FPS drop diagnosis/troubleshooting advice?

[Emjay86]

Hi folks,

I did a quick search and couldn't see anything that covered my issue, although it probably wouldn't anyway as its obviously very specific!

I am having issues with my PC in that it has FPS drops, constantly. It doesn't matter if i'm gaming on something demanding, or even just typing here, I will get performance dips where for around 2-5 seconds the FPS will drop to ridiculously low, and then it will climb back up again.

How do I go about finding out what is doing this? What are the most likely culprits?

My specs are:
Operating System
Windows 10 Home 64-bit
CPU
AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 48 °C
Matisse 7nm Technology
RAM
32.0GB Dual-Channel DDR4 @ 1330MHz (18-18-18-43)
Motherboard
ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. ROG CROSSHAIR VIII HERO (AM4) 32 °C
Graphics
Z35P (3440x1440@100Hz)
4095MB NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER (Gigabyte) 43 °C
Storage
465GB Samsung SSD 860 EVO 500GB (SATA (SSD)) 31 °C
465GB Western Digital WDC WD5000AZRX-00A8LB0 (SATA ) 31 °C
931GB Seagate ST31000524AS (SATA ) 39 °C
119GB M4-CT128M4SSD2 (SATA (SSD))
1863GB Western Digital WDS200T3X0C-00SJG0 (Unknown (SSD))

Huge thanks in advance!

 

[Emjay86]

Hi Both,

Thanks for the responses.

So my temps are all very reasonable when gaming. My GPU is fan cooled so it sits around 60-70, noting overly hot and sits around 38 on idle. My CPU is in a watercooling loop that rarely gets over 60 itself also. Nothing else spikes in temp or generally gets anywhere north of needing to care, its a pretty cool PC overall!

I have re-seated my GPU, just in case and gone over all the cabling, so if that was an issue, it should be sorted. That said, nothing looked out of place so it may be fine with that respect.

I probably could do with updating my BIOS, which I will take a look into doing in a mo. Just downloading the software and familiarising myself with the way of going about it. Been a LONG time since I did this and im pretty sure its more than just clicking install!

I have also not noticed anything on task manager that looks suspicious. Everything looks as it should and the only power sinks are the games themselves. Its the first thing I thought of when this was happening and i've never seen anything strange in that respect.

Thanks, i will let you know if the fixes mentioned work or not!

 

[Emjay86]

Isn't the 2070 Super 8Gb rather than the 4Gb you list?

Apologies, I copied and pasted speccy and it displayed it as 4gb. It should indeed be 8gb, although I rarely see the memory clock go higher than 7000mhz for some reason (using the GeForce Experience Overlay).

I was thinking that as well.

If your gpu is just a 4gb version and you are playing open world games then you can get freezes when data is being loaded to the gpu or ram. What games are the freezes happening in ?

As above, it should be 8gb, not sure why speccy saw it as 4!

With regards to games... it doesn't really matter what I am playing it seems. I am even experiencing lag input from typing this message. I dont have anything overly cumbersome running and my pc is using under 5% CPU and GPU. It just randomly dips every so often.

Also are you running games at your full monitor resolution? I would think 3440x1440@100Hz is really pushing the limits of a 2070 Super.

I am yes. I agree, it is definitely pushing it, although I have had this setup for over a year now and have had no issues. The lag spikes are a new thing and happen to old and new games, as well as just web browsing. It's almost like there's a bottleneck somewhere...

 

[Emjay86]

Random thought outside of the obvious thing that the gpu is too weak for the game.... is the ftpm module enabled in the bios? Might be worth a check even if you have turned it off in the past, some bios updates have changed to having it turned on by default.

Even though I had nothing using it, just having it turned on would cause stutter similar to what you're describing on my 5950x...

So I took a look in the BIOS and low and behold the ftpm was turned on. I have "disabled" it and it would appear that it may have fixed my issue. I say may, because even though ive just had an hour of smooth gaming, you never know!

Thanks for the tip. I will be sure to report back if I experience anything as we go!

I'd guess at something waking the HDDs up that have spun down and entered sleep so it's taking a couple of seconds to grap what's it's looking for. I would try physically unplugging them and running a game just from an SSD.

Fault finding you really need to go back to basics and unplug everything non essential and kill or turn off any programs that are not needed in the task you are doing. So all your overlays etc off to start trying to pinpoint the issue.

All my gaming stuff is on SSD's or an NvME. I have a HDD which is donkeys old and is literally storage for music at this point, but not a bad shout either.

I have an equally old SSD, which currently has my OS installed on. Would a failing SSD also cause this kind of issue? How would I check the life of the SSD?

Cheers folks!

 

[Emjay86]

So after a week I can confirm that unfortunately the problem still persists.

I thought for a while it could be my Corsair iCUE program, so ive done a fresh install of that, no joy. I have tweaked things in the BIOS, no joy. I am now at the point where I am going to do a fresh install of windows, because I can't figure it out. The spikes happen every now and then and can happen regardless of what I am doing. I just had a spike now whilst typing this message for example and I have this open (chrome) and the windows software downloading, that's it. GPU and CPU utilization according to Nvidia experience widget is minimal although the GPU clock and Memory clock for my GPU spike. The readings are going from GPU clock of around 300 to 1605mhz and memory clock of around 405 to 7000mhz. Outside of that, I cant see anything that makes sense here. Voltage and wattage for the GPU don't really move and so on.

It's possible my setup just isn't installed correctly as for whatever reason I had issues when updating my motherboard a couple of years ago where it wasn't picking up my windows install on my SSD. I had to mess around with the BIOS settings quite a bit to force it to go a certain path, maybe it was that? If so, I'm hoping the fresh install will fix it. That said, the stutters are a recent problem, so that doesn't add up either.

Everything in my PC is relatively new, all being upgraded within the last 3 years, the exception being the SSD that my windows install is on, which is over 10 years old now. I have no reason to believe the drive is failing as such as nothing else has issues, but that's why I asked the question above. Perhaps I will put the fresh install on my new NvME drive...