I've been experiencing a frustrating issue while gaming recently. For the last couple of days, everything starts off running smoothly at about 60 FPS, but after a few minutes, the frame rate plummets to around 10 FPS or even lower, and it stays there for a long time. When I monitor my CPU and GPU usage, the GPU is often at 100% while the CPU fluctuates between 15% and 70%. Temperatures seem reasonable at around 50-60°C. I've already reinstalled my drivers and tested several other games with the same results. I've also tried lowering the resolution and graphics settings, but the drops persist. I always play with my laptop plugged in, so that shouldn't be an issue. Here's my setup:
- 8GB RAM DDR5
- Intel Core i5 11300H 3.10GHz
- RTX 3050 (notebook) with 4GB VRAM
- 512GB SSD
- Asus Vivobook Pro 15 OLED
Apologies for any mistakes in my English!
2 Answers
If you've already ruled out drivers and temperatures, you might want to consider doing a 'reset my PC'. Just make sure you back up anything important first. It sounds like there's some background issue that's causing your GPU power consumption to fluctuate weirdly. Maybe your charger is causing the GPU power to drop too low when it's under load?
I noticed the GPU power consumption was dropping from 25W to around 11W when I was lagging. What does that mean?
What games are you trying to play? Given that you're running an RTX 3050 with only 4GB of VRAM, that can really bottleneck performance in newer titles. Also, 8GB of RAM isn't ideal either; it might be worth closing some background applications to free up resources. You could find that your games run smoother with less background load.
I was playing Call of Duty WW2, and it didn’t even use more than 2GB of VRAM.
I can't reset because I’ve got way too many important files.