Question Game has lag spikes without FPS drop; still displays the usual high FPS

Mar 2, 2021
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Hi there, I have a problem regarding the lag spikes on my computer when playing games as simple like Roblox. I've noticed it lags now to then however isn't displayed with any FPS drops. I've checked my Task Manager to see if there were any programs eating up my memory, which any of them don't apart from the Xbox DVR which somehow manages to run and lag my PC. I've disabled the crap on my PC like the Xbox captures, etc and uninstalled bloatware, cache and pretty much anything useless on the drive. I do however think the issue is related to V-Sync but it still lags even under 60FPS on a 144hz monitor. This is also specifically severe with Roblox only since I've tried other games like Valorant and they're fine. I do must mention that I have freesync enabled and the problem still persists.

RX 580 8GB
Ryzen 5 2600
16 GB RAM
650W PS
 
Perhaps it is hard drive load spikes. If the content to be displayed requires waiting for the hard drive, then I could see the possibility that the data being displayed appears to be unchanged (but with high frame rate...think of a load screen where the visible content appears to stop changing, but the frame rate is still high), then it might just be waiting for the hard drive. Is your hard drive solid state, or old fashioned physical platters spinning? If this is the older physical spinning platters, then you could defrag the disk to perhaps improve it, but this does not apply to a solid state drive, and you'd basically see miracles in performance improvement if you were to switch from physical platters to solid state.
 
Mar 2, 2021
2
0
10
Perhaps it is hard drive load spikes. If the content to be displayed requires waiting for the hard drive, then I could see the possibility that the data being displayed appears to be unchanged (but with high frame rate...think of a load screen where the visible content appears to stop changing, but the frame rate is still high), then it might just be waiting for the hard drive. Is your hard drive solid state, or old fashioned physical platters spinning? If this is the older physical spinning platters, then you could defrag the disk to perhaps improve it, but this does not apply to a solid state drive, and you'd basically see miracles in performance improvement if you were to switch from physical platters to solid state.
It is running on the SSD, both the game and system. I always thought it was the game poorly optimized but I noticed it suddenly happening more frequently now.
 
It is running on the SSD, both the game and system. I always thought it was the game poorly optimized but I noticed it suddenly happening more frequently now.

I don't know what the cause is, but if you run task manager at the same time (assuming you have two monitors, otherwise this won't help), the during the lag does either the CPU or GPU drop in percent use? It would be nice to know if perhaps one component starves another component. If the task manager itself also pauses, then perhaps it is CPU starving GPU. Don't know.