Hard freeze + GPU 0% usage drop.

kol12

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Jan 26, 2015
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First of all I did tack on to some similar threads here but figured it was probably best to create my own.

This has been an ongoing issue for me in some of the games I play. It spans back many drivers to when I was playing Watch Dogs 2 in 2017 and early 2018. What is happening is intermittently the fps will suddenly freeze/stutter and at the same time the GPU usage will drop to 0%, after 1-3 seconds the GPU usage and fps recover to normal.

I am currently experiencing this in Shadow of the Tomb Raider and FFXV PC. FFXV suffers from this issue the worst I have seen in any game. Oddly some games are not affected at all such as AC Odyssey which I have been playing the last two months and also BF1 are not affected.

I would appreciate any help from anyone who may be familiar with this issue and can provide more info already attempted troubleshooting. My system specs are:

i7 8700K 4.9Ghz, Maximus X Hero, DDR4 16GB 3400Mhz (oc), EVGA 1080 Ti FTW3, Seasonic X-750 PSU, Win 10 1809, 417.22 3440x1440.
 

kol12

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Jan 26, 2015
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Recently I have removed all overclocking from my GPU and CPU and reset the BIOS to defaults. Everything is bone stock yet these hard freezes persist. In FFXV (PC) there is a clear pattern of the constant GPU usage drops particularly during demanding scenes such as fighting multiple monsters where there is a lot happening on screen.
 

kol12

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Jan 26, 2015
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Of course. I have been through two re-builds and multiple clean installations of Windows 10. I recently clean installed Windows 10 1809 on this machine just 3-4 weeks but have experienced this issue on previous versions of Windows 10...