Charles Nov 18, 2014 @ 12:15am
Massive FPS drops after 20 minutes
Was hoping to get some clarity on what might be causing this.

Yesterday I started noticing some pretty bad fps drops in games which I normally never struggle maintaining a solid 100+ fps in.

Take World of Warcraft for examle. After a fresh reboot of my PC I will have between 80-110 fps depending on the area. After about 20-30 minutes the game will still show that I have the same fps but I can clearly see that it's jumping between 20-60 fps.

Every single game is the same, both games on my SSD disk and an old mechanical 1 TB harddrive behave the same and no matter what I do the problem won't go away unless I reboot my PC and then it starts all over.

Can't think of anything that I did that might have caused this. Didn't install any drivers, or any other programs for that matter.

Today I installed MSI Afterburner to see some stats on the GPU usage and after the fps drops have started the GPU usage is locked to >95% and the temperature won't go below 65C.

Anyone have any solutions to do this? Rebooting the PC every 20 minutes gets a little tedious.

Specs:
i5 2500k 3.3 GHz
8 GB RAM
ASRock Z68 Pro3-M
Geforce 770
Win 7

Something went wrong while displaying this content. Refresh

Error Reference: Community_9708323_
Loading CSS chunk 7561 failed.
(error: https://community.fastly.steamstatic.com/public/css/applications/community/communityawardsapp.css?contenthash=789dd1fbdb6c6b5c773d)
Showing 1-12 of 12 comments
Crypto Carlos Nov 18, 2014 @ 1:54am 
It sounds like it could be a heat/heat sensor related issue. Still, 65C seems like a very reasonable load temp for that card, so I don't know why the card would be throttling down at that temperature. The first thing I would try would be to re-install/update your GPU drivers, there could be some glitch there causing problems. Also making sure your global power management setting in the Nvidia control panel is set to "Prefer maximum performance" might help. Are your CPU temps OK?
Charles Nov 18, 2014 @ 10:59am 
Reinstalled drivers, changed global power management to Maximum Performance. Still the same problem.

When the throttling starts the CPU haven't been above 60C. That's the peak, then it decreases when I turn off the game I was playing.
Cathulhu Nov 18, 2014 @ 11:01am 
What is the highest temperature your CPU gets? I have the feeling your CPU throttles itself.
Charles Nov 18, 2014 @ 11:03am 
Using RealTemp to check it. It has 4 columns.

Minimum:
53 45 51 51

Maximum:
61 55 59 58

Thermal status says OK in every column.
Iceira Nov 18, 2014 @ 12:21pm 
if above post is right ...then its another matter... check for dust and see bios or other mortherboard utilities that can raise fan through put ... some has apps that can that allso check bios
------------
but it allso sounds like pc game has been filled up after so long gameplay that you think you have a problem .. if game dont have any lag at all then all is ok...and you look to much on FPS

but if SSD disk or old disk cant keep up there u have the issue

no page file at slave disk

turn off prefetcher and superfetcher ...SSD dont need this

shame u dont had 16gb ram then u could turn off page file....

allso check motherboard driver updates same with gfx card

and use nvidia optimal settings ..some dont and make bottleneck for themself

and watchout for hd powersleep i think it kickin after 20 minute...
maybe u allso use balance mode schematic use full power... so many dont get this today...play high-end games you need full power...
Last edited by Iceira; Nov 18, 2014 @ 12:26pm
Cathulhu Nov 18, 2014 @ 1:48pm 
While the lowest value isn't really low, the max temperature is far away from the thermal throttling threshold. I agree with Iceira that this shouldn't be the cause, but at least we now know what didn't cause it.

Have you monitored the temperatures of your videocard?
kakamavrota Nov 18, 2014 @ 1:52pm 
time for new fans!
Charles Nov 18, 2014 @ 3:46pm 
Originally posted by Cathulhu:
While the lowest value isn't really low, the max temperature is far away from the thermal throttling threshold. I agree with Iceira that this shouldn't be the cause, but at least we now know what didn't cause it.

Have you monitored the temperatures of your videocard?

I have, in idle after a fresh reboot it will stay around 40C. When the problems with the fps drops begin the core temp is around 65C, it then climbs up to 69C and stays there until I reboot the PC again.

Also noticed something else, which might be nothing. Was fiddling around in the task manager to see if there was anything using a lot of the processor and I found a certain "steam.exe" that was using about 20%. The weird part is that steam wasn't running and hadn't been since the last reboot. Is this something to be concerned about?

Edit: Okay, I forced that "steam.exe" to quit and the problems with the GPU load went back down to 0%. Definitely what caused it. Is this some new malware? Have used both my antivirus and MalwareBytes to search through the computer and this hasn't showed up.
Last edited by Charles; Nov 18, 2014 @ 3:48pm
Cathulhu Nov 18, 2014 @ 3:59pm 
Thanks for that information, it gave me an idea what is going on.
http://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/35221584425122691/
It seems your PC is infected with a Bitcoin miner, stealing your resources and disguising itself as steam.exe.
That would explain everything you experience right now.
Charles Nov 18, 2014 @ 4:08pm 
Thanks a lot! That was the cause. Much appreciation :)
Cathulhu Nov 18, 2014 @ 4:20pm 
Good to hear we found the issue, but i have to thank you for providing this very helpful information.
Splat Mar 5, 2015 @ 6:13pm 
Hello community how are you all? I have been having this same problem for a while now. I play mainly DayZ and i was thinking for a bit that was a direct problem from the game but i was wrong, it happened to me on Diablo 3 and Skyrim. I didnt find that Bitcoin malware i only know that after a while my fps goes from 20+ or more depending on the game to like 9 or even less and it stays there.

A friend of mine told me it's not a problem with the RAM, my NVIDIA is updated. Weird thing is that i always had a good experience playing games on this laptop but for a while it has been giving me this annoying problem. Anyone can help?
Showing 1-12 of 12 comments
Per page: 1530 50

Date Posted: Nov 18, 2014 @ 12:15am
Posts: 12