Question Constant lag spikes in several games, can't see any reason for it

frostedKIVI

Reputable
Jun 30, 2015
3
0
4,510
For a good while now i've been having constant lag spikes in quite a lot of games, and i cant seem to pinpoint what the issue might be.
Some games a restart usually fixes the issue for a while, some, there is no fix.

(Also Facebook from my browser is unuseably laggy as well, dunno might have something to to with this)

So first, my hardware:
i7-4790
gtx 1080
12Gb ram

And the affected games:
Rainbow 6 siege (restart fix)
StarCraft 2 (restart sometimes fix)
And very curiously Dota 2 has a bit different behavior, it has a lag spike at set intervals all the time, but most interestingly, my own custom written game engine suffers from the EXACT same issue, and with the full MSVC debugger attached to my own game i cant find any reason for the lag and it runs like a charm on other systems, and what makes me think it's the same issue, is that both Dota 2 and my own engine use SDL2 for rendering and they both have the exact same type of spikes.
Here, i linked the frametime graph from my own SDL2 based engine, and this the same behavior as Dota2.

https://emalm.ml/?p=DThCF

Any idea to troubleshoot this?
I'm happy to provide any further details.
 
May 18, 2019
6
1
15
Did you OC your GPU by any chance ? If the overclock is too high and unstable it might cause random lag spikes.
Another thing is when your RAM is full and your pc is dumping to the pagefile or when your VRAM runs out then the pc starts dumping to RAM.
 

frostedKIVI

Reputable
Jun 30, 2015
3
0
4,510
Did you OC your GPU by any chance ? If the overclock is too high and unstable it might cause random lag spikes.
Another thing is when your RAM is full and your pc is dumping to the pagefile or when your VRAM runs out then the pc starts dumping to RAM.

My gpu doesnt have any OC on it aside from the standard nvidia turbo thing.
As for paging, it is a possibility, but when i run my own gameengine, overall ram usage is low, and i cant see any evidence of paging, memory access times are consistently low, and the issue persists in a low ram usage environment too, like, 4-5Gb used from 12Gb with my game using only a few hundred megs.


What is the temperatures of your CPU/GPU? and to be honest, your processor is getting old pairing it with a 1080 will probably give you a bottleneck somehow.
CPU and GPU temps stay at decent levels, 80deg on the GPU under heavy load, low 70's on the CPU, and i know my CPU is aging but games like Dota 2 StarCraft 2, and my really basic 2D game engine really souldnt lag even if my CPU is getting old now.
 
May 18, 2019
6
1
15
I would probably reinstall the drivers by first removing them using DDU in safe mode.
Then check your bios settings if it's not some thermal throttling setting which kicks in on 70 degrees.
Make sure that both your nvidia panel power management is set to prefer maximum performance and that your windows power plan is at high/ultimate performance.
Uninstall any control software which you don't use which might be changing the power plan.
Scan your system with a good anti virus if you have it or at least malwarebytes. (There are even bitcoin mining viruses which might be putting your pc under a lot of pressure)

Simply verify all the settings, uninstall all the garbage.

Those temps are quite high for the gear you have. I'm running a 2080 Ti OCed to the limit and a i9 9900k which can get hot AF and my temps are never going above 60.

//EDIT

Another thing which I just remembered from past experiences is a disk failure. If your hdd / ssd is failing it might result in a terrible performance (random stutters / freezes, unexplained bad performance, even bsods at some point)
 
Last edited: