever reason AMD's drivers tend to not be as good at making games "unbroken" compared to Nvidia. This is all besides the point though, which is that you want the newest GPU driver all the time.
DrunkOnEstus said:
While you're there you might as well update your BIOS, but this is up to you. You may not see performance improvements from it, and while the process is a HELL of a lot safer than it used to be, there's still an inherent risk in your computer losing power or something while the BIOS is being flashed. If any of this makes you uncomfortable, don't worry about upgrading your BIOS.
I think I know enough to do it, but I do feel some small uncomfortability. Is that small uncomfortability enough for you to advise me to stay away or based on how you've read my OP and responses do you think I'll be safe doing it?
You have more knowledge then most of the people I work with in a professional context, as well as a general understanding of what you're doing regarding what we're talking about, and most importantly a curiosity to know as much as you can about how to get the most out of your machine and how it works.
I keep my BIOS regularly updated, these days it involves the download of an .exe that you run that can flash the BIOS within Windows. Back in the day you used to have to put the flasher on a floppy, then any other external media, and reboot your computer and flash it before the OS launched.
I want to recommend it as it provides the newest "in-between" of the hardware and Windows, as well as the newest features for your model from the manufacturer. I just don't want to feel responsible if a freak thing happens (like <1% possibility freak thing, since in a power surge your laptop would still be powered by the battery). It's something I do whenever a new update is available, and have done about a couple dozen times without issue. I only know that there's an inherent risk involved if something happens during the flash, and I would feel pretty shitty if I recommended something that broke your laptop. So I'll say I recommend it, and you should feel assured about doing it, but in very unlikely circumstances mentioned for ass-covering reasons I hope we could still be friends one day.
DrunkOnEstus said:
Sidenotes: Don't launch a game in windowed mode to gain performance, you generally won't and will only make your life more difficult if you don't need your game windowed/borderless windowed. If possible, use your monitor's native resolution to run a game and work the other settings around that, upscaling is very bad and lowering the resolution needlessly can actually make the performance more reliant on your CPU instead of your GPU. Lowering shadow resolution/quality is the first place to go for big gains that aren't noticed a whole lot visually. With a laptop I don't recommend MSAA for most games as its too "expensive" (resource wise) but FXAA and MLAA are post-process solutions that are less expensive and worth it if you're okay with their relative blurriness compared to the jaggies they get rid of.
Every game I have seems to run better in windowed non-fullscreen, lowest resolution mode. You say it's a bad idea, but with the GPU I have I'm not sure it's such a bad idea for the CPU to handle more of the performance. At this point, I really am talking complete ignorance though, so it's better you tell me what's right or wrong with what I just said. I knew relatively what I was talking about above in the rest of this post.
I did some thinking on this, and here's what's going on. The reason the rule of thumb is fullscreen>windowed for single monitors is that the game isn't getting "priority". The game is being rendered, and its math is being calculated, along with the drawing of your desktop and Windows environment. The upside to this is that alt-tabs are quick, and you can minimize it and so on. I'd like to think that for at least some games there's a way for you to be fullscreen at or near your native resolution, as that represents the game getting full attention from the PC and looking at its best in a render that your monitor would prefer to display without nasty upscaling.
As you look through resources like pcgamingwiki and get comfortable with advanced settings, for a lot of games you should be able to find a happy visuals/performance medium and that generally involves not using the catch-all "low/medium/high/ultra/MasturRaceLol" visual settings. You can ask me or google what things like SSAO, SSAA, MSAA, SMAA, FXAA, and chromatic aberration are and how much of a performance impact changing such a setting would have on the game.
For example, if I set a game to just "high" and launched it, I might be getting less FPS than I like because the shadows and light rays and such are at high, when I'd prefer that those things be at medium if it means that I get to have high textures (I always want as high resolution textures as possible) or turn on a form of AA and end up with better performance than I did with everything at "high". You'll also notice going through pcgamingwiki that some games fucked up a certain setting. In Wolfenstein:TNO for example, everybody who doesn't have high-end rigs get destroyed by turning on the reflection and shadow resolution settings. If I just set the game to "medium" it might raise one of these values and I'm seeing way worse performance when it could run better and quite frankly not look much worse/different.
I guess what I'm getting at is that setting most games to windowed with low as possible resolution is (at least to me personally) a vastly inferior visual experience that asks your GPU to do as little work as possible when there's ways it can help you achieve a better experience. Having the FPS counter in Cortex should help should you decide to visit the wiki for a game and see if you can make a fullscreen experience happen. Some may disagree with me on this point, but most of the graphical settings are merely fluff compared to having a game render at a resolution that the screen prefers or isn't massively upscaling. Higher resolution means more pixels means more colors means more of the visuals the game is trying to have you see, and at or close to the screen's native resolution means less or no distortion and the screen displaying the best it can.
DrunkOnEstus said:
One additional thing I thought of is looking in the BIOS (when the computer is turning on, continuously press DEL or F2 or whatever it says for system setup) and see if there's a setting in there to raise the amount of memory allocated to the GPU, or any other power settings in there to help you out. Sometimes laptop manufacturers configure things to maximize the battery life at the expense of performance so it's worth taking a look at it. You also have enough system RAM now to give the GPU whatever it will take.
If I ever get comfortable messing with the BIOS I'll make sure to do that.
You shouldn't have to think of the BIOS as a scary thing. If a setting is saying something you don't understand, then some research needs to be done before changing it. Changing something like your SATA mode from AHCI to IDE would cause Windows to not boot, but in such a circumstance you could just go back in and change it back or hit the "default settings" button. It's for this reason that it's recommended that first-time BIOS tinkerers only change one setting at a time while they're in there, so if anything acts up you know exactly what setting caused the problem. There's no button to set the computer on fire or anything, and you don't seem like the kind of person who would arbitrarily set a boot-up password and then forget it. If nothing else, it wouldn't hurt just to look in there and navigate it just to get the feel for it, if you're afraid that you might accidentally change a setting you can always exit without saving your changes. If there's a way to allocate more VRAM to the GPU or stop some power-saving measure, the gains would be awesome, but either way it's a nice way to learn just a little more about how your computer works and seeing what the "handover" from boot to Windows looks like.
