$1500 PC, random half second lag spikes/freezes

[Shock123]

Hey, exactly 1 week ago I built myself a new pc, it's really fast and pretty high end. I realized each and every game runs at over 100 FPS, but randomly I get a lag spike almost every 10-20 seconds. 

My specs are: 2060 6gb

i7 8700k

16gb of ram

if you need anything else, i'll put it in

[ki8aras]

13 minutes ago, Shock123 said:

Hey, exactly 1 week ago I built myself a new pc, it's really fast and pretty high end. I realized each and every game runs at over 100 FPS, but randomly I get a lag spike almost every 10-20 seconds. 

My specs are: 2060 6gb

i7 8700k

16gb of ram

if you need anything else, i'll put it in

reinstall audio drivers, i had this problem about a month ago and reinstalling them fixed it

[Shock123]

19 minutes ago, ki8aras said:

reinstall audio drivers, i had this problem about a month ago and reinstalling them fixed it

I'll do that quickly. But how come audio? How does it create lag spikes?

[ki8aras]

36 minutes ago, Shock123 said:

I'll do that quickly. But how come audio? How does it create lag spikes?

i don't have any idea, all i know is that when i did it everything went back to normal

[Shock123]

4 minutes ago, ki8aras said:

i don't have any idea, all i know is that when i did it everything went back to normal

i tired it and it still didnt fix it :(. Do you know what else could be an issue?

[Paul Rudd]

1 hour ago, Shock123 said:

I realized each and every game runs at over 100 FPS, but randomly I get a lag spike almost every 10-20 seconds.

What games?

[Shock123]

58 minutes ago, Dr. Historic Low said:

What games?

battlefield 1, far cry 4 and 5, overwatch, star wars battlefront 2, and some low end games like gmod, and team fortress 2

[Paul Rudd]

13 minutes ago, Shock123 said:

battlefield 1, far cry 4 and 5, overwatch, star wars battlefront 2, and some low end games like gmod, and team fortress 2

Do a quick speed test here... https://www.speedtest.net/

 

What does it show for your download and upload speed as well as your ping?

[Shock123]

56 minutes ago, Dr. Historic Low said:

Do a quick speed test here... https://www.speedtest.net/

 

What does it show for your download and upload speed as well as your ping?

 

[Paul Rudd]

13 minutes ago, Shock123 said:

Well there ya' go. Upgrade your internet speeds and the lag spikes will go away.

[Shock123]

20 minutes ago, Dr. Historic Low said:

Well there ya' go. Upgrade your internet speeds and the lag spikes will go away.

fps lag spikes, not ping

[Paul Rudd]

41 minutes ago, Shock123 said:

fps lag spikes, not ping

Exactly what I'm telling you. Upgrade your internet and your fps will remain stable. All the games you listed are played online.

 

Play a game like BF1 offline in the campaign and record the gameplay using Shadowplay and post it here. Be sure to use MSI Afterburner to show everything while you game.

[Shock123]

5 hours ago, Dr. Historic Low said:

Exactly what I'm telling you. Upgrade your internet and your fps will remain stable. All the games you listed are played online.

 

Play a game like BF1 offline in the campaign and record the gameplay using Shadowplay and post it here. Be sure to use MSI Afterburner to show everything while you game.

I don't really think ping or bad internet messes with your frames. Far cry 4, Far cry 5, and battlefield 1 on single player all still have random lag spikes.

[LogicalDrm]

11 hours ago, Dr. Historic Low said:

Exactly what I'm telling you. Upgrade your internet and your fps will remain stable. All the games you listed are played online.

FPS isn't internet related... and term "lag" is used for pretty much every performance issue related to games. Not just the original meaning which is for internet connection.

 

All drivers up to date? Games loading from SSD? Pagefile set to be enough (4gb+)? Can you monitor your hardware usage when these spiked occur? And are the spikes about fps dropping to sub-40fps numbers or just dropping 40fps from that 100fps+? What software do you have running on background?

[Paul Rudd]

11 hours ago, Shock123 said:

I don't really think ping or bad internet messes with your frames.

