Game stutters after being minimized for an extended period of time

[OrangeOak]

Greetings,

I've always had this phenomenon where the longer a game is minimized, the harder it'll stutter.

I'm not looking to fix it, rather, I'm looking to understand it. (Although, fixing it would be a bonus)

Ex:

I'm playing a relatively demanding game. (Not something ridiculously low or high...let's say some average 3D MMORPG, ex: WoW)

If I minimize it and open it up again, there's no issue.
If I minimize it for about 5 minutes and open it up again, there's no issue.

If I minimize it for about 10 minutes and open it up again, it'll have a random spikes here and there for a few seconds and then stop.

It gets progressively spikier and spikier as the time it has spent minimized augments.

If the game is minimized for about an hour...it'll spike every 3 seconds, and it won't go away, I need to re-open the game again and it works fine.

Does anyone have an idea on what causes this? What's the correlation between the time spent minimized and the amount of spike it receives?

Thank you.

 

[yatys93]

I want to say hard drives having to spin back up after they go into idle from not being used, although this isn't going to happen if you only have 1 drive and I would expect it go away regardless of how long the game was minimised

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

Depends. There are a lot of things that could be going on, and it's ultimately going to hinge on how the game engine is coded, plus everything else your computer is doing at the time. Once your game gets minimized, there is probably a certain window of time in which Windows will leave it be as-is, without screwing with it's CPU scheduling and memory resource usage, but after ten minutes, I wouldn't be surprised to see certain resources paged out to free minor amounts of system RAM. After paging parts of the game back into RAM, if that's even happening, the paged portions could actually be fragmented, but we're getting pretty nit picky at that point. The main game thread could also be dumped onto a CPU core running more background tasks and having less usable time on it. Another thought is, the graphics card drivers could be destabilizing, since in Windows 7 and onward, other software can concurrently be accessing graphics resources. If you task out and stay on the Desktop for a while, the GPU resources you were previously using may not be returned fully to your game again. Another thought could be your network card going into a power save mode from lack of activity, and tasking back into the game may not fully wake it up again.

If you're really that curious, you can try something like Process Monitor and actually watch the internal messages that are flying through your Windows OS, to see what processes are doing what. It can be quite enlightening, especially if you have any Adobe software install, such as their PDF reader which actually behaves a lot like a virus.

TN Process Monitor page:

 

[OrangeOak]

Thanks for the answers.