L4D2 intense lag with addons

-1

My copy of Left 4 Dead 2 was downloaded during the free download period on Steam (the Christmas Special), so I'm wondering if this is one of the problem.

I don't know why, but without addons, my laptop seems to be running the game fine. However, the map loading part is really slow though, took approx. a minute plus. If I play with addons, the loading is even slower, took about 3-4 minutes, and finally when it finishes the load, the game froze for another minute before the game responds. It also lags in certain parts of the map.

Last time when I play L4D2, this doesn't even happen. The problem might also be lack of RAM as the developers probably added a lot more new features.

My laptop specifications: OS: Windows 8 x64 RAM: 2GB CPU: Intel Core i5-2410M (2.3GHz) GPU: GeForce GT520MX 1GB HDD: 500GB (the game is stored in my D drive, 29.7GB left out of 219GB)

Solutions I've tried
1. Lowering video graphics (Disable Anti-aliasing, Disable vertical sync, set low paged pool memory available, etc.)
2. Verified integrity of game cache

PS: I prefer not to re-install the whole game.

If you plan on telling me to remove all the add-ons, I won't, because playing with the default weapons bore me.

MegaRodeon

Posted 2014-01-01T03:22:50.087

Reputation: 319

You do understand that your computer specifications barely meet the specifications for the game right? The re-installation of the game will NOT solve anything. – Ramhound – 2014-01-01T06:08:32.017

Barely meet? The game runs perfectly few months ago. No lag at all. – MegaRodeon – 2014-01-01T12:56:40.513

Answers

The bottleneck with loading is most likely the low RAM and low HDD read/write speed, the fix would be to lower the amount of data actually being loaded, so you'd have to do what you said you don't want to and get rid of the addons. Another fix would be to buy more RAM(reducing the amount of swapping) and/or an SSD hard drive, although try defragging your hard drive first because that might get a bit more speed out of it. The lag in the map is due to rendering, increasing the RAM most likely won't help and you need a better GPU, since you say it's a laptop you would have to buy a whole new one since the GPUs are soldered in. Personally, I find lowering the graphics settings a bit is usually cheaper than buying a whole new laptop.

user270595

Posted 2014-01-01T03:22:50.087

Reputation:

I guess you're right, I should lower as much graphics as possible. But the thing is that I played the game a year ago and it ran fine, there's no lagging at all, even with the add-ons. It loaded pretty fast too, approx. 30+ seconds. – MegaRodeon – 2014-01-01T03:39:04.917

1Well if you were using a 32bit OS at the time it would have used less RAM and it might have loaded faster, they may have improved the graphics or lost some optimization so updating your GPU driver might help with the lag in the game. – None – 2014-01-01T03:42:44.587

I found out the solution. I had to run a disk defragmentation. After making Windows analyze how fragmented my disk is, I was quite surprised. The D drive (where my copy L4D2 is located) was quite fragmented, and my W drive (my laptop is dual boot, Windows 7 installed in C while Windows 8 installed in W) was 14% fragmented, so that probably answered why the game loads slowly.

MegaRodeon

Posted 2014-01-01T03:22:50.087

Reputation: 319