Suit yourself. 100% positive it does, I experience it everyday in GTA 5 online. When I'm in a fully populated lobby, my fps is around 64-82. The moment I get into a lobby by myself, my fps jumps back up to a stable 105. If I just play in story mode, it's at 90-105 consistently.

[tatte]

If your lag spikes are like freezes, also manifest outside of games and especially if you have upgraded from HDD to SSD on the same config your BIOS settings could be at fault. I don't recall anymore the correct terms, but that used to be a thing some years ago. Your hardware is easily new enough that I doubt this is the case, but if the symptoms match, it's worth researching.

 

Otherwise, trying to expand on what has already mentioned, have you monitored your temps? If your CPU throttles under load, that could cause a fine myriad of issues.

[Mira Yurizaki]

Whether or not games freeze due to poor internet quality depends on the game itself and how the system was developed. The client could refuse to run the game logic if it doesn't receive anything from the server because the server is the one in charge of sending game state. Or the client could continue on and "catch up" later.

 

I believe Source games will continue on and catch up later. Or at the very least, the client doesn't appear unresponsive. And looking at this video...

Overwatch also doesn't appear to freeze everything when there are lag spikes.

 

And since it's a game I play regularly, Final Fantasy XIV also doesn't freeze everything when there are lag spikes. If you have lag, everyone else just stops while you can still move around. Then the game catches up once the lag goes away.

 

The only game that I suspect freezes everything when there's bad lag is The Division, but I haven't looked too deeply into it.

[Shock123]

12 hours ago, LoGiCalDrm said:

FPS isn't internet related... and term "lag" is used for pretty much every performance issue related to games. Not just the original meaning which is for internet connection.

 

All drivers up to date? Games loading from SSD? Pagefile set to be enough (4gb+)? Can you monitor your hardware usage when these spiked occur? And are the spikes about fps dropping to sub-40fps numbers or just dropping 40fps from that 100fps+? What software do you have running on background?

All drivers are up to date as I know so far, games ran off of a 7200rpm western digital caviar blue hard drive, im not that tech savvy so im not sure what a "Pagefile" is. If you know of any apps that let you monitor in game while the lag spike occurs, that would be great. The lag spikes are usually half a second each, and actually freeze the game instead of lowering the fps, it happens so fast, my fps counter only goes down by like 10 instead of going to 0. Also, I only have the main softwares running that I need, like razer synapse for my mouse and keyboard. Also I have MSI afterburner running in the background too so i can monitor the temperatures. Discord is also usually running in the background.

[LogicalDrm]

4 minutes ago, Shock123 said:

All drivers are up to date as I know so far, games ran off of a 7200rpm western digital caviar blue hard drive,

 

Some other software accessing drive could cause this.

 

4 minutes ago, Shock123 said:

im not that tech savvy so im not sure what a "Pagefile" is.

 

Pagefile is virtual memory. Some software need it to run. If you don't know what it is, then its not issue. Windows sets it to high enough by default (matching your RAM size).

 

4 minutes ago, Shock123 said:

If you know of any apps that let you monitor in game while the lag spike occurs, that would be great.

 

If you have 2nd monitor, Task Manager works. If not, you can use MSI Afterburner, HWiNFO64, HWmonitor etc. to save graph. The things that interest me are drive usage, RAM usage and CPU/GPU usage (though these two should only reflect to two first ones).

 

4 minutes ago, Shock123 said:

The lag spikes are usually half a second each, and actually freeze the game instead of lowering the fps, it happens so fast, my fps counter only goes down by like 10 instead of going to 0. Also, I only have the main softwares running that I need, like razer synapse for my mouse and keyboard. Also I have MSI afterburner running in the background too so i can monitor the temperatures. Discord is also usually running in the background.

 

I would call that micro-stutter. It can have many causes, like RAM. That was issue with my old system. Upgrading from 4gb to 8gb solved that, but I was 80%+ RAM usage all the time back then.

[Shock123]

1 hour ago, LoGiCalDrm said:

 

Some other software accessing drive could cause this.

 

 

Pagefile is virtual memory. Some software need it to run. If you don't know what it is, then its not issue. Windows sets it to high enough by default (matching your RAM size).

