Dota – Lag spikes every ten seconds on new laptop

dota-2pc

I've been playing DOTA 2 on a lenovo laptop perfectly for some time on very low graphics. I just recently acquired an asus laptop with all-around better specs and it plays DOTA at a much higher visual quality.

My problem with this new Asus is that when i run dota the fps will drop from 50 fps to about 15-16 fps every 10 seconds which is ruining the experience.

I had my IT friend maximize the performance and he also reapplied a better quality thermal paste to the laptop and same deal, lag spikes.

I feel like this is not an internet issue because i can switch right over to the lower-specs Lenovo and it will run Dota with no lag.

Any possible diagnoses?

Edit: the game runs perfectly fine on my lenovo laptop that has significantly less impressive specs. The asus should outrun my Lenovo on any game

Best Answer

Why?

Drops in framerate due to other reasons (other than graphics) could only be attributed to the VAC system, as it has been known to read/write to your system heavily. The game itself (with VAC stripped) doesn't use a lot at all.

As for what VAC does? Nobody knows - Valve has been very secretive about this.

Try running DoTA 2 without VAC (using the -insecure launch option) and compare the performance.
In my experience, ASUS laptops have been known to have terrible processors and hard drives, in comparison with the RAM your machine has, even if you're only word processing. Proof Needed

Update: The Valve Anti-cheat System has been known to check the game's memory to check for any malicious changes such as the freezing of memory values, which attributes to quite a bit of its memory and processor usage.

How do I fix?

There are many ways you can go about doing that. Since it's about your reading/writing speed, here are the options:

  1. Try giving DoTA 2 high CPU priority. This will put all read/write requests over everything, and hopefully your CPU is able to handle the entire load that DoTA outputs, while sort of ignoring/postponing everything else.
    You can do this by adding the -high node in your command-line launch options. By giving DoTA high priority, as read/write commands are usually processed by the CPU.
  2. Try getting a better hard drive. (Sounds stupid, but may be your problem)
    It could be that your system is fast enough to handle the load that DoTA outputs, but your hard drive isn't fast enough to go through the read/write commands to it, which is rarely the case.