New laptop, TF2 locked at 30FPS, any ideas?

NoodleCollie

Stoat fiend
aa
Jul 30, 2009
383
335
I bought a new Dell XPS laptop lately - this is an 8th gen i7, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti machine, so shouldn't have any problems running TF2 in theory. However, I'm finding that when I run the game, my FPS is always fluttering around 30 (give or take +/- 1), which makes me suspicious that there's some sort of frame rate lock applied somewhere. There's also about half a second of input lag.

8fZlA88.jpg


This is on empty 2Fort, and no graphics settings that I change seem to make any difference. Vsync is not switched on in game or in the NVIDIA control panel, and it's definitely starting up on the NVIDIA GPU rather than the Intel one.

This is my first foray into Windows 10 (I really dislike it, and run Linux at home, but I'm seeing if it's workable on this laptop at least for now). Is there anything I might need to turn off to fix this? Has anyone come across anything like it before?

EDIT: For the sake of posterity, I've tried changing the following to no effect:
  • Focus assist
  • Game bar
  • Game mode
  • System power saving mode
  • Vsync (in TF2 and in NVIDIA control panel)
 
Last edited:

DrSquishy

we've all had better times to die
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Feb 10, 2017
1,297
974
Try putting -gl in your launch options - it means TF2 will run on OpenGL, perhaps that'll help for you
 

NoodleCollie

Stoat fiend
aa
Jul 30, 2009
383
335
OK, after a lot of searching and a lot of GeForce Experience BS, I found this:

D4YXOFoWkAA2osB.jpg


Apparently this is turned on by default. I turned it off and now my FPS is capped at 60. Better, but not ideal - I'm now going through the rigmarole of updating the GPU drivers (which keep failing), and will see if that solves the rest.