 

 

If you have 2nd monitor, Task Manager works. If not, you can use MSI Afterburner, HWiNFO64, HWmonitor etc. to save graph. The things that interest me are drive usage, RAM usage and CPU/GPU usage (though these two should only reflect to two first ones).

 

 

I would call that micro-stutter. It can have many causes, like RAM. That was issue with my old system. Upgrading from 4gb to 8gb solved that, but I was 80%+ RAM usage all the time back then.

I checked and no softwares are installed on my hdd, only games are. I'm not entirely sure on how to enable a graph for each component using afterburner, maybe ill try a different software unless you know how to. And I also have 16gb of ram

[Paul Rudd]

4 hours ago, Shock123 said:

The lag spikes are usually half a second each, and actually freeze the game instead of lowering the fps, it happens so fast, my fps counter only goes down by like 10 instead of going to 0.

Upgrade your internet and call it a day. Until then, use MSI Afterburner to show all your temps and usages for your CPU, GPU, RAM, VRAM, etc, etc to show what is going on while you game. Post a clip playing a single player campaign here so we can determine if there's anything going on outside of your internet.

[LogicalDrm]

6 hours ago, Dr. Historic Low said:

Upgrade your internet and call it a day. Until then, use MSI Afterburner to show all your temps and usages for your CPU, GPU, RAM, VRAM, etc, etc to show what is going on while you game. Post a clip playing a single player campaign here so we can determine if there's anything going on outside of your internet.

Or they could try and see if this continues without internet access. If it does, your hypothesis is incorrect.

[Paul Rudd]

9 hours ago, LoGiCalDrm said:

your hypothesis is incorrect

It's not a hypothesis, it's a personal experience I deal with every other day. I'm not imagining my fps dip when in full populated lobbies and then rise back up when I kick everyone out the lobby. I'm not imagining lag spikes on my screen when I play online sports games with friends that have similar internet to what you see above. They have yet to upgrade their internet either and playing games like NBA 2k17 with them is very annoying. The lag is exactly as described above when playing with them. And the moment we replace them with a person that has good internet, POOF, the lag is gone.

 

It's not a hypothesis, it's a conclusion.

[LogicalDrm]

31 minutes ago, Dr. Historic Low said:

It's not a hypothesis, it's a personal experience I deal with every other day. I'm not imagining my fps dip when in full populated lobbies and then rise back up when I kick everyone out the lobby. I'm not imagining lag spikes on my screen when I play online sports games with friends that have similar internet to what you see above. They have yet to upgrade their internet either and playing games like NBA 2k17 with them is very annoying. The lag is exactly as described above when playing with them. And the moment we replace them with a person that has good internet, POOF, the lag is gone.

 

It's not a hypothesis, it's a conclusion.

The distance to server and actual ping are things. OPs internet connection is fast enough for gaming. So suggesting upgrading it to solve something that you can't say for certain is even internet related is why I'm arguing against you here.

[Paul Rudd]

47 minutes ago, LoGiCalDrm said:

OPs internet connection is fast enough for gaming.

Fast enough for gaming? Sure. Fast enough for lag-free gaming? Not even close.

47 minutes ago, LoGiCalDrm said:

suggesting upgrading it to solve something that you can't say for certain is even internet related is why I'm arguing against you here.

As I have stated over and over, I deal with these types of internet everyday. They lag the game every single time. I used to be in his shoes as well and everyone I played with did not want to play with me because of it. The day I upgraded my internet is the day they no longer complained to me about lag.

I'M NOT MAKING THIS UP AND I'M 100% POSITIVE IT WILL FIX THIS ISSUE.

Sorry for yelling. It's for effect. There's a reason when you sign up for internet packages, the most expensive ones literally have the word GAMING in that package. When you look at the basic packages, the word gaming is nowhere to be found. For a reason dude, for a reason. That very reason has everything to do with lag-free gaming.

 

The best way for me to put this is that while internet is not supposed to affect fps, it most definitely masks or projects something similar to an fps issue, like a lag spike. Exactly what the OP is experiencing. And when you monitor your fps, you will SEE WITH YOUR EYES IF YOU WERE TO OPEN THEM, that the fps is in fact impacted.