Lagging during gaming on a laptop is one of the most common reasons for frustration. In many cases, it is more observable during playing high-end graphics games like Batman: Arkham Knight, Battlefield V, and Crysis 3.
If you are new into gaming and don’t know what lagging is then it means your laptop can’t process enough Frames Per Second (FPS) for smooth gaming. However, apart from low FPS or lagging, you may also face some other issues like your laptop is freeze or taking too much time to respond.
So, lagging or freezing this kind of issue gives you a bad gaming experience. This is why it is very important to know what is the reason for lagging so that we can take some necessary steps to solve that issue and get a better gaming experience.
There are some common things that can cause lagging or freezing in gaming laptops which are the following:
10 Reasons Why Your Gaming Laptop Is Lagging
1. Processor & Graphics Card Throttling Due To Overheating
To make gaming laptops portable, processors and graphics cards are crammed into a small compact chassis. Due to this, it limits the airflow inside the small chassis, and without proper heat management hardware components generate more heat which causes thermal throttling.
Actually, thermal throttling is an in-built technology that protects the system by slowing down the speed of the CPU and GPU, in a result, it cools down the internal a bit which saves it from any kind of permanent damage. Also, when the throttling is happening, the system automatically reduces the performance and this is why it starts to lag, screen tear, or stutter.
If you have or buy a gaming laptop from MSI then it has its own software called MSI afterburner which allows you to check whether the gaming laptop is overheating. If it’s overheating then you’ll need to take the required steps to cool down your gaming laptop.
2. Slower Internet Speed When Playing Online Games
Only your gaming laptop lag when playing online games on platforms like Google Stadia, Steam, Xcloud, etc., then the problem might be your internet connection speed. Because playing online games required a stable and fast-speed internet connection.
If you are new to online gaming then you might be thinking why you need fast internet speed. So, here I want to make it clear first, during online gaming data needs to be continuously transferred between the laptop and gaming server. And if your internet connection is slow, then the data also be transferred slowly between the laptop and server and this is how you’ll experience lag during gaming.
Therefore, you need to make sure that your internet connection working properly or has a high-speed internet connection, so you may not face a lagging problem.
3. Multiple External Gaming Peripherals Connected To Your Laptop
Usually, external devices for gaming like monitor, gaming keyboard, gaming mouse, cooling pad, etc., can put an extra load on the system by using a processor, RAM, and graphics card resources.
However, how much your laptop is lagging depends on how many gaming peripherals you have connected to your gaming laptop and also the number of resources they need to run.
Let’s take an example, if you have connected an external monitor to your gaming laptop then it will face more lagging issues than a gaming keyboard and gaming mouse. The reason is that, to show high graphics gaming visuals on your monitor, the laptop’s CPU and graphics card need to work harder and faster to render high-resolution images.
4. Too Many Apps Running In The Background
If too many apps are running in the background is another major reason which causes lagging issues on your gaming laptop. Also, it doesn’t only eat up CPU and GPU resources but sometimes they run some random updates and scans in the background which can cause to slow down your gaming laptop.
If you have no deeper technical knowledge then you should know that the apps which you have opened are not the only apps that are running in the background but some apps start automatically when you just turned on your gaming laptop.
To see which apps automatically start when you turned on your laptop then you need to open the task manager by clicking the Ctrl + Alt + Delete button. Once it’s open you’ll need to click on the Startup tab where you can see all the apps which automatically open on startup.
So, to stop that app to start automatically you need to click on that app, and at the bottom right you can see the Disable button just click on that and you are done.
But keep in mind, you should not stop or disable all the apps from starting automatically because some of the apps are important such as Windows related apps and they need to start automatically during the laptop’s start-up.
5. Gaming Without Plugged Into A Charging Outlet
As we all know, gaming laptops have inside powerful components like processors and graphics cards which are power-hungry. This is one of the major reasons why gaming laptops did not run for very long on a battery without being plugged into a charging outlet.
However, to increase the laptop’s battery life there is an option called Power Saving mode which limits the power supply to the internal components. But due to power limitations, processors and graphics cards can’t be able to use their full power and this is why it is not good for gaming.
Therefore, without plugging the charger into a power socket gaming laptops can’t able to provide their best performance which ultimately causes lagging.
