Framerate drops every ~2 minutes while playing

[DownD]

Hi everyone, i have not played any game in the past 4-6 months maybe but recently I decided join some friends in the game xDefiant.

To my surprise, I was welcome to this weird bug, where every 2 minutes or so, my framerate drops to arround 1 fps or lower for arround 5-10 seconds and then comes back to normal.

 

At first, i thought this was related to CPU temperatures as I was getting over 90ºC. So I bought a new CPU cooler and voilá I was now at 50ºC and thought my problem was solved...

Although, i joined the game and kept getting the same problem... At this point I started to think it was somekind of virus maybe at kernel level, because i was not seeing any process usage spikes but i could hear the fans spinning like crazy sometimes when i was not doing anything(idle). Until now, all of this was happening in Windows 11, so i decided to completely wipe my SSD and install Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (something that i wanted to do for a while).

I installed xDefiant using the proton layer annnnnnnd the problem persisted...  Still this random FPS drops every 1-2 minutes.

At this point, I can confidently say that it is NOT a software issue (unless some BIOS setting which i didn't touch yet). I run Netdata to collect metrics and the insights i found important are power drops from Both CPU and GPU, but weirdly, i get higher CPU usage and lower GPU usage.

 

I attached the graphs with what i think are the most important metrics. The FPS drops happened at 23:41:50, 23:42:25, 23:43:13.

I also noticed some inconstancy in the GPU metrics, I think those are getting polled with much less frequency then the other ones. I may attempt to increase it later.

Additionally, i din't attach temperatures, but neither the GPU or CPU goes over 60ºC.

 

 

 

I am running:

- AMD Ryzen 3600X

- 16GB RAM

- NVIDIA RTX 3060

- 500W PSU | 80 plus silver

 

What do you think? For me, this seems to be a PSU or GPU issue, although, if this was a lack of power by the PSU I would expect a system crash or BSOD no?

I wanted to isolate the problem to a single hardware piece with some degree of confidence as I don't have spare components to swap out, and I also don't want to keep spending money until i find the problem.

[Mark Kaine]

this could also be asset loading / streaming, etc....

 

impossible to say with the info we have.

 

 

back in the day this was easy to tell you'd hear the disc/drives working hard, but nowadays with ssds there's no such indications and then people think it's their gpu or something because that's all they see in "monitoring software".

 

just saying,  it almost seems like this... every minute or so... silence...

 

 

check page file usage,  memory,  disc activity,  etc, etc?

[DownD]

On the first print I posted there is actually the I/O throughput from the disk, and now that I look closely, there are some spikes on the writing...

I will see if I can find better metrics on this later today.

[lafrente]

Does it occur in other games?

[DownD]

Soo, I tried Overwatch now and... at first, (while compile the shaders) I was getting the same problem, even on the main menu while not gaming. But after a while, it actually ran smoothly, which is weird.

Now I am even more confused, if it ran fine after a while, i think is safe to discard a GPU issue. I will see if I can find a disk stress tests.

 

Also, this is not just FPS drops, this is actually complete slow down of the entire system, even Alt+Tab and doing other operations on the computer becomes super slow! I have also remember seen this happening not gaming at all, while I was on Windows with some background tasks running but didn't manage to reproduce it again.