BF4 FPS drops to almost 0 at random intervals, GPU at 135MHz during this.

[Brookcie]

Recently my gaming experience on BF4 has been plagued by MASSIVE FPS drop at random intervals it seems. Game runs very well on Ultra and out of nowhere it drops to 1 or 0 fps for about 30 seconds, then plays normally again.

I have used mutiple temperature testing software and they never go above the high 70s, and that's if they even GET THERE!
When the game shudders and FPS drops I notice through GPU-Z that my video card drops to 135MHz rather than the usual 1200+MHz when running smoothly. This also happens in single player mode, not just online.

I've looked at so many other forums and nothing has helped!

What I have tried:
1) Testing for overheating - GPU and CPU temps never go above the 70s.

2) Did a clean install of my GTX 970 driver, both the BETA and certified version ahve the problem.

3) Updated BIOS on motherboard.

4) Changed power settings to Maxiumum performance on Windows 7

5) NVIDIA control panel, set to Max performance rather than 'Adapative'

6) Disabled Vertical Sync

7) Disabled Origin overlay

8) Repaired the game using Origin

I have NO idea what else I can do! This didn't happen when I first started playing the game a couple years ago. I got back into this and now it's playing up!

My Specs:

ASROCK 980de3/u3s3 r2.0 motherboard (newest BIOS)

GeForce GTX 970 4Gb

16Gb Ram

AMD 8350 CPU

SilverStone 500W PSU

Windows 7 (updated)

 

[dudio]

Do you have a power supply?

 

[Brookcie]

Do you have a power supply?

Whoops. Yeah it's SilverStone 500W

 

[Brookcie]

Okay. So for some reason now, when it lags and the FPS drops to almost 0... the program GPU-Z says the GTZ 970 is still running at 1200+ MHz.

Before it would drop to 135MHz, but that seems to have gone but the drop in fps every minute still persists.

 

[DSzymborski]

What's the CPU usage? "Never goes above the high 70s" is way too hot for an FX-8350. You're supposed to keep that chip under 61 and if it's in the 70s, it's likely throttling heavily. It's hard to diagnose a possible GPU problem if your CPU is throttling significantly.

 

[Brookcie]

Okay here we have some real time values of when BF4 is lagging.
https://ibb.co/jguQMa



And here is 30 seconds after when it is running smoothly again.
https://ibb.co/fRvMuv


Note the differences in CPU load and GPU load, as well as the relative temps for each. Can anyone interpret these and tell me what is going on?

 

[razamatraz]

Which specific video card is it? What kind of cooler? 14% fan speed seems pretty low even for BF4 and makes me think that maybe it's displaying temps incorrectly and running the fans too slow. Can you try manually speeding them up to 50% or more and see if it still happens?

The other possibility is power management going weird. Try high performance mode if you are not on it already although it shouldn't fix it. Avast Antivirus has done this to me a few times in the past as well.

Other than that your readings look good so I'm not sure what else to try. What is RAM usage during play? I've seen memory leaks cause that specifically with Killer Ethernet (which your board doesn't have), but if RAM usage is getting close to your 16GB you probably have a bad driver on something especially if it's unpaged RAM.

 

[Brookcie]

So, I am back again. 2 years later (almost 3), I see I never marked this as "fixed"

Well from memory I bit the bullet and bought a new motherboard and CPU. The problem has vanished.

I believe the fix was the CPU, I live in a hot climate and perhaps the CPU was damaged slightly and didn't perform well at high performance things.

I bought and installed a Ryzen 2600x CPU and on a new motherboard, works fine - I think my old CPU was on the way out.

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