Massive FPS drops from ~250 to 40-60

[Thylekk]

Hi everyone,

So in the middle of October 2018 I got a new desktop setup and everythign was fine just until the second half of December 18. I play a lot of games like Battlefield 5, PUBG, Rainbow Six Siege, EFT and had not any problems with any performance or anything. But since the secodn half of December 18 I started experiencing massive FPS drops.. for example:

Battlefield 5 has average of 170 fps and sometimes drops to 40 for a sec or less.
CSGO has average of 290 fps and drops between 40-60 for a sec or less.
Siege has average of 170 and drops to 50 or less.

In Decemebr I also started using Wallpaper Engine with some 4k animated wallpapers but after experiencing FPS drops I deleted Wallpaper Engine and changed wallpaper back to "normal" picture.

Specs:
ASUS ROG B450-F Gaming
MSI GTX1070TI GAMING 8G
RYZEN 7 2700X
2x8 HYPERX PREDATOR 3200 Mhz
CORSAIR RMX650 650W (gold)

Didnt overclock anything, both CPU and GPU are on stock clocks.

MSI Afterburner shows[GPU]: ~45C gaming; 30C Idle
Ryzen Master[CPU]: 45C gaming, 35C Idle

btw. Ryzen Master also shows that my ECD is at 100% of 140A. So I googled it and its cause by Precision Boost and it should not cause any trouble.

Thanks a lot for any advices or possible solutions.

[𝔇ave]

i see no mention of your storage drive..

if you are running a mechanical HDD only then you can expect slowdowns in drive performance as well as increased frame drops the more you put on the drive. to an extent defragmenting can help to reduce this

if you are running an SSD for your OS and have games on mechanical HDD then try transferring the games you are experiencing problems with to the SSD if there is room.

If you are running SSD only then it could be an optimisation issue of the games or some other issue with your pc be it instability or perhaps background services eating up resources

[Thylekk]

I have 2TB WD Blue HDD (games stored here) and 250GB Samsung M.2 EVO 970 (system, and programs here). The problem is that I did not experience any issues with same setup before.

I also experience things like this in BF5. I know that BF5 is quite new game, but this should not be BF's problem.

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[𝔇ave]

that to me looks like failure to load textures properly. that would be the cpu not doing it's job properly..

have a read of this

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=2715-YIPD-6873

[Thylekk]

That doesnt help me at all. I tried multiple benchmarks and all of them were in the end succesful and without any issue. After that I started BF5, cuz I am tired of this and I wanted to play a game for a bit and the game after like 10 mins of gameplay lagged (fps drop 170 to like 50), went back to 170 and after circa 5 secs my screen blurred (as on screens bellow) and game freezed. Then crashed.

[Clint E]

Try turning your overlays off, steam, uplay, origins etc. any FPS counters as well that is where I would look next

[Thylekk]

How is that supposed to help me? :d The FPS drop is still recognizable in the gameplay. Hiding number drops will not help solve the issue.

[𝔇ave]

benchmarking is not the same as a game.. benchmark resources are typically loaded into memory completely as they are pre determined runs. a game however has infinitely variable possibilites and not all resources can be loaded for every situation. you are experiencing stutters during game play because your HDD cannot provide resources to the CPU fast enough or your CPU can't pass information to the GPU fast enough.

otherwise it's purely an optimisation issue and you need to visit the respective game forums to see what other people are experiencing and find possible solutions per game.

you have a ton of thermal headroom on your components going by your reported temps so OC that sucka and see if that helps. try to put atleast one game on the ssd for testing purposes cos i would wager that is the issue. slow hdd

[Thylekk]

So u say it might be problem with the HDD and its affecting CPU/GPU which causes FPS drops and make it look like it is CPU's or GPU's fault right?

[Clint E]

Lol k because overlays have never caused in game issues ...

[𝔇ave]

Originally posted by UML Statechart Diagram:

So u say it might be problem with the HDD and its affecting CPU/GPU which causes FPS drops and make it look like it is CPU's or GPU's fault right?

i highly doubt it is your cpu or gpu. they are both strong pieces of hardware but i almost can guarentee they are being held back by the HDD.. think of a mechanical HDD as a fuel line in a vehicle and the CPU&GPU as the engine. if the engine is starved of fuel it will not perform to it's maximum capabilities.. same can be said for PC hardware. the weak link in your pc is the slow HDD that can't deliver information quickly enough to the other components which is holding them back

[x_wing]

Originally posted by UML Statechart Diagram:

So u say it might be problem with the HDD and its affecting CPU/GPU which causes FPS drops and make it look like it is CPU's or GPU's fault right?

I really doubt that is your hdd. But If you want to discard it, move your game to your ssd and play from there.

If it wasn't for your report of a crash after some time, I would have think on a software problem. But on this scenario, I would start by checking your PSU voltage on continue load for a long time periods.

[Thylekk]

Guys the HDD is a brand new. I would not expect it to be tthe issue. So u would recommend buying high capa SSD and use only SSD disks in this setup? Thanks for answers.

[𝔇ave]

Originally posted by UML Statechart Diagram:

Guys the HDD is a brand new. I would not expect it to be tthe issue. So u would recommend buying high capa SSD and use only SSD disks in this setup? Thanks for answers.

age of drive is not the issue. it's the speed of which other components can access the data on the drive.

[Thylekk]

Okay but. I bought the HDD and SSD like a month later after buying other components so I had to use my 8 years old HDD (same WD BLUE, just half capacity) and had no issues.

[ugafan]

Originally posted by UML Statechart Diagram:

Okay but. I bought the HDD and SSD like a month later after buying other components so I had to use my 8 years old HDD (same WD BLUE, just half capacity) and had no issues.

do you still have the old hdd? you could plug that in and see if you have the problem. my suspicion is that you downloaded some software or something got updated and that is causing the conflict.