All in all, keeping your laptop plugged into the charging socket while gaming improves overall performance. Also, the pop-up which appears when the battery is low will not irritate you in midst of a game.
6. Doesn’t Meet The Minimum System Requirements
The games you are planning to play on your gaming laptop occurs different system requirements to run them smoothly and this is why when you are going to buy a laptop you must need to keep this in mind. If in case, your gaming laptop fails to meet the minimum system requirements of your favorite games then you are likely to face lagging issues during gaming.
If you feel that your gaming laptop slows down while you are playing any specific games then your laptop might be failing to meet the system requirement according to your games. If you don’t know how to check the system requirement of the games that you want to play then simply visit this website – systemrequirementslab.com.
Well, according to the game’s system requirements if your laptop’s RAM or storage can’t fit that requirement then you can easily be able to expand them. But when it comes to the processor and dedicated graphics card then in this case you’ll need to buy a brand new gaming laptop because these components are not upgradeable.
7. Running Laptop On Outdated Drivers
Running a gaming laptop on outdated drivers is also one of the reasons for lagging and especially if your gaming laptop’s graphics card is not up to date. Manufacturers of graphics cards such as Nvidia and AMD continuously release new updates for the graphics cards to add new features and resolve some existing bugs.
On top of that, having a DirectX driver on your gaming laptop helps the games you want to play by working directly with video and audio software, and eventually, it improves the overall gaming laptop’s performance and solves lagging issues.
8. Playing Games On A Low-End Laptop At High Settings
Also, when graphics-related features are enabled like ambient occlusion, anti-aliasing, shadows, and ray tracing then a dedicated graphics card has to put extra effort to do rendering and processing. This is why if your gaming laptop’s graphics card is not capable enough then you’ll likely face a delay while gaming.
This thing happens mainly while you are playing high graphics games on low end gaming laptop. But when it comes to high-end gaming laptops they have powerful hardware configurations that can be able to run almost all the latest games on high settings without any trouble.
If you have a gaming laptop which lags while gaming then you can do one thing is to play games on a lower graphics settings which may help to reduce the lagging. Many of you might be thinking that how it can reduce the lagging, then in order to lower the graphics settings it reduces the load on the CPU and GPU and this is how it also reduces the chances of lagging.
Lowering the graphics settings it includes reducing the display resolution and disabling some other additional gaming-related features like ray tracing from the game’s settings menu.
9. For Gaming Using The Wrong Graphics Card
If you are a noob then you should know that gaming laptop has two types of graphics card which include a Dedicated Graphics Card (separate from the CPU) and the second one is Integrated Graphics (Integrated with the CPU).
When playing high graphics games then it is recommended to use the dedicated graphics card because it is powerful than the integrated graphics and also renders the images faster. In addition, it also provides better FPS (Frames per Second) and a smooth gaming experience without any kind of issues like lagging or stuttering.
Before you start to play your favorite games make sure that the dedicated graphics card is set as the main GPU or not if it’s not then you will need to do that by going to the graphics card control panel and do some required changes.
10. Don’t Have Enough RAM
Having sufficient RAM ensures that all the resources that the processor needs while running games or other apps can be easily accessed and updated quickly. On another side, if your gaming laptop doesn’t have enough RAM then the processor is required to bring that data directly from the storage such as HDD or SSD, which makes the process much slower.
Eventually, you will face lagging or stuttering issues which makes the overall gaming experience poor. Well, for gaming you need at least 8GB of RAM but if you may also want to use it for some other purpose along with gaming then 8GB also might be not enough.
However, if you want to use some other gaming features also like ray tracing then definitely it requires more RAM. Let’s take an example, in the recent update of Call of Duty its minimum requirement of RAM is 8GB but if you want to use ray tracing then you’ll need 12GB of RAM.
Final Verdict
So these are the most common reasons for gaming laptops lag and most of the gamers pass from this issue once in a while. For gamers, if a gaming laptop lags during intense gaming sessions then it is very frustrating for them.
If you are one who is facing the lagging issue for the first time then go through this article and try the above solution one by one and see which works for you.
Note: If your gaming laptop just started lagging suddenly then there is a chance it may be because of any software update, OS update, hardware install, due to suspicious file, or any kind of major changes in configuration settings.
