Unusually low FPS on Minecraft

[antoniu200]

On my brother's laptop Lenovo G570, like a month ago, Minecraft runned at 60 FPS. After 2 weeks, the FPS decreased at 30. Another 2 weeks, the FPS decreased at 10. He's using the same version every day. I tried updating Java, reinstalling video driver, reinstalling Minecraft and installing Optifine to decrease the settings. Nothing worked. What to do?

[DaveLembke]

Did he go in and alter the graphics settings in the game to be set to the max from the default which would have been set at clean install?

I'd check to see if the settings have been set to the max to try to get better graphics in game with integrated gpu which sometimes dont work well.

[antoniu200]

No, he didn't. The settings are the same as usual.

[DaveLembke]

I'd look in task manager when the game is running and see if anything else is hogging resources. Anything else running that is in the top 3 or 4 listed as consuming the most CPU. You can sort by percentage and have them listed from most to least. Any that are constantly a resource hog will stick in the top 4 usually with others below it shuffling as they are more or less a hog. Write down the name of the process that is eating up CPU etc.

Another thing to check into is that if the laptop runs hot it can throttle itself to stay cool so I would run speedfan on this and set a graph for CPU and GPU temps, play the game and then minimize of end game after 5 minutes and look back at the graph and make sure the temps are working in the cool enough zone. Any that spike up to beyond 65C usually indicate an issue with cooling. Laptops have been known to have cooling issues at times, however most of the newer ones are pretty good at remaining cool.

You already went for the #1 culprit most of the time which is video driver. Which as long as it was the correct one then this is not an issue. A resource hog other than Minecraft could be the cause of CPU latency that also would slow down the frame rate, or the laptop is heating up and due to modern electronics that try to protect themselves from melt down, its Thermal Throttling itself ( lowering its own performance ) to avoid a melt down if running too hot.

[antoniu200]

It can't run too hot! The laptop is capable of running the game ar 60 and over fps and in task manager are the normal processes. The coolers are ok. May it be malware?

[DaveLembke]

Malware is possible. When looking in task manager at processes you will want to make sure that you have clicked on the box "Show Processes from All Users" otherwise you can have something eating up CPU cycles that goes sight unseen. I'd suggest downloading and running malwarebytes from https://www.malwarebytes.org/lp/sem/5/?gclid=CLrfhMDfo8cCFcWPHwodf7AFXQ as well as what antivirus are you running on this system and have you updated the definitions to be latest and performed a full system scan without any problems. As well as has this system ever been infected showing a positive detection for any problems within the last month to where other problems may be lurking from a trojan etc?

If temperatures are confirmed to be running cool with a tool like speedfan vs assumed, video driver is correct, then its likely something that is stealing resources.

The quickest fix would be if you backup all data to an external drive or thumb drive and reload the system back to clean factory installation state in which its as clean as the day you took it out of the box to power it. This fixes the problems 99.999% of the time unless there is a hardware issue or MBR Virus etc.

[antoniu200]

It had 44 viruses!!! And I told him to scan the computer at least once per month!

[DaveLembke]

Yup that would do it. If you have any problems cleaning out the problems let us know.