Hi to everyone,
when I play recent 3D games (Battlefield 3 & 4, Tomb Raider, Saints Row 3 & 4, etc.) I experience periodic FPS drops, e.g. in Battlefield 3 from the average of around 70-80 fps to 20-30 fps; Even if I stand still and look at the same spot. It happens about every 3s and the drop is only a spike - half a second long.
It's not the graphics card or driver, because I switched my AMD card with an NVIDIA and the problem persists. And while the game is running, I monitored CPUs, RAM, Pagefile and Graphics card: Each CPU core stays below ~70%, no single core goes up to maximum, RAM always stays below 12GB and pagefile doesn't get touched
Now how can I make the fps become constant or how do I debug this issue? I'm out of ideas.
My system:
What I tried:
...here are some graphics: http://imgur.com/a/w0z1o
...I also noted that it gets worse after some gaming / warming up. Usually if I run the (Catzilla) benchmark twice in a row, the first run gets 1-3 gaps, while the second run is gapping 10-20 times.
when I play recent 3D games (Battlefield 3 & 4, Tomb Raider, Saints Row 3 & 4, etc.) I experience periodic FPS drops, e.g. in Battlefield 3 from the average of around 70-80 fps to 20-30 fps; Even if I stand still and look at the same spot. It happens about every 3s and the drop is only a spike - half a second long.
It's not the graphics card or driver, because I switched my AMD card with an NVIDIA and the problem persists. And while the game is running, I monitored CPUs, RAM, Pagefile and Graphics card: Each CPU core stays below ~70%, no single core goes up to maximum, RAM always stays below 12GB and pagefile doesn't get touched
Now how can I make the fps become constant or how do I debug this issue? I'm out of ideas.
My system:
■ Motherboard: AsRock Fatal1ty 990FX Killer
■ CPU: AMD FX-9370 (4.4Ghz 8-core)
■ RAM: Corsair 16GB 1860MHz (2 x 8GB in dual channel)
■ PSU: Corsair 750W
■ Storage: Samsung Evo SSD (OS) and Samsung 1TB 7200rpm (games)
■ Graphics: Asus Radeon R9 280X
What I tried:
■ update graphics card driver (to 14.9)
■ downgrade graphics card driver (to 13.11)
■ switch graphics card to NVIDIA Geforce GTX 760 - still, same frequent fps drops
■ play with almost every BIOS/UEFI setting
■ reset BIOS/UEFI settings to default
■ stress-test the CPU and RAM with Prime95... no power drops, no visual cues that would fit into the 3s-0.5s pattern
■ monitor the heat of CPU and graphics - CPU gives me 68 degree Celsius under pressure and graphics don't really heat up too much (sorry, forgot the number). Also the CPU is liquid-cooled.
...here are some graphics: http://imgur.com/a/w0z1o
■ Screenshot from Catzilla benchmark, displaying the drops (because
it measures and displays the fps constantly, not only every second).
I also noted that the frequency can vary a little bit, i.e. the
distance between the gaps is not uniform.
■ Another Catzilla screenshot, same thing, but only 2s between
gaps.
■ Screenshot of GPUtweak (a graphics monitoring tool with a time resolution of 1s)... notice that in the first benchmark (left) that causes the lags, there is mixed GPU usage, while on the right in a permanently high GPU test there are none.
■ CPU usage screenshot. During the benchmark this spiky pattern occurs - don't know if that's normal or related to the lag issues.
...I also noted that it gets worse after some gaming / warming up. Usually if I run the (Catzilla) benchmark twice in a row, the first run gets 1-3 gaps, while the second run is gapping 10-20 times.