FPS temporary drop on games

Hi Guys,
I have a fairly good PC, with a 3 core 2.9 MH processor, 4 Gb RAM, and a GTX 560m video card (1 G vram), at 1600x900 resolution. I usually play games at max at 50-60 FPS with no issues, but that has change with the latest games. However, my issue is strange: Games like Tomb raider and Bioshock I., run fine at max settings, with an average FPS of about 30-40. However, in some graphic intensive views (i.e. some landscapes) the FPS drops to about 15. BUT, that happens only during 1-5 seconds. After that, looking at the same view, the FPS start recovering and then (after say 10 seconds) they get to the usual 30 FPS (may be that´s 10 FPS less than the average for the game).
I wonder what is going on, what is failing on those seconds where the FPS drop?
Thanks for the illumination.

 

could be a heat issue and its throttling. when was the last time you cleaned the vents and fans out with compressed air.

 

Thanks, I tried it, but didn´t work. I don´t think it´s a temperature issue, Couldn´t it be that the graphics are loading somehow while I have the FPS drop? Does anyone else have this issue?

 

It might be happening when you're loading a large amount of textures, if you turn those down slightly does the problem go away? If so then that's likely the issue.

 

Run a temperature monitoring program like HWMonitor while you're playing and take a look anyway - blowing air in the vents is hardly a surefire way to eliminate heat issues, especially if you've got a big buildup of dust in there.

It could also be a texture issue as suggested. There are a couple places in the third DLC of Borderlands that do the same thing to my laptop: sweeping vistas and long fields of vision that drop FPS down to low double-digits, though the problem doesn't let up after a few seconds like yours.

It might just be that max settings are too much for these games on that card. It's a two and a half year old upper-midrange GPU, after all, and 30-40 FPS maxed out seems more like the results you see for cards that are a price-point higher and a generation newer than yours (resolution notwithstanding). "Too much" is typically determined not by average FPS but minimum FPS - if you can get 1000 FPS walking down a hall but drop down to 5 FPS every time you fire your weapon (extreme example), your average FPS might be a gaudy 300, but the game's still unplayable.