I am currently on an older vista laptop with an amd turion platform with radeon 3100 graphics. Recently i have run into some odd performance quirks. The first is that any source game, be it garry's mod or counterstrike, performs below what could be expected with a fairly decent platform, the biggest quirk of all is that crysis 1 will run on medium with about 20 fps and minecraft will run about 70. Is this just an issue with windows vista or is it just a problem with the 3100 ati graphics series? Before anyone says 3100 sucks, I know, and im not planning on using this laptop for gaming mostly travel and movies. To try and clear up any questions it is a toshiba satellite with a 2 GHz amd Turion dual core that is running 32 bit vista and from my best guess is from around 2008, and like all of amd's processors its 64 based. Would a defragment help? or is it just an antiquated rechnoligy issue?
Minecraft isn't a particularly demanding game, I'm surprised you can run Crysis at all, and you never mentioned what kind of playability you were getting with Source Games, but those shouldn't be too bad. If I were you, I'd double check the drivers are updated, and use GPU-z to monitor GPU utilization (can monitor to txt logs) and fire up a Source game. If the GPU utilization constantly maxed, then your graphics just suck.
Fragmentation doesn't affect gaming performance past loading. I'm fairly sure it's just your computer is just old, but then again, counter-strike is an old game, and source games aren't particular demanding either.
i have to set the game to low on almost all source games and the cpu is not being heavily used constantly other than when i game and only source games ramp up both cores to 100 percent, in crysis it only utilized 100 percent on one core and about 74 percent on the other.
I'm more concerned about the GPU. If it was a CPU bottleneck, adjusting graphics settings wouldn't help. However, a CPU bottleneck is a plausible. Again, Source games aren't particularly demanding either. Counter strike particularly only requires a 1.7GHz single-core Pentium 4. A dual-core Turion should be more than enough. Again, I suspect it's the GPU.
Use GPU-z. Once you download it, fire it up. Under the "Sensors" tab, tick the box that says "Log to File". You can easily see in screenshot below. Then start up your game. Play a few minutes, then close out of GPU-z and check the log file.
http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/SysInfo/GPU-Z/
thanks
It was a bottleneck between the cpu and gpu the gpu is slightly underpowered for the cpu. The problem is that the gpu uses system ram and has lower speeds on the ram, something like 1066 Mhz ram, and there is another bottleneck within the bottleneck, its bottleneck seption, the gpu is using 1.7 gb of the system ram for vram wich is completely unnesicary. My final conclusion, dont buy a laptop that doesnt have a good dedicated card that runs off of system memory.