Question Suddenly getting very poor performance in AAA games; I've tried everything

[Phasma Felis]

Hope this is the right forum--I was torn between here and Windows 10.

I last played Outer Worlds on my laptop a few weeks ago, and was getting a solid 60FPS on medium-high settings. Yesterday I went to start it up and I can't get above 20, even on lowest settings. I don't play a lot of recent AAA games, but I tried Doom 4 and it's having the same problem, so I don't think it's just the game. I still get fine performance on older/indie games like Renegade Ops. I haven't made any significant hardware or software changes to my PC that I'm aware of. Things I've tried so far:

• Reboot
• Check that laptop is connected to power
• Update Windows
• Reinstall Outer Worlds
• Disable the network, run Display Driver Uninstaller in safe mode, and reinstall the NVIDIA driver package
• Run Rkill, MalwareBytes, ADWCleaner, HitmanPro, Windows Defender deep/offline scans (nothing significant)
• Check Task Manager for other programs consuming significant CPU/GPU/anything else
• Check that the game is using the NVIDIA GPU and not onboard video
• Do a full Windows 10 reset/reinstall

Here's my specs. Here's my UserBenchMark and an OHM screenshot taken while the benchmark was running (as required by r/pcgamingtechsupport). Temps are fine, and I can still get 100+ framerates on loading screens and such, so it's not overheating or an accidental FPS look.

I know that UBM isn't the best modern benchmark, but I see that my GTX1070 is scoring very low on it. I'm worried that the GPU might be damaged somehow, but I've never heard of a GPU failing in such a way that performance plummets but it remains perfectly stable with no unexpected crashes. Is that possible? Is there any benchmark I could use to, at least, prove to myself that that is/isn't the problem?

It feels like it's stuck in a power-saving mode somehow, but I can't think how it could have stayed there after everything I've tried. I'm completely out of ideas. Any suggestions?

 

[Roland Of Gilead]

Have you changed the Windows power profile recently. Make sure it's set to high performance. Test again.

 

[Phasma Felis]

Have you changed the Windows power profile recently. Make sure it's set to high performance. Test again.

I did make sure it was set to high performance, before and after the reinstall. Thanks!