lag on STEAM GAMES ONLY

[Oxknurl]

♥♥♥♥ started up out of the blue a couple months ago.

I was playing stardew valley with my sister and went through a loading screen from the southern forest to the town. as soon as loading into town i was hit by instant game ruining lag.

it went from running perfectly smooth with no stuttering, frame drops anything out of the ordinary to constant stuttering and lag literally every other second.

Ive spent the last two months now trying to solve this problem and diagnose what in the ♥♥♥♥ is going on.

So far all i have managed to learn is this something is wrong with STEAM ITSELF because i can run my steam games from their .EXE from the directory without any lag or stuttering or anything, but when i launch them through the steam library BAM instant trash. youd think my PC was 20 years outdated.

No issues with any other gaming platforms. epic games launcher and its games run just fine, likewise with battlenet and ubisoft.

this issue is exclusive to steam.

now roughly two months back i fixed this issue the first time by making sure my default GPU was set to my Nvidia Gtx 1060 in my nvidia settings. that solved the problem for roughly two days then it went right back to the same weird lag/stuttering ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

the next way i fixed it was by moving my steamapps to my desktop and completely deleting and reinstalling steam then dropping my steamapps back in (just to avoid reinstalling all of my games again) that solved the problem for almost a month (much better than 2 days) however just today it started doing the exact same ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ again.

I thought ♥♥♥♥ this and double checked by started games through their .EXE without using steam's library to launch them. lo and behold no lag. started games from other gaming launcher such as epic and battle.net and no lag in any of my games. it is EXCLUSIVE TO STEAM.

somehow reinstalling steam didnt fix it this time so im completely ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ lost, again. i would really like to find a permanent solution or reason as to what in the ♥♥♥♥ is going on.

No my hardware is fine, my temps are fine.
(my hardware isnt the problem or this would be system wide not exclusive to steam. i can literally go through my steamapps/common and launch the exact same game files from their .exe (just circumventing steam and not launching it through the STEAM UI. and it runs perfectly smooth like it should and typically does.)

my specs are as follows

Operating System
Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
CPU
AMD FX-8350 46 °C
Vishera 32nm Technology
RAM
16.0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 799MHz (11-11-11-28)
Motherboard
MSI 760GMA-P34(FX) (MS-7641) (CPU1) 43 °C
Graphics
LG ULTRAWIDE (2560x1080@60Hz)
2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB (EVGA) 56 °C
Storage
953GB Samsung SSD 850 PRO 1TB ATA Device (SATA (SSD)) 36 °C
931GB TOSHIBA DT01ACA100 ATA Device (SATA )

these temps are while cyberpunk is running in the background BTW

my SSD is my boot drive and is what my games are loaded onto.
the HDD is just a backup storage for my system recovery.

[Iceira]

Can you please read every steam settings , and reduce all, sort off turn steam into a light client and turn as much off as possible to test , do note OC and other things like that what is running at the pc, safe mode do what you think is best.

and do have all Driver and Bios update.

and MSI has been caught in more odd things lately, net killer driver to harddisk issue,
im not after MSI if thats what you think, but then your have tech eyes on many things you start to see things where others dont, it dont make me right, they just been notice lately, so do check all is update.

dont forget sfc scannow, google it,

do note, even then we cant find it, chack for addware and spyware to virus. and claen pc systeam app.

i have seen it before , i cant say reinstall windows will fix it, but even that has seen before, untill user make same mistake or use same app that cause it.

and no matter what other has to say about it, dont be sure you can reproduce the error, if somehow its the system that do it.
( this is just one of them things, untill someone figure it out. )

i will not lie to you , this is worst case , because without a crash or log, how the hell will you know whats wrong.

do Have Full Performance on , if this is your pc in balance mode and pc dont get the power it need, then its seen as user own mistake.

just because i have said it many times ( more a laptop issue ) they was build for max power safe, desktop pc is not a excuess, ( then green effect hits us in the 90 , not a joke many had start energy saveing and switch pc to minimum power use, problem was most game did not work, sorry for the history, try see it as explanation , and options as default in balance mode is still seen as user own problem.

i did not say you need those settings , see it as your job to ruleout its not that.
you can find alot of argue with better PSU, but i still think if its support then it cant be that.
but we all know the diffrence in strong PSU and the whats just required.

it is EXCLUSIVE TO STEAM.
thats why you should reduce its option to no GPU accelration to low bandwide, as test.
you can find other threads like this, but again user own problem to read every setting steam call default.

clear web and cookie cache. (not a joke , all the crap steam do now, so some or many steam user want to make steam look better , all this has a cost,

so even reinstall Graphic card driver in advance mode and make a clean install then check box is there.

dont forget you will not get many reply, this is shooting in the dark to nail whatever cause this. ( just because i/we here have ideas dont mean we hit the nail. )

[Yujah]

... and try toggling Settings -> In-Game -> "Enable the Steam Overlay while in-game" to its other state.

[Oxknurl]

i eventually fixed it temporarily at least hopefully it holds. i had to go through my steamapps folder and delete every file that wasnt for a currently installed game and it seems to have fixed it for now. no more lags in games even cyberpunk running smooth like before.

i had already tried clearing cookies and caches in settings and running on low performance etc. i followed up on videos and read through a million different google pages about how to fix steam running poorly but none of them were fixing it. i eventually broke down and made this forum page,

i havent the slightest clue how in the hell deleting some of the steamapps files would fix this client wide lag that was even leeching into the games.

first clue i had to mess with steamapps is i did another install of steam then started it up before adding in steamapps. it seemed like the clients lag was gone. yet after adding steamapps back in after reinstalling steam then restarting it the lag was back page would scroll a couple inches and then freeze up for a moment or two then rinse and repeat every couple moments. when i started up a game this slight graphical error on the steam client translated into piss poor performance and what used to be smooth games would suddenly lag and stutter profusely.

so then i tinkered through steamapps and removed files from non-installed games and started steam back up and it seems to be running fine again. but it wouldnt be the first time this odd bug seemed to be solved in the last couple months.

[Iceira]

Try the odd old advice like force virtual harddisk memory size to 4096 as max.

this is to prevent OS system dump 16gb ram or expand or minizing its size.

i know you said solved, by something , this is to next time to reduce bottleneck if this is a hard disk virtual memroy swapfile dump that somehow just make everything worse.

and i bet you get the part with no error , this is hard as hell to avoid if it did it once , why not again,

you need to see it from a tech point of view , either it do it or it wont. hard to explan to people.
untill you discover it, and ofc. you know system resouces manager. do not have task run same time, besure pc is idle.

well for now GZ with solved, but as tech person , things dont happend without a cause.
sorry for not being happy , but i hope its solved , but the minute you said its return , then you get why i reply as i do.


ps.
and dont forget preshadow ( vulkan driver in top of this ) that is also a cache data, so many grey area with disk access, and should be turn off doing this test. part os steam stetings.

[Oxknurl]

yeah its been weird as hell trying to diagnose this problem as the issue is the same but the solution is different each and every time it rears its ugly head again.

at the moment everything is running smooth again since i went through an deleted all the unnecessary files for uninstalled games in the STEAMAPPS folder.

just some extra info for you;

all my drivers are up to date

i tried steam both in low performance and low bandwith (didnt solve the issue)

i had cleared the web and download cache for steam (didnt solve the issue)

I made sure my PC was in high performance and not energy efficiency mode (didnt solve the issue)

I had tried disabling steam overlay (didnt solve the issue)

even the steam client itself was laggy as hell too during this. just trying to type out my forum question i would watch the words end up getting a second or two behind what i had actually just typed before they would show up on screen, but i could go to like google chrome and type things in with no delay at all literally at the same time while steam was open.
definitely one of the weirdest issues ive ever encountered with steam.

I had scanned and cleaned my computer with CCleaner, spybot search and destroy,disk defragmenter and malwarebytes, they each found a couple things and fixed them (didnt solve the issue)

I had even tried system recovery at one point to a date I KNOW was before the issue by a few days at least (when the issue first started a couple months ago) and even the system reset didn't fix it which is just weird to me as the only reason a system reset wouldn't solve the problem (if its a matter of corruption or files being janky) is if hardware is going bad, however this most recent solution had to do with files in the STEAMAPPS folder somehow bogging down steam so bad that it was making games run like ♥♥♥♥.

I think what you're saying about the RAM getting eaten up makes sense to me, i had a similar issue with star citizen not too long ago. for some reason my PC was only using like 4GB of RAM instead of all 16GB and i had to tell it to start using all 16GB and then restart my PC and then star citizen starting running smoothly again.

so ultimately i do wonder if theres some bug that is causing steam to just devour all of my RAM but i don't have a clue why.

Also if its just steam eating up RAM then how come the first time i solved it (albeit it temporarily) it was just by making sure my Nvidia default GPU was my 1060?

then next time it was reinstalling steam?

this most recent time it was deleting all uninstalled games in the STEAMAPPS folder?

hopefully this time it actually fixes it but i just dont understand how this problem keeps popping up after awhile yet the solution to fixing it is different each time, and the same solution doesn't seem to work more than once.

weirdest PC issue i've ever had. even weirder that its exclusive to steam for some reason. I've literally never had any issues with the steam client up until this.

Thank you for your help and suggestions. hopefully this most recent fix withe STEAMAPPS actually ends up being permanent.

[Iceira]

turn off preshader cache the new issue some seem to get, as test. if you have a spare HDD reinstaæll new OS as a TEST , not a joke , you cant repaira broken OS with incremental upgrade if somewhere down the line did it.

dont forget i have seen it before, even on a 3 day new pc, without any clue, i could see it lag at screen , i told my nepfew, what did you do he said nothing, i even push him vist any adult site or something he said no . so hell yeah, gl find something that dont give a error.

i reset hes win10 to fresh reinstall option this is impossible to find a error on a 3 day old pc all that was installed was games. and it was fix this way.

and preshader cache was not even release it was yearsago.

and yes i did notice , you seem to solve it without smoking gun found.

but , you seem to have solved it by uninstall steam and reinstall it. ( that is the worst case, most dont do that anymore with DL and reinstall all games ) you might want to contact steam support with it, if they even want to be bother with it. or actual gather info on it..

i did not say they can fix it, i said gather info about it.

[Yujah]

There's also been on/off reports of Steam taking 100% of (at least) one core under some circumstances which I haven't seen pinpointed. I'd check CPU load if/when this happens again.

[Nx Machina]

Stardew has lag issues - https://steamcommunity.com/app/413150/discussions/search/?q=lag&gidforum=487876568238453267&include_deleted=1

One example.

Originally posted by warownia1:

I tested this on two computer working side by side on the same local network so any connection should be flawless and almost instantaneous. Yet I experienced lagging. To me, it looks like the game has some weird lag compensation mechanism and its networking code is far from ideal.

[Oxknurl]

yeah it wasn't exclusively stardew valley sadly. thats just the game i happened to be playing when this issue first started a couple months ago. since fixing it stardew runs just fine during multiplayer with my sister.

I had tried contacting steam when i first had the issue (before uninstalling steam and that fixing it temporarily for the 2nd time).

so heres the 3 solutions ive had to use so far. hopefully this last solution is also the final solution. if not ill end up commenting on this post again at some point down the road.

here is the timeline of events (roughly)

1st time: playing stardew with sis, lag outta nowehere, tested other steam games all lagging just as bad when previously running smoothly. eventually solved after going through NVIDIA settings for my GPU and setting my GTX 1060 as my default GPU instead of the default setting which was "auto select"

2nd time: roughly a day or two after the 1st solution the problem restarted again. I came home after a busy day and booted up a game (i think it was albion online) just to notice it was lagging terribly when its normally perfectly smooth. wasted another night trying every solution i could think of and reading through a million google pages for possible solutions to "steam lag" and "only steam games lagging" as well as too many youtube videos. eventually pulled out "steamapps" to my desktop and deleted all steam files left, then reinstalled. started steam noticed there was no client lag like before so i dropped "steamapps" back into the new steam install (this was just to avoid reinstalling all my games, i have 500GB of games installed on steam and i would much rather not have to reinstall every single one, also some of my games don't have cloud based saves and i would rather not lose my progress. so pulling out "steamapps" and then reinserting it was preferable to reinstalling every single game and still losing progress in some games.

3rd time: just a week shy of a month from the 2nd solution it started up again. came home after a busy day and sat down to play cyberpunk, installed the 2GB V1.05 Hotfix update and started the game, noticed crazy lag and stuttering compared the usual smooth gameplay. though it was cyberpunks update breaking the game at first til i started up a couple more steam games that i know run smoothly (stardew valley as my first try) it was lagging in the title screen and during gameplay like it had the previous 2 times. so immedietly went about reinstalling steam after pulling out the "steamapps" folder to avoid reinstalling all the games and losing progress. booted steam up after reinstalling and it was running smoothly. reinserted "steamapps" and the lag was back (during the 2nd solution this had not happened, after reinserting "steamapps" everything was back to normal, this time sadly the circumstances were different for some reason. tried reinstalling and reinserting steam apps a couple more times. however each time after reinserting "steamapps" the lag returned so i figured something had to be going on in the "steamapps" folder itself. went through "steamapps" and deleted every folder that was related to an uninstalled game. (like fallout 4 and Skyrim:SE which I have had uninstalled for quite awhile now.) there was probably a dozen or so files for uninstalled games that i deleted completely. after deleting all these no longer necessary files steam went back to running smoothly and cyberpunk as well as all other steam games no longer had any lag.

hopefully this 3rd solution is the final one. i fear what i'll have to do next time if this problem rears its ugly head a 4th ime.

[Iceira]

if you notice, only clue here , is pc overtime get bulky or heavy, call it what you want.

stardev albion cyberpunk, i cant be the only one that see no relations at all, unless all of them games had issue just random issue, and even that , seen from a tech person view is related

most ppl do not know all in how PC Resources is spent overtime.

just because many other have use apps like CCleaner and iobit advance systeam care and other check my pc and optimized it.

this is own Responsibility and know the consequence of them.

do note, we all use things to keep pc optiized, problem is noone talk about it.
maybe tahts the problem here, pc and all of them is part of the problem.
junk and cookie and addware and before this end up in bad arguement.
most of us have give up, and just use them.

i will bet, im not the only one that see things , and it should not be this way, but just because it has been this way always dont make it right.

if you want more info on the subject, research it. or ask for easy help with app suggest, dont expect me to explan them or why, and we are back at consequence of them.

[crunchyfrog]

There are a couple of problems I've seen that manifest this way.

There is indeed the issue that Steam can take up and max out core usage on the CPU. There's also a weird issue that mostly affects certain laptops, where disk usage goes through the roof, so if you predominantly play on Steam it can seem like that's the problem (it's actually a Windows issue that is fixed by a registry change).

The key way going forward for anyone suffering issues like this is to monitor task manager while you're playing as that can speak volumes on where to go next.

[Joy in A Box]

I have the same issue where steam games and steam client starts going unresponsive for 10+ secs after running for a while and it keeps happening. Did all the checkings, removing caches stuff, all scans and de-dusting and everything. I can almost certainly confirm it is out of Steam's origin, since it is the only affected program, plus my CPU and GPU and temp are all fine while Steam client went unresponsive. And the unresponsiveness is even happening when I am navigating in the client's tabs and settings etc.. No idea on what problem it exactly is, since everything runs so smoothly 8 hours ago and now it just break without any error message or warning signs. I hope deleting unnecessary files in steamapp common will work, otherwise it is completely done.

[Iceira]

Originally posted by Joy in A Box:

I have the same issue where steam games and steam client starts going unresponsive for 10+ secs after running for a while and it keeps happening. Did all the checkings, removing caches stuff, all scans and de-dusting and everything. I can almost certainly confirm it is out of Steam's origin, since it is the only affected program, plus my CPU and GPU and temp are all fine while Steam client went unresponsive. And the unresponsiveness is even happening when I am navigating in the client's tabs and settings etc.. No idea on what problem it exactly is, since everything runs so smoothly 8 hours ago and now it just break without any error message or warning signs. I hope deleting unnecessary files in steamapp common will work, otherwise it is completely done.

nah you have a new issue, or do you claim you have it sense, 20 Dec, 2020 @ 6:18am where OP make this post, you have a new issue that look like this, i bet

update your GPU Driver with a clean install, and turn on/off steam GPU accelration to see if that help. ( flip/flop the option. )
i know its aforum and steam policy say use same post. but then users and steam has no clue in faulthy finding, then use other post is actual hijacking or necro thread then you dont match op timeline and cause. just because something look like same dont mean it is.

and we are not support, I/we are user forum. that some helper here try to help other sometimes then we feel like it.

point is make own past and link to whatever you think to other post. ( nothing wrong with that ).
and then you controll then your case is solve, you cant solve this case its not your post ( your are not OP ) all post over a year can be seen as outdate, and should only be read not post in.

[blackscrubs]

Hey guys I found this post after not having any luck resolving my issue with only my steam games lagging and only when I move my mouse in game. The menu and everything is perfect, when not moving my mouse my game runs perfect. I've tried different mice, changing my polling rate which seems to help, changing my compatibility settings game specific etc. Any help I could get on this would be outstanding. It doesn't matter which game it is on steam it does the same thing all of a sudden.

[Free Wall-E]

Thank you so much. I spent hours trying to find a solution to this issue. Most tips elsewhere regarded drivers and didn't help at all.
Starting directly from the .exe really did help, though. I know it's roundabout and annoying, but I'm just glad I can play without lags and stuttering for now.