BF3 framerate half

I'm having a weird issue with BF3. Whenever I enter a game, I'll be getting the normal 60-70 fps, but it will deteriorate within about 2 minutes into the game. I can literally stare at a wall this entire time and watch my fps sink slowly down from 70 to 30. Any ideas what it could be? I haven't tested in other games extensively yet, but I've tried playing tribes ascend and it didn't seem to be happening.

P150HM, i7-2720QM, 12GB RAM, GTX485M O/C @ 625/1500

 

Are you in balanced/high performance power mode in both the Windows settings AND the hotkey power settings? What temps are you seeing on when you monitor it? It sounds like you're either losing FPS due to down clocked power settings or overheating.

 

What are the hotkey power settings?
I'm in high performance mode.
I wasn't monitoring heat actively but I keep the fan on via fn+1 when I'm gaming.
I also tested it at stock clocks and got the same problem.

I played bf3 last night for a while at 650/1500, which was always a stable clock for me, but it kept crashing so I knocked it back to 625/1500 and played for 3 hours without a single crash, topping out at 80C when I was finished. I booted up this morning and got this.

EDIT: okay, I just started bf3 back up and played a bit. Got the same problem, checked my temps at the gpu was at 94C... that's not normal. Is it possible my fan is going? I have my laptop on one of those lap desk things on my lap. I'll try it on a real desk and see if I'm getting similar temps.

EDIT 2: 93C on a desk.

 

It's rather simple.

Don't push the limit with BF3, people have this thing with pushing the graphics to maximum just because they survived a game or two, but as soon as 30 people join a server and it gets crowded, BF3 suddenly requires a lot of power to run everything at max, so my solution is to crank down the settings

 

Need to crank down the settings. As the above poster said once the server gets full it will begin to struggle. I run on medium with a 6990M as to get decent framrates at all times.

 

Well that doesn't help me at all. I was able to consistently push out 55-70 frames before today, and I'm already running the most demanding things on low. Shadow quality, Effects, and Mesh quality are all at low. AA is off, motion blur is off. Ambient occlusion is off. AF is x16 and everything else is at ultra because the difference between having all of those at low and having them all at ultra is 5 frames at most.

Regardless of this, I just tried it again with everything at low and everything at stock in the nvidia control panel.
Same problem. over 90C.

 

If you've had the machine for a while, blow out the fans with compressed air and clean out any dust that's accumulated. If it worked fine before, then either new drivers/patch issues or overheating have caused a slowdown.

That said, BF3 won't do much better than medium on most mobile GPU's regardless.

 

I checked the fans and blew them out, there's almost no dust. I reverted back to 295.73 and am trying again, but that still doesn't answer why it was fine last night.

EDIT: driver reversion didn't help. still 93C.

 

Sounds like the GPU is throttling.

93C is hot. Try repasting / getting a cooler.
Annnnnnnnnnnd you have it OC'ed. That explains it. It's just throttling.

 

If your FPS keeps degrading when you play the game, I would say there is something wrong. I usualyy get a dip in the first few secaonds before I can deploy; I think it is because my graphics card loads thing slower than my SSD.

But if your FPS starts out normal and keeps degrading (even in single player or som sort of steady multiplayer environment) there is probably something wrong.

My guess is that your CPU is throttling somehow as GPU throttling would still give you bearable fps. Just my guess.

 

See above. I reverted to stock and am still pulling 92-93C. My laptop cooler broke two weeks ago but I've been playing bf3 for two weeks without it (OC'd to 650 mhz) and only got to 85C on a hot day.
If it needed a paste job, wouldn't this happen over a long period of time? It literally happened overnight.

Tested with Blacklight: Retribution on DX9 mode, tribes: ascend, skyrim, and half life 2. The only game that runs cool enough is half life 2. Blacklight crashed, tribes and skyrim both hit 95C in about 5 minutes and I decided it was unsafe to continue testing them.