[SOLVED] FPS/GPU usage Dropping when game window is in focus?

[dklims]

Hey guys... I have forever had the issue in bf4 (and some other games) that when the game window is in focus my fps and GPU Usage% drop... its super frustrating.

Here is what my GPU usage looks like in game (lots of downspikes.)

and here is what it looks like when i click out of the game window but still have the game on screen (just out of focus) and the game runs at high fps.

I have already tried clean install of new drivers multiple times

Any ideas?

 

[kerberos_20]

windows resource management
whats your gpu ram/system ram usage?

 

[dklims]

windows resource management
whats your gpu ram/system ram usage?

when the GPU usage is 100% the game runs at about 120fps - its when the gpu usage is dipping constantly i get low fps - but its spikes down... like 120,120,120,15,13,20,120,13
Ram is at 14GB/32GB

FYI:
I am running a i7 6900k, 32GB of RAM, 980ti, and the game is on an ssd

 

[kerberos_20]

pic from gpu-z sensors page

 

[dklims]

pic from gpu-z sensors page

 

[kerberos_20]

the other tab named sensors (while gaming)

 

[dklims]

the other tab named sensors (while gaming)

(not to repeat myself but note: the fps draps WITH the dropage of gpu usage)

 

[kerberos_20]

last picture doesnt show any performance difference...can u run game for a while, when it starts dropin fps, thats when u make picture from gpu-z

 

[dklims]

last picture doesnt show any performance difference...can u run game for a while, when it starts dropin fps, thats when u make picture from gpu-z

yupp - I had just started it up... give me a couple minutes and ill have somethin

Thank you for taking the time to help!

 

[dklims]

last picture doesnt show any performance difference...can u run game for a while, when it starts dropin fps, thats when u make picture from gpu-z

And here is a graph on CPU core #1.... could it really be a the first core maxing out? I would think a 6900k could handle bf4 with relative ease... I know its a little slower than the 4 core i7's at single threaded tasks but still... that seems crazy right (overall cpu usage is about 29%)

 

[kerberos_20]

gpu is fine
can u play in windowed mode to see your background processes activity from task manager?

 

[dklims]

gpu is fine
can u play in windowed mode to see your background processes activity from task manager?

played for a couple minutes and actually you can see the cpu usage dipping all over the place too

Here is how bad/inconsistent the fps is

 

[dklims]

I FINALLY FIGURED THIS OUT. So I still have the Intel i7 6900k (8 core/ 16 thread processor). If I disable half the threads by setting the affinity to "cores (really threads) 0-7 the game runs perfectly fine. There must be a threading issue with the game or engine where maybe they didn't account for having so many threads and the main thread has to "wait" for the other threads to finish what ever they are doing... can't really say for sure without actually seeing the code and debugging it but that's my theory.

I wrote a really quick powershell script and replaced the shortcut for "bf4" with a shortcut calling my script which just starts the game, waits a few seconds, then, sets the affinity to cores 0-7.

start "I:\Origin Games\Battlefield 4\bf4.exe"
Start-Sleep -s 15
$thisProcess = Get-Process bf4
$thisProcess.ProcessorAffinity = 0xFF