Generally speaking...Does GMOD generally run slower these days?

[Mongoose]

I have a Dell Inspiron laptop with an Intel HD 4000 integrated chipset (yeah, yeah, I know), 8 gigs of RAM, 1 TB HDD. it's about 6 years old, can run most Unreal Engine games at 30FPS at medium settings, Source has never had a problem for the most part. I was never able to use dynamic shadows, and I could never get it to run anything above DX9, mainly because Valve never added support for my graphics for Orange Box Source.

My computer is honestly pretty mediocre, and I will always admit that, but I never used to have as much trouble running GMod as I do now. I always at least got 30 FPS, but having reinstalled Gmod to dick around, I feel like I'm lucky to only get that with smaller maps, and it often plunges down really low, like 10-15 fps low. Terminal 6 was almost unplayable in single player, looking in certain directions on some maps destroys my FPS and can even cause me to crash, and that's fully aware that it's not a very well optimized map. Mods like VJ base for some reason are now so resource intensive that having 3-4 NPCs out at once can cause me to crash.

Full disclosure, I had a lot of addons, but these tend to be model packs, and have tried to clean those out to figure out if one of those is causing problems. But I hadn't had problems with GMod before I left on my trip, and I'm not 100% sure what may have transpired in 6 months that could have caused such a noticeable decline in performance.

Has anyone else noticed this? Is my computer just becoming senile? Has GMod somehow moved beyond my computer's minimum functionality? Is it Windows 10 finally wreaking havoc on my laptop's GPU usage in a way that I haven't foreseen?

 

[DTBWolfie]

-Edited to simplify-

Essentially, hardware obviously doesn't update. As software continues to update, its requirements, even if minimal, still increase over time as more features, aspects, coding, etc. are added, and hardware is basically left behind, continuing to struggle as its workload continues to increase.

I have the same laptop except an older version, and haven't updated to Windows 10 yet. I'm staying on Windows 8 just because I did a test update to Windows 10 back when they were allowing it and my system slowed down exceptionally, so I ended up reverting.

My best suggestion is to try to minimize the amount of things running at startup and just running in general on your PC, especially when gaming. I close just about everything out that I can with the exception of Chrome, Discord, Steam, and the game that I'm running.

 

[Mongoose]

Yeah, I suppose that's what I expected. I'm going to have to invest in a new PC anyway for Pix4D, ArcGIS, 3DSMax and stuff since I obviously don't have much of a powerful workstation on this laptop either. It just sucks that my modest gaming capabilities are falling off too.

 

[DTBWolfie]

Yeah, I suppose that's what I expected. I'm going to have to invest in a new PC anyway for Pix4D, ArcGIS, 3DSMax and stuff since I obviously don't have much of a powerful workstation on this laptop either. It just sucks that my modest gaming capabilities are falling off too.

Trust me, I feel for ya. The only game I can play now pretty much is GMod because it's the only thing that runs over 20 frames for me. It sucks to have to upgrade, especially when you have a pre-built laptop so you can't upgrade as you would a built desktop.

 

[Mongoose]

Yeah, I've definitely had worse, but it'll suck to retire this workhorse. The silver lining is that I can play games made after 2012 and things won't take a century to render, at least!