Question Poor gaming performance on my Dell XPS 9570

[S1ddarth]

Lately, I have noticed my XPS 9570 having painfully bad FPS when gaming. I recently tried GTA5 and noticed FPS in the 10-20 range on lowest settings at 1080p, when it used to average a cool 40-50fps earlier on medium settings.

The GPU was running at 100% as indicated by NVidia GeForce experience overlay, and temps would top out at about 75 degrees celsius.

I just opened up the laptop today and cleaned out dust from the fans, and this is something I do every 5-6 months. Does anyone have any insight as to why this might be happening?

 

[hotaru.hino]

What is the speed the GPU is running at? It can be at 100% but be operating slow as heck.

Does poor performance also happen in other applications?

 

[S1ddarth]

What is the speed the GPU is running at? It can be at 100% but be operating slow as heck.

Does poor performance also happen in other applications?

I don't really run anything else too taxing. Thr GPU clock speed would bump up to about 1290MHz and then bounce back down.

Are there any other applications I could try running which would help you gauge performance?

 

[stonecarver]

I found a picture of the bottom of your laptop and it is close to table. Can you raise to get air flow better and test gaming.

 

[hotaru.hino]

Are there any other applications I could try running which would help you gauge performance?

3Dmark (they have a free version) or Unigine Superposition. Otherwise any game with a benchmarking thing should work

 

[S1ddarth]

3Dmark (they have a free version) or Unigine Superposition. Otherwise any game with a benchmarking thing should work

I just tried out 3DMark, I've linked the results here. I once again noticed that the GPUs reported temperature maxes out at 74 °C, and frame rates in the benchmark remained choppy throughout. I did also run the GTAV in-game benchmark, and that had similarly disappointing results.

Here's a link comparing my results to devices with the same CPU & GPU. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to improve performance.

 

[hotaru.hino]

The only other thing to probably do here is replace the thermal paste or thermal pads. But even then, it could just be the hardware starting to give up the ghost.

 

[S1ddarth]

The only other thing to probably do here is replace the thermal paste or thermal pads. But even then, it could just be the hardware starting to give up the ghost.

That's unfortunate. I did read on some forums that this is possibly due to some Dell BIOS updates that thermal throttle very aggressively and reduce the power draw as well. I'll investigate if any of that can be bypassed without damaging the hardware.

Thank you for your help