I’m gaming on my PC laptop, playing through both Steam and the EA app, but after about 20 minutes of gameplay my game experiences severe lag spikes and even freezes for a few seconds. After that, it usually goes back to normal until it happens again. The only way to fix this temporarily is to restart the game. My laptop has an RTX 3050 mobile GPU and an i5 12500H processor with decent cooling, so I’m not sure if it’s overheating. Also, when the lag happens, I see a “ucmd lag” icon pop up in the corner. Has anyone else dealt with this or have any idea what could be causing it?
4 Answers
This sounds like it could be tied to your hardware or thermal issues. Even though your laptop has decent cooling, sometimes the GPU or CPU can still throttle if a sensor detects a temperature spike, causing those lag spikes and freezes. I’d recommend monitoring your temperatures with a tool like MSI Afterburner or HWMonitor while you play to see if anything is hitting high temps when the lag occurs.
Seeing that “ucmd lag” icon means the game client itself is detecting latency or server communication issues. It might not be purely your hardware. Have you tried playing while connected to a different, more stable network to rule out internet problems? Sometimes packet loss or high ping can cause the game to freeze up like that.
Another thing to try is lowering your in-game graphics settings, especially shadows and textures. The RTX 3050 mobile is decent but can struggle with some newer games at high settings, especially on laptops with limited cooling. Reducing the load might stop those freezes without needing to restart the game.
Since you already updated your drivers and the problem still happens, it might be worth checking if there are any background processes eating CPU or disk resources during gameplay. Sometimes Windows updates or other programs can kick in unexpectedly and cause stutter. Also, make sure your power settings are set to ‘High Performance’ so your laptop isn’t throttling down the CPU or GPU.
