Game slows to a crawl after a couple hours

alfawolf04

Distinguished
Nov 20, 2009
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Whenever I play a game on my PC, it runs just fine with no issues. Then, after a couple hours, the frame rate will bottom out, making the game nearly impossible to play. This will last for 10 or so seconds, then it runs normally for about 10 seconds, then it goes back to a horrible frame rate, and the cycle repeats endlessly.

Below are several graphs from MSI Afterburner. The very beginning of the graphs is when everything was running normally. The middle sections are when the slow frame rate cycle was occurring, and the end is after I quit the game. Any ideas what might be going on? Could this possibly be something other than my GPU?

Using a Radeon HD 7870:
gpu_graph.png