Drastically varrying frame rate

[Chette]

A few months ago I purchased a new laptop. It's not a "gaming" laptop by any stretch of the imagination, but the reviews I read led me to believe that it would be fine for DDO. And 90% of the time it is. Most of the time I have an excellent FPS rate of 50-200, very little lag and can turn my draw distance and other graphics setting all the way up. But about 10% of the time I log on and things look like ****. I have extremely low FPS and overwhelming lag, it is so bad that I can't even play. I get about 3-5 FPS when something intense is happening (i.e. raiding) and about 10-15 the rest of the time. Restarting my client doesn't usually work, and restarting my entire computer doesn't usually work. Turning my graphic settings down all the way doesn't do anything either. I just have to wait it out. It might take a day, it might take three, but eventually things go back to normal after enough restarts or rest or whatever.

My computer is a Lenovo W520 with an Nvidia Quadro 1000M graphics card. If anybody has any ideas as to what could be causing this occasional loss of performance, I would welcome any suggestions. If it were happening all the time that would be one thing, it would be something I can try to fix, but when it happens only 10% of the time and there doesn't appear to me to be anything different during that 10% of the time, I am really at a loss.

[donfilibuster]

Seems your system is new enough and you have checked things beforehand, so chances are you are seeing the so called "post u9 lag".

Raids seems to be particularily affected, perhaps related to the 'contagious lag' some people has talked about.
e.g. if someone has a spike and is stuck in place, you get lag yourself if you run near, can even crash.
Keep an eye open in case you witness anything strange like this, there's scarce reports.

Tips may vary.
Loading in public areas is rumoured to use more ram, which leads to being prone to other slowdowns, so try logout somewhere clear.
(even with high ram it will fill up eventually and begin swapping to disk, but a restart tends to fix it)
For public areas try tuning down the 'crowd quality' setting (i set it to zero).
In public areas you may also turn your object distance down from ultrahigh, which otherwise works fine in quests.

If all fails try setting the ddoclient process to high priority (in the task manager).
This should at least help make sure no other thing is interfering with performance.
Such as background programs you may believe are safe. (including alt-tabbing)
The gain is not big but fairly noticeably. (and in my case let me dish out the blasting without slowdowns)

As for real troubleshooting, i'd start looking at directx.

[Chette]

Thanks, I'll give that a shot. Willing to try pretty much anything as at 3-5 FPS in major battles, I can't do anything but stand in place and auto attack, hoping the boss is in front of me.