What causes fps drops?

[armza]

If I have a GFX card which can run a game at 60fps on max usage, and it uses let's say 4GB out of 8GB of its dedicated vram, say if I increase textures or any graphical setting and my vram usage goes to 6GB vram, will my fps drop or will it stay the same since it hasn't reached the 8GB vram. I'm still confused as to what causes fps drops?

 

[WildCard999]

The FPS should stay fairly consistent, once you exceed your max vram then you may experience FPS drops and stuttering. There's other things that can cause FPS drops/stuttering such as thermal throttling when your CPU &/or GPU gets way too hot and needs to lower the clock speeds to keep from overheating/damage.

 

[ThomasKK]

What causes fps drop?

When a GPU runs out of VRAM, it will use RAM as part of it's memory, which is much slower and causes stuttering. But in your situation you should be fine since 8GB is more than enough even for 4K.

Also, no matter how much of data a GPU stores into it's VRAM module (let it be 4GB or 6GB), GPU also has to work with that data -> render images and send them to the screen. A graphics card must have enough horsepower to work with bigger data. If you max-out everything on a game and you have enough VRAM, the data will be stored in VRAM, but if the GPU does not have enough power to load/render/work with the amount of data it is given, the frames will take more time to be rendered, which means less frames/second and that's a straight way to the "fps drop"

Also a CPU may cause an fps drop. CPU plays an important role in gaming since it provides GPU with data that is transferred to the images you see on the monitor. CPU pre-renders the frame and gives it to GPU to continue working on it and if the CPU does not have enough power/speed, it may provide GPU with less data and then less frames will be rendered and sent to the monitor and a "fps drop" will happen.

Not enough RAM memory may also become a problem if a game wants to use 5GB but you only have, for example, 4GB. The system won't have enough temporary storage for files and will cause huge stuttering (fps drop/freezing).

As WildCard999 said, thermal throttling may also cause fps drop since forced lowered speed of system components lowers overall performance.

Will your FPS drop? Well, i don't know your GPU model, so i would recommend you to go on and test higher settings and find a sweet spot between your acceptable framerate and graphics quality.

 

[dontlistentome]

If what you're really asking is "is there a combination of affordable components I can use where I will never have fps drops?" the answer is no. Just about everyone, even those with expensive parts, complain about fps drops at one time or another. So many games, so many combinations of set ups, so many OS updates, so many patches...the variables are too many to list.