FPS randomly drops causing games to freeze

creation88

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May 12, 2015
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I was able to play dark souls 3 on ultra graphics with no issues and about a month or two ago the game randomly started to freeze and I would see the fps drop to 57 and sometimes to 15 and anywhere in between. So I turned down the graphics to low and to no avail the same issue. I have noticed this same issue on The Forest and league of legends as of lately. I have read many articles on here saying that its not cool enough and that the system is overheating. I downloaded afterburner to see what my temperature was when playing darksouls 3 I even made the fans work on max during some play time. My GPU stays at around 45 to 55 Celsius and my CPU stays at about 50 to 55 Celsius. I have 3 top case fans 2 in front 1 fan in the back and 2 fans on my heat sink which is a hyper 212 I think. Does anyone have an idea on what is causing this? I am unfortunately leaning towards the graphics card is dying. Could this be the case?
Here are my computer specs if it helps. I don't quite remember if this started happening before or after I installed the new SSD could the SSD be an issue?

MotherBoard : msi gaming m7
Ram : Ripjaws V by g.skill 32GB 3200MHz
CPU : intel I7 6700K quadcore 4.0 GHz
SSD : samsung 950 pro M.2
GPU : msi Geforce GTX 970
PowerSupply : EVGA 750G

 
Solution
You could try Samsung's page to see if they have official information on how to set up correctly their drives for Win10. But in general, for SSDs, you just need to make sure the BIOS/UEFI settings are correct for the M.2 and sATA ports to use all of the capabilities of modern SSDs. And when creating the partitions, they are properly aligned. I do remember a problem when installing windows directly on top of an SSD and it leaving the partitions not aligned (you can google what this means, since I can't really remember). That could cause a drop in performance and other headaches.

Other than that, I have no other ideas.

Cheers!

creation88

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May 12, 2015
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4,540


I am not sure what I am looking for on the memory usage but depending on the area it could be at 2300 or 2800 stays somewhat steady unless I go to more graphically intense areas such as looking at the castle as a whole. When I was doing all this google was open on my other screen and sometimes is when I play dark souls. Other than that I don't run other programs when I play dark souls. When I play league I have napster running for music but it has never been an issue before. I did look at some other graphs one was voltage limit and that would drop down from 100% to 0% then right back up to 100% but this did not always correspond to the fps drop. Could this be an issue? also the cpu1 usage seemed unreasonably high and spiky when I looked at it on afterburner. Is there a possibility that my power supply is shot I have popped it a couple times using other wires from other modular power supplies by accident?
 
I don't think it's the PSU with the information you've provided so far.

The SSD bit is interesting though. Some SSDs are known to drop in performance after some usage and games that have to transit a lot of data might affect them faster than other types of games. You could do some tests with your SSD and see if you created the partitions correctly and if it's correctly set up.

Or the simple test is to run the games from the HDD drive you have and see if it happens again.

Other than that, the CPU bit of information could also point to something outside of the Video Card. Download a program called "Process Explorer". When you search for it, make sure you get it from the MS site. Once you have it, get familiar with it and take a close look at Disk and CPU usage while playing.

Cheers!
 

amtseung

Distinguished
If your SSD hasn't been trimmed/optimized in a while, your performance could drop drastically, especially if you've got a Windows page file on it. SSD's are more sensitive to capacity filled, and need to be optimized more frequently than HDD's.
 

creation88

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May 12, 2015
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I trimmed the drive and it seemed to have helped a lot as I had turned my graphics up to max on dark souls 3 and it still ran pretty fine with only two fps spikes down to 55 then back up when I clipped my camera into a staircase. Other then that it ran really smoothly. Although I have not further tested with other games yet. When I installed the Samsung 950 pro it was a hassle and I am not completely sure I have installed it properly. I had to go into the bios set it up for uefi and m.2 genie, then I had to download a program to format windows 10 for uefi mode because otherwise it would not boot at all when windows was installed. I installed Samsung's NVMe driver software specifically made for the 950. I just set up an over provision which I thought I had done previously. Does anything I did seem wrong or did I miss something? When I run Samsung's performance benchmark the sequential read and random read are extremely hindered.
 
You could try Samsung's page to see if they have official information on how to set up correctly their drives for Win10. But in general, for SSDs, you just need to make sure the BIOS/UEFI settings are correct for the M.2 and sATA ports to use all of the capabilities of modern SSDs. And when creating the partitions, they are properly aligned. I do remember a problem when installing windows directly on top of an SSD and it leaving the partitions not aligned (you can google what this means, since I can't really remember). That could cause a drop in performance and other headaches.

Other than that, I have no other ideas.

Cheers!
 
Solution