Question Gaming laptop performance drop ?

[Koi fish]

I got an HP Victus like 6 months ago with 16 gigs of ram rtx 3050 ti and ryzen 7.
When i first started using it, it was great. I play lots of high graphic games like ark survival evolved and didn't have any lag or problem,
Now 6 months later it's performance has drastically dropped, like from 100 fps with high graphics to 60-70 fps with normal graphics, and its still lagging (idk why).
i looked at fans from down and its a little dirty so I will get that cleaned, but surely a little dust can't drop performance that bad ?

 

[Lutfij]

Welcome to the forums, newcomer!

First check and see if your laptop is pending any BIOS updates. Then check and see if your OS is ending any updates. Following that, use DDU to remove all GPU drivers, then manually reinstall the latest Nvidia drivers sourced from Nvidia's support site, in an elevated command, i.e, Right click installer>Run as Administrator.

 

[geofelt]

A little dust can make your cpu cooler less effective and cause throttling.
A common malady with laptops.