Peculiar FPS drops

Hello everyone,

A while back I got a new laptop, and it was a huge improvement to my older one ! The game ran at a nice 60 frames- there was one little quirk though, after a bit of playing the framerate would drop to 30 for a little bit, then go to 60 again and this would repeat. I didn't think much of it, because even playing at 30 frames was a luxury for me at the time.

This is still the case- not better and not worse, and I'm starting to really notice it. I've tried a bunch of things, such as lowering graphics settings, tweaking things in the Nvidia Control Panel, updating drivers, etc... but nothing worked. Switching to DirectX 11 keeps the frames stable as far as I'm aware but they don't get higher than 40.

I've made a video to show exactly what I mean and what happens, at 0:24 you can see it drops to around 30. It stays for a while, then at 1:45 it fixes itself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfd9yWjNuVM

My specs:
Processor: Intel i7-6500U @ 2.50GHz (4 CPUs)
OS: Windows 10 64-bit
RAM: 8GB
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce 940MX

Any help would be appreciated .. ^^

Tried the power settings policies? I play on a laptop and usually find these are the problem.

If your laptops cooling policies are set to slow down processor /gpu speeds before increasing fan speeds that could be it.

So it might be your system gets to a certain temperature then instead upping the power consumption and speeding up your fans. It slows down your gpu and processor to try and save power. Then when the temp drops it'll speed them back up.

There's a couple of other things in the advanced power management settings. Especially on laptops. A lot of settings are tuned to favor power saving /extended battery life over maximum performance.

Thanks for the fast reply ! Unfortunately though, all my general power saving settings were already turned to favor/maximize performance, and the system cooling policy was also already set to increase fan speed before slowing the processor. I've double checked that my GPU's power settings are also set to max performance as well, so .. I'm really not sure what's going wrong where.

Hrmm... It almost seems like its throttling performance back. Has it always done this since you got the laptop? Also, are you using the DX9 or the DX11 client? Does this happen anywhere? Like once it fixed itself, could you run back to the spot you were at when it started and keep a solid 60? If so, you can download HWmonitor and run it in the background, and check it to see if you're getting a spike in temperatures during the time the FPS tanks.

Yep, it's been like this since I got it. I'm using DX9- and yeah, it does happen anywhere and isn't bound to specific areas. I'll give checking the temperature a shot tomorrow since I've gotta get to bed for now- thanks for the suggestion!

Okay, well I checked the temperatures and there's nothing spiking there either. At rest it's around 36C, while playing it rises to ~67C, and when the frames drop it's also around 67C.