Let's say I'm playing Rocket League. I'm maxed out on 250fps, no problems, everything is smooth. Doesn't even matter how long I play it for. Then I switch games, to let's say, minecraft or League of Legends. I get 800fps, no worries – and BOOM:
the game mini-freezes every half second or so. We're talking about (guessing here) a 1/10th of a second freeze every 0.5 seconds.
It's not a framedrop, it's a freeze. The fps counter doesn't even register it. It does not matter what I do to the game's settings in this situation. It doesn't matter whether I cap the fps on 60, 100 or let it run wild and hit 800 either. Vertical sync does not seem to do anything either. No setting seem to matter.
Thing is: My pc is not giving a global problem. I can run a movie next to the game (second screen) and it's giving smooth 60fps with no freezing at all. It literally is the game only.
Then I reboot my PC, and voila; Problem solved. Game runs smoothly again and nothing's wrong. This could last for days on end, but then, suddenly, I start a new game and poof: The mini-freezes again. This does convince me that it is a software issue and not a hardware issue (or maybe even firmware, but not hardware) and that's at least something.
Things I've tried so far:
- DDU graphics uninstall drivers
- Run Ccleaner afterwards as well and clean the registry
- Reinstall graphics drivers
- Ran windows'
sfc /scannowmany times. It always reports some errors but whatever. Never says it can't fix them.
my system:
-
Motherboard: Asus Maximus Hero VII (Z97 chipset)
-
CPU: Intel 4790K 4.0ghz (I turned off turbo-boost because I deemed it to be useless)
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RAM: 4*4GB Kingston HyperX Savage (1666mhz)
- PSU: EVGA Supernova 850 g2 (850W, gold)
- Graphics card: Sapphire vapor-x (amd) R290 4GB
(tri-fan) - Windows 10 Pro running on a HyperX Fury 240GB
SSD.
— so far, this issue seems to only be gaming related. Nothing else seems to be suffering, so I'm half-sure it has to do with drivers and AMD just messed it all up again? Looking for advice from someone who knows a bit more about it than I do.
small side detail: I also sometimes have the issue that I want to switch my main audio source, but opening playback devices will take anywhere between 30 seconds and 2 minutes. This also only happens sometimes and is fixed with a reboot. Whether it happens at the exact same time has not been determined yet, but I would guess so.
Update:
I have switched my power mode to high performance and still have the issue. I noticed my sound tab took a while to open up again, and decided to start a game to test it out (I have not yet played any games today, I've only been programming, using PHPStorm and watched a movie)
— I can now confirm that these issues do indeed pop up at the same time. They seem to be related somehow.
Best Answer
Issues like these are usually cause when using a balanced power scheme (default).
The system balances the available power, and when a background process starts to require juice, it is actually given juice and as a result, the system can experience very small lag spikes. Audio performance can be lower too.
The advised action is to set the system to High performance to make sure this is the problem.
This can be done by going to the Control Panel, Power Options.
By default, it will give you Power Saver and Balanced schemes where Balanced is selected. At the right, there is a down-arrow with the text Show additional plans.
Click this to show the High Performance scheme and then select it.
Now test for a few days if the problem is still there, or that it is gone.
If its gone, and you want to switch powerplans during gaming, you can do so by following this answer: Easy way to switch power plan in Windows 10
The reason why the problem is fixed after a reboot is simple: the background process is killed and not immediately started. This can be windows update, or a Windows Defender scan, or any other windows maintainance task.
As for the sound issues you describe, this is likely due to problems with the audio driver. I recommend going to the Device Manager and uninstall the drivers, then reboot, and if windows doesn't install them by themselves, install them yourself.