Random slowdown HELP!

[Grand Moff Porkins]

Hey all, I'm playing NFS Most Wanted 2012 through Game Pass/EA Play. It plays fine anywhere from 20 min to over an hour. But at random it'll suddenly start chugging like my system can't handle it. Craziest thing is if I hit the Game Bar button and bring up the Overlay it's fine again until I close it - see video attached. When I restart the game it's fine until it isn't again. I've tried tweaking the graphics settings every which way and dropping the quality MAYBE buys a bit more time, but it's very hard to tell.  I've used both the latest NVIDIA driver and rolled back to one from early Feb with the same results.  It's so far the only game giving this behavior, which is so weird that a 10 year old game is doing this but something like Halo Infinite isn't.

 

PC SPECS:

Ryzen 5 3600

GeForce RTX 2060

16 GB ram

Windows 11 running off 256GB M.2

Games installed on 1TB spinny disk