Question Huge Framedrops while Playing. Is it the Memory?

Sep 15, 2019
2
0
10
Alright,
So Yesterday I Got myself Watchdogs 2 (ik it's late but i wanted to play it) And It all seems to be running good while i was playing the 1st mission which is kinda like an intruduction, However once I Was done with it I Could roam trough the open world a bit.. And that's where it got Problematic.
My settings where set to high and up until the openworld it all ran great. But after running around a bit I Noticed that when driving a car or running quickly trough the world it would have Framedrops which made the game unplayable. So Loaded it up today with MSI Afterburner and turned on the On-Screen Overlay and i believe the problem relies with my Memory.

Here are my Specs:

CPU: Intel Core i7 6700
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB (ASUS Dual Fan)
Memory: 8,00GB Single-Channel @ 1069MHz
Motherboard: ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. Z170-P




Now the results that MSI-Afterburner gave me while playing where the following (Note: I Turned the settings to a Mid to Low at this point)

GPU: 50-60%
CPU: 90-95%
Memory: 7600-7900mb

The game runs at around 40-50FPS with quite a lot of Framedrops.
Now here the weird part:

I Used to have a similiar problem with Forza Horizon 4, It wasn't nearly as bad as Watch Dogs 2 But it was still pretty ban and seeing that it's a racing game it is problematic. So a friend suggested that I Should install it on my SSD And look if that would solve the problem, And it did! However I Don't have enough space to hold another game on that SSD and Would rather have that on my Hard Drive instead of my SSD,

So i'm pretty confident it's that my ram is running on one single channel and i mean it's 8gbs which for todays standars isn't all to great anymore. But i wanted to ask before buying another stick.
 
Hey there,

Yes, it's highly likely it's your ram. Dual channel can give a boost of between 15-25% depending on if it's AMD or Intel system. Intel systems aren't massively sensitive to memory speeds, whereas AMD are much more so.

With that said, if you got a 2x 8gb matched kit of 2666mhz or higher ram, then your issues would go away.

Your CPU is still very capable, and the GTX1060 is great for 1080p gaming with all the bells and whistles on, graphically.

When your 8gbs is maxed, which it is at 7600-7900mb, as the remainder ram is allocated to hardware, then you start to use the swap/page file on your HDD/SSD. This is much slower than your fast system ram, hence the FPS drops as it reads from the HDD/SSD first, and that causes the stuttering.

My recommendation is to get a 2 x 8gb matched kits of 2666mhz.

What PSU do you have?