Simultaneous CPU and FPS drops randomly in (presumably) all games

[UnknownAK]

Hi,

I've been having this problem for quite a while now where I will suffer seemingly random FPS drops for about 10-15 seconds, whilst playing any games. They began to happen a short time after I installed a new CPU cooler but I managed to fix the drops in some games by updating drivers/Java so I don't believe it is an issue with the cooler any more.

The games that it is bugging me the most in are Minecraft and Overwatch. During the Overwatch Beta i suffered the drops for about a day or 2 but updating to the latest Nvdia driver fixed the issue and I didn't have any problems for the rest of the beta. Now that the game is released these drops are happening every few minutes and are extremely irritating. I understand that many others are having problems in Overwatch at the moment but the drops also occurr in Minecraft where I can be stood still and will watch as the frames randomly drop to 30 before jumping back up to 100+.

The common denominator in these drops is that my CPU usage will half (usually from around 40% usage to around 20%) at the exact same time this is happening and then the CPU usage will jump straight back up.

Here is an screenshot of task manager showing the drop whilst in a game of Overwatch:

Here are the things I have currently tried:
- Updating to latest drivers whilst also using DDU and making sure it's a clean installation
- Making sure High Performance is set in the power options
- Changing the minimum and maximum processor states
- Checking BIOS to make sure nothing like "Cool n quiet" is enabled
- Checking temps, neither GPU or CPU goes above 50-60c whilst playing


Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!


My Specs:
Processor: FX8350
Graphics: GTX 980
RAM: 8GB
Motherboard: ASRock 970 Exreme 4

 

[ak47jar3d]

I would try using A tool like MSI Afterburner to find the source of the issue. It should show the bottleneck of the system in real-time.

 

[UnknownAK]

Here is a screenshot of MSI afterburner whilst playing GTA 5. From the image it shows that the GPU usage is also dropping at this time as well as the FB usage, VID usage, and GPU power. Do you have any ideas of what might be causing this?

 

[Deleted member 1963706]

Seems like overheating to me, your system might be turning down the clocks to save itself from breaking.

 

[ema21del9]

You do get some high temps on the GPU, it may be the issue.

 

[Bakua]

Games will only use 1-4 of your weaker cores, and if your 4 cores are near max, then it'll be a bottleneck. Have you tried Rivatuner (pre-installed with MSI Afterburner) and checking core-usage/temps while in the games?

It's more than likely a temp problem, check both usage and temps.

 

[ema21del9]

My bad, I saw the picture in a rush and thought it had reached 100 C

 

[UnknownAK]

What temperature would a 980 begin to throttle at? I've been playing Minecraft before where my GPU temp is 45 and the FPS drops still happened, personally I doubt it's the temps. The only reason MSI shows a max temp of 72c is because when I ran it I was playing GTA5 at max settings.

 

[ema21del9]

What temperature would a 980 begin to throttle at? I've been playing Minecraft before where my GPU temp is 45 and the FPS drops still happened, personally I doubt it's the temps. The only reason MSI shows a max temp of 72c is because when I ran it I was playing GTA5 at max settings.

Don't worry, that's a good temp for GPU.

 

[UnknownAK]

So ruling out temperature for the minute is there anything else it could be that I could test for? One of my friends thought that it could be an issue that my graphics card was being forced into a 2D render state rather than a 3D which would explain why the FPS drops so drastically.

I've been testing lots of different games and all of them seem to have the same issue but slightly different. In Black Ops 3 it reduces my FPS from around 60 to about 45 for 3-5 seconds before jumping back up. GTA 5 drops from 60-20 for about 10 seconds. Minecraft drops from 130+ to 25 for about 6 seconds. I'm not really sure if this information is useful but it shows that the drops differ in each game.

So far I know that during these FPS drops both my CPU usage and my GPU usage drop as well as the GPU power (however I presume that's just because its lowering the power because it isn't needed during the drops)

 

[UnknownAK]

Okay so by disabling C-States in my BIOS and unparking my CPU's I managed to get the FPS drops to stop in Minecraft. However they still seem to appear in Overwatch and other games

 

[UnknownAK]

I decided on a whim to try playing Overwatch in windowed mode and I didn't notice the drops happen at all. Is there any known culprit that could be causing these drops to happen in fullscren games?

 

[ema21del9]

You have v-sync enabled? it may be the culprit.

 

[UnknownAK]

Nah I don't put V-Sync on in pretty much any game. Also sadly I noticed that the drops do appear in windowed mode but they are just not as common (played 5 mathces and it only happened once).

 

[UnknownAK]

Okay so a very useful discovery is that if I cap my FPS to 60 in game then the drops don't happen at all.