Forum Discussion
Gaming laptop stuttering/ freezing
Hello, I have an Omen gaming laptop. Intel Core processor, Nvidia GeForce RTX. I bought it two years ago and have been treating it very well, no suspicious downloads, no nothing.
Recently though I've noticed some bad stuttering. Like when I try to scroll, or load a new page, it freezes for a second before catching up with the action I had taken. Even as I type this, sometimes the screen freezes and then a few seconds later the letters pop up.
When I try to play video games the issue is even worse. Literally every 10 or so seconds the game lags and freezes for a second or two, it's impossible to play any games right now.
This issue only popped up this past week, and at first I could solve the issue by restarting my laptop, but now that doesn't fix it anymore. The laptop starts up fine, runs pretty quickly, no long loading times, it's up to date and no new updates are available. My storage isn't even close to full. Idk what could be causing this.
Usually the freezing isn't that bad if I'm just on google/ youtube or something. But if I've got an app like Discord or a game running in the background, the freezing becomes awful when I try to type something or open a new tab.
5 Replies
A buggy or corrupted graphics driver is the number-one suspect. Many users have found that simply updating, or sometimes rolling back, to a specific stable version of the Nvidia driver fixes the stuttering.
It says my graphics drivers are already up-to-date when I check them in my device manager
Your Omen laptop has two graphics processors: a power-efficient Intel integrated GPU (iGPU) for regular tasks and a powerful Nvidia discrete GPU (dGPU) for gaming. When the system gets confused about which one to use for a game or app, it can cause severe stuttering and lag. One user with an Omen Victus found their laptop ran perfectly when connected to an external monitor but stuttered badly on the internal screen because of a routing conflict with the Intel GPU.
Is there a way I can set which one is which so it stops getting confused?
Your description of the freezing being much worse when Discord is running in the background is a major clue. A common conflict involves Discord's "Hardware Acceleration" feature.
