Is there any way to DECREASE my framerate while gaming?

[Carnagath]

Short prologue that should clarify my question: A few months ago I bought a Sony laptop with an i5 sandy bridge @2.3ghz, Geforce GT540M, 4 gigs of ram and win 7 home 64. At first it worked well, but then came what would be later considered the hottest summer that Greece has seen at least in the last century, with temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius every day for 3 months (and counting). This hellish environment made my laptop pretty much unusable for gaming, everything I run on it apart from browser-based games causes it to overheat, which causes my cpu to downclock itself, which in turn causes constant horrible slowdowns, making games that normally my hardware would be able to handle fine into unplayable messes.

The only game I can play fine is Diablo 3. The only tweak I made that effectively eliminated the random slowdowns was capping my framerate to 30, which the game allows you to do via its option menu. Apparently, that allowed my system to maintain a viable temperature which smoothed out the performance an awful lot.

Unfortunately, no other game that I know of has such an option. Most games offer Vsync options, that basically cap the framerate to 60 on "most" monitors, but that's not enough to make the games playable for me. I was wondering if you guys know of any good program that will allow me to manually cap my framerate while playing games, or of any other method through which I can achieve what I did with Diablo 3. Thanks in advance.

 

[Supernova1138]

Unfortunately most games don't have any options to cap your framerate that low. You can try to lower the refresh rate on your monitor so Vsync will correspondingly lower the framerate. For most LCD panels the minimum framerate is around 50Hz or so, capping games at 50FPS, so that might not fix it for you.

I think the nvidia control panel has overclocking options, another option is to underclock your graphics chip, this will allow it to run cooler, and make the CPU do less work, but will also cause a performance hit.

Sadly with laptops, especially ones oriented more towards gaming is that they do not have adequate cooling to operate in environments where the ambient temperature is 40 degrees celsius. Laptops are generally designed to run in an environment about half that temperature. If you can't wait out the summer or find an air conditioned room to play in, and underclocking and lowering the refresh rate doesn't help, the only other solution would be to buy a laptop cooling pad and see if that helps. Problem with cooling pads is they don't work with every laptop. Cooling pads rely on the air intakes being on the bottom and the hot air being exhausted out the side of the laptop, if your laptop exhausts hot air out the bottom, a cooling pad won't help you, and will make the heat situation worse.

 

[Living_Brain]

You're screwed man. You could always lock yourself in a room with a state-of-the-art air conditioner, get a cooling pad, leave the laptop there for 5 hrs. and play in the ice-cold room. Otherwise, no options for you. [including the post(s) above]

 

[SnowyGamester]

I'd assume most games have such an option, it just isn't visible to the user. You'd probably benefit from googling how to with specific games, most would probably have a console command, config file modification or startup parameter to handle it. Also turning the graphics way down with the vsync cap on wouldn't hurt if you haven't tried that.

 

[Zaik]

These sorts of things are often buried in .ini or .init files, googleing specific games and ini or init edits should help.

 

[Living_Brain]

This^. Lower your performance. Less heat output.