Sudden and repeated FPS drops in 3D games

Hello everyone,

I'm not too sure if there is a correct way to describe this annoying occurrance I'm constantly experiencing, also cause I don't know where is the problem originating from!

Basically after a while that I'm playing a game(any game, mind you) that involves 3d graphics(as in: far cry 3, instead of dungeons of dredmor, which is 2d) my FPS start dropping drastically low for 4-5 seconds, and then go back to normal. To clarify, the drop constantly repeats itself roughly every 4 minutes and can be huge, even from 60 fps to 10 fps, it doesn't really matter how fast the game normally goes, the low reached is always the same.

Now, let me tell you that I really did try several things to fix this, I thought it was tied to the GPU so I went to tweak a bit in the nVidia control panel, still nothing, I also thought it was tied to the power saving settings, but even if I put the high performance setting, at all times, this annoying thing still occurs! I even thought it was tied to the temperature reached from the GPU and/or CPU, but I don't believe so... maybe I'm mistaken.

In fact I have no idea whatsoever if it's the GPU or the CPU... so I took a screenshot for you to understand better what kind of spec I'm running on:



Anyone who can shed some light on this is very welcome... also, this always occurred since I bought the laptop, I kinda hope it's tied to some wrong setting config rather than some hardware problem...

Thanks in advance guys!

 

I get that same issue with Far Cry 3, often at the worst times.

You might try using ThrottleStop and forcing Turbo on all cores to see if it is CPU related.

I also have all of my steam games installed on a 7200RPM with steam and my OS on a SSD. Could the lag be due to loading textures etc from the HDD? Or maybe some kind of auto-save?

 

Have you tried updating the drivers to the latest ones from Nvidia. Sometimes when certain games have these FPS drops Nvidia will fix them in the next update.

 

I have had somewhat similar problem since I got this new laptop also.

I can play a game for a few hours and randomly my FPS either drops to like 2-5 or freezes for a few seconds.
So in BF3 or BF4 I can be flying the jet, screen will freeze and I will swear the laptop or game is about to crash but nope, it keeps going and the picture just resumes. I know it's not the whole PC freezing as I can still talk to people in TS when it's happening or Alt-Tab etc. Didn't have problem on my P150HM but this P157SM does since day one.

No event logs, no temp issue, tried multiple drivers, fresh install, Win8 and Win8.1 both happen etc. No idea what is causing it but I sure hope some firmware or software update fixes it. Is a little annoying and thankfully it only happens once or two every hour or so. I suspect it is something to do with iGPU vs. dGPU but when it happens I don't see the indicator come on so not like it is flipping on me or anything.

It's not even specific interval to say something else is causing to repeat, seems totally random.

Now one thing I can seem to reproduce fairly easy is videos freezing/lagging for a split second too.

So if I watch a YouTube clip or any sort of video, be in HTML5 or FLASH the video and sound randomly studder. This is iGPU as is locked to run on, and honestly is plenty powerful for them but also annoying. Multiple Intel graphics version same results. If I monitor the iGPU freq during this time it stays at either max speed or turbo so not like it's dipping down neither.

I updated to the 09 bios a month ago in hopes that would fix as it updated the iGPU bios but no joy in fact that just gave me a new issue. Sometimes my monitor will go to "unsupported refresh rate" and require power cycle to get back when switching to games or booting up when set to 144Hz.

 

I'd monitor gpu and cpu themps/frequenies. Also have task manager open to see if a background application is spiking resources.

 

Which OS is this occurring on?