Framerate issues

[EddyDecapitated]

Hey guys, I'm posting this in hopes of getting some help with a performance issue I'm having with the game. When playing Tiny Tina's Wonderlands on my gaming laptop (165W RTX 3080 16GB, i7 10870H, 32GB RAM and NVME drive) the frame rate in the game will fluctuate between 150's to below 30's. It will maintain a high FPS state for some minutes and then immediately drop into the high 20's and range into the 50's for several minutes.

The game basically cycles between running well (90 - 150 fps) and running very poorly (20-50 fps). I have tried many combinations of settings including FSR, low quality shadows, low volumetric fog, etc. with no change. It seems no matter the settings, the game experiences massive fps drops which sustain for several minutes. I have the latest nVidia drivers at this time and I ensure no background programs are running when playing the game besides Steam. I've looked for patterns in the frame drops and have noticed they aren't isolated to large, open areas or instances in which many effects are occurring. I've heard some people claim the frame drops are related to the Shift service.

Thank you in advance for your help, it is truly appreciated! I love this game and just want to be able to play it at stable frame rates that aren't painful! I bought my best friend and I copies of the Chaotic Great Edition so we could spend quality time together with this game but the frame rates are killing the experience. I've done some research on this forum, reddit, etc but haven't found a solution yet.

[BoomH4nter]

Sounds like either thermal throttling or power consuption getting to much, try to cap the fps at 90 - 100 to lower the stress on the CPU and GPU (Maybe battery too)

Just set it ingame the Limit Frame Rate.
Try it and tell me if it helped.

[EddyDecapitated]

I tried limiting the frame rate earlier but I think I set the limit too high. I'll try the range you suggested and let you know how it goes. Thank you buddy!

[Robban]

Have you checked your temps? cpu load? gpu load? when you get those drops, what the temps n loads r at. What computer specc do you have?

[BoomH4nter]

Originally posted by Robski87:

Have you checked your temps? cpu load? gpu load? when you get those drops, what the temps n loads r at. What computer specc do you have?

You can see all the specs in the first post he, did pretty well at stating the problem, you just need to read it

[BoomH4nter]

Originally posted by EddyDecapitated:

I tried limiting the frame rate earlier but I think I set the limit too high. I'll try the range you suggested and let you know how it goes. Thank you buddy!

BTW iam running a RTX 2080 and use medium settings with a cap at 90FPS (i used Riva tuner to cap fps as its more frame time stable) with 75% Res scale, FSR off and Sharpening on.

[iwasdropped]

I ran into the same thing. RTX 3070 i7 8700 at 3440x1440. Game runs well capped at 100fps. No overlays on. Game mode on. And in one section of the game (when the first obelisk appears on the main story) my fps went into the 30s until I had killed all the enemies and left the area. I think it's just parts of the game aren't fully optimized unfortunately.

[BoomH4nter]

Originally posted by iwasdropped:

I ran into the same thing. RTX 3070 i7 8700 at 3440x1440. Game runs well capped at 100fps. No overlays on. Game mode on. And in one section of the game (when the first obelisk appears on the main story) my fps went into the 30s until I had killed all the enemies and left the area. I think it's just parts of the game aren't fully optimized unfortunately.

There is a chance, that you are affected by a windows bug that causes the Standby RAM to not be released.
You can check that in the Performance Monitor of Windows in the RAM tab.

I have 32GB of Ram but if I download big games or use any RAM heavy programm, windows caches it (as standby) and fills the RAM to max, causing lags.

[EddyDecapitated]

Hey guys, I wanted to thank everyone for their input and help, especially BoomH4nter. Life got in the way and I wasn't able to get back to troubleshooting this game until today. I wanted to post my findings in the case it may help someone else.

I do believe BoomH4nter is correct that a standby RAM issue is one of the main factors at play. My frame rate issue did not improve at all until I addressed the Windows 11 standby RAM issue, which ironically I did last.

In reviewing my DXDIAG file I found error nvwgf2umx.dll which was resolved by deleting graphics drivers and reinstalling them manually from nVidia's site. I also chose not to reinstall Geforce Experience.

I also found errors Kernelbase.dll, ntdll.dll, kernel32.dll which were resolved by running an SFC scan through command prompt as administrator. I went through all background apps, processes and my antivirus to ensure they did not start or run upon PC boot.

After all this, Wonderlands was running exactly as described in my initial post.

This led me to consider BoomHunt43r's post and I noticed my standby RAM at over 12GB with no programs running. Some steps in resource monitor, task manager and advanced performance settings related to RAM, virtual memory, paging, etc. seemed to make a noticeable effect on game performance.

Though the game still clearly runs in one of two "modes" so to speak, the low mode now ranges from 60 to 90 and the high mode from 120 to 180. I use the term modes because the game will operate within one of these two frame rate windows and you can immediately tell when the transition has occurred. It will run in that state for minutes or tens of minutes before transition to the other.

Generally, medium settings with balanced FSR have allowed me to pick up enough frames that it's still playable when chugging hard, which is about 60 FPS now.

It could be this game doesn't run well on laptops. I haven't heard much of other laptop users' experiences but I have come across some games through the years that just don't play well with mobile.

Thanks again!

[BoomH4nter]

If everything works go and enjoy the game :D!