L4D2 Frame drops?

BulletInAction2

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Mar 30, 2014
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When playing L4D2 I stay around the 90's - 180's. But when there is a horde it drops to like 57 or 48. Is this normal when lots of stuff goes down in that game?

FX-8320 @ 4.4Ghz
GTX 660 2GB OC
8GB DDR3 RAM

I play on max everything with V-sync off.
 
Solution

Oh I'm playing at x4 AA. But I will try effects to medium. Could an FX-8320 hold up to 5Ghz with Hyper 212 EVO CPU cooler?

BulletInAction2

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Ahahh glad I'm not the only one. Is there anyway to make it not drop? I know it's not my PC, as I'm playing BF4 High settings 60FPS.
 

doubletake

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Sep 30, 2012
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What settings are you running at? Generally, if you're not on an Intel processor, you should leave effects detail settings in Source-engine games to medium as they don't use more than 2-3 cores max (and Intel processors just do better in these games thanks to higher IPC), and in L4D2, large hordes really start to tax the CPU. I can run this game at triple screen resolutions with 8xMSAA and even then sometimes the game will CPU bottleneck as it struggles to calculate all the physics while feeding two GPUs.
 

BulletInAction2

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Everything maxed. So turning the effects to medium will stop it frame-drops and keep it above 70?

 

doubletake

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I assume by max you mean even AA turned up to 16xQ CSAA? I'm pretty sure even the 660 can keep up to 100+fps with that on, however, you might want to turn down the CPU performance options. First try setting Effects detail to medium, and if that doesn't help significantly improve your fps during large hordes, try disabling multi-core rendering. Another thing you could try is to overclock your CPU as this game is more dependent on clock speed rather than having more cores.
 

BulletInAction2

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Oh I'm playing at x4 AA. But I will try effects to medium. Could an FX-8320 hold up to 5Ghz with Hyper 212 EVO CPU cooler?
 
Solution