While playing games on my laptop, I get a severe lag spike roughly every 30 seconds. The FPS drops to around 10 for about five seconds, then returns to normal. This only happens during gaming. I'm not very familiar with computer troubleshooting. The laptop has an AMD Ryzen 7 5825U processor with integrated Radeon Graphics, which Windows reports as having 496 MB of dedicated graphics memory.
3 Answers
The suggestion about creating another user account is mainly a troubleshooting test, not a direct fix. A cleaner account can show whether startup programs or software in your