Question Demanding Games are causing sudden frame drops

[burning_phoneix]

Hello everyone,

I got a new PC a couple years ago for gaming and as one does when you get a new monster PC, you play 10 year old games on it for quite a while before you install any really demanding games.

I recently noticed this issue in big open world games that I bought this PC specifically to play. Namely; Red Dead Redemption 2, Death Stranding and Ghosts of Tsushima. For a while it was fine but then I noticed the same issue with all three of them:

I would play for a while and then the screen would go black for a split second before returning at a much choppier frame rate. In Death Stranding's case, also at a lower resolution (though I think this second issue is a byproduct of a widescreen mod in that particular game). I can return the game to "normal" by going into settings and resetting the graphic settings (usually by changing the resolution back and forth) but sometimes the game would just crash (RDR2 in particular).

Here are my specs:

Case: Phanteks Enthoo 719 Super Tower Case
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X
CPU Cooler: Corsair H115i 280mm Liquid Cooler
Motherboard: ASUS Prime X570-Pro
Memory (RAM): 32GB DDR4-3600
Graphics Card: AMD RX 6800XT
Operating System Drive: 500GB NVME Solid State Drive
Storage Drive: 4TB Mechanical Hard Drive
Power Supply: 850W Gold
Operating System: Windows 10 Home
Monitor: Samsung Odyssey G9 5120x1440p

As you can see by the monitor, even though I'm outputting at 1440p, it's pretty much 4K in resolution by pixels pushed onto the screen so I was scared I was somehow overheating a component or other but checking temps and load during gameplay, I can hit 70ish FPS while my graphics card hovers around 70C and my CPU around 60C quite comfortably. CPU utilization isn't too high at around 30 or 40% during gameplay so I don't think there's a bottleneck there.

I honestly chalked it up to one or two games being buggy but now that it's happened to Ghosts of Tsushima when I got it today made me certain there's some hardware issue at play but I have no idea what it is!

 

[boju]

Some things you can try

High performance mode in Windows. Adrenaline doesn't have power modes like Nvidia does so i believe power mode for Amd graphics cards is controlled by Windows. Might help stabilise the graphics card if refresh rate is causing it to stumble. Additionally, could try lower Hz to see if same thing happens.

Graphics driver, try an older version. Can also search which driver versions people are mostly happier about.

Toggle Sam (Smart Access Memory aka ReBar/Resizable Bar) on or off in Bios. Can also disable in Adrenaline on the driver level but requires a restart.

Pagefile, try limit to initial 1024MB and max 2048. Just helps prevent pagefile growing to excessive sizes after longish plays, especially if OS drive has 100GB or less space, with ReBar on and lots of ram, mirroring that size to drive can lead to performance issues.

 

[burning_phoneix]

I've tried all of the above and unfortunately they didn't work.

Luckily, working through some other solutions, I've found the culprit. One of the drivers over the years must've been installed incorrectly as I did a clean install of the latest AMD drivers rather than a straight upgrade and that resolved the issue!

Thanks for that SAM tip though, not only did I fix my issue with all three games but I'm getting 5-10 extra frames in each of them!