Game performs oddly.

I bought the game yesterday, and it ran at around 14fps, which isn't great, but better than nothing. When I lowered or increased the graphics settings, nothing happened-there was no performance increase. The FPS only lowered when I spawned in another vehicle. I looked around the forum and people we're having similar problems, but (correct me if I am wrong) it was because there CPU was overworked and at 100% in the task manager screen. I suspected similar, but when I checked it only used around 30% of the CPU and 40% of the memory. When I went to play this morning it only ran at 7fps for some reason. After updating the game and making sure I had the newest driver for my graphics card, there was still no improvement. I checked and couldn't find anything running in the background or something to make the frame rate lower. Is it the game? has my computer done something odd? Can this be solved?

Here are my specs: (I am a bit of a noob, so I just took these from the properties screen in my computer)
AMD A8-4500M APU with Radeon graphics
1.90 GHz
6GB of RAM
64bit, x64 processor
Quad core

It's a windows 8 laptop, BTW

 

When you play the game try pressing "J" if the your FPS increases substantially then your CPU is too slow.

 

When I pressed J the FPS increased to about 13, increasing it by about 5fps. I woudn't call that a substantial increase.
And it still doesn't explain why the game was running at 14fps yesterday and 7-8fps today.

I've checked the specs, and I have a quad core processor and more RAM than needed for moderate settings. Surely this means the game can run faster than 7fps, or even faster than 14.

 

your cpu clock speed is a bit low, 1.9GHZ, not sure if that would affect FPS (I think it would.)
Knowing it's a laptop really makes it harder to deal with, because if it was a desktop you could maybe overclock (depending on your cooling), That would've helped.
You can OC on a laptop, its very risky though.

 

game isnt really fluid for me either...cpu issue too i guess.
got a gtx 465, which is enough since there is no change at all in fps no matter what settings i choose...
cpu is q8200 @2,3 ghz, quad core, but i guess it only uses one core.

nothing more than the default cooler, and no exp in OC'ing either...so im kinda lost

 

It is weird. I don't know much about computers, or about the technical side of games, but it seems weird that the game runs so poorly and changing the settings doesn't increase fps. Every car and every map has the same fps. Surely things like textures and lighting are done my the CPU, so lowering them would increase the frame rate., and so would a smaller map and car. And I have no idea why the performance dropped overnight.

 

i'd suggest forget about OC'ing if you have no experience, you might fry your laptops components as they are all squished into a small frame.

 

isnt a laptop, but anyway, wasnt going to try
gonna upgrade MB/CPU next few months.

 

Ah, sorry I thought you were the OP XD
Good luck with your cpu upgrade, can be tricky to do.

 

This PC is quite a toaster. CPU clock is too low. It's like having i7 1.7Ghz.

 

The game use several cores, I've seen up to 73% CPU usage by the game which means it's using at least 3 cores (since I have a quad core). Your CPU is old and slow by today's standard.

 

So do I have a really crappy computer? I know it isn't the best out there, but it is only 6 months old and can run most games I play on medium (or sometimes high) with about 30fps. On RoR 0.4 a well-optimized car (Like anything Gabe made) could run at 30fps fine, yet Beamng is supposed to be better optimized than RoR.

 

Yes, your CPU is a budget CPU. Notebookcheck says "If compared to Intels Core-i3-series, the A8-4500M offers less performance in most cases. Nonetheless, CPU performance from the AMD processor should be sufficient for all daily workloads like Office, Internet browsing and even light video editing or gaming." http://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-A-Series-A8-4500M-Notebook-Processor.74884.0.html. This game is very CPU heavy because of the physics.

 

Great, I guess is isn't as good as I thought. So, does the poor CPU mean that even lowering the Graphics settings increase the frame rate? It makes no sense that no matter what the settings are, the performance is unchanged. It says it is only using 30% of the CPU, but if it couldn't cope, surely it would be using 100%?

 

It makes perfect sense. It's the physics that your PC can't handle, not the graphics. Someone said in another thread that the game uses one core per vehicle (hence the low total CPU usage) and that doesn't work well with your CPU since the performance per core is low. I wonder if it would be possible to limit the physics FPS and if that would help, running the physics at 1900+ FPS (it does for me on the grid map with one vehicle) seems a bit unnecessary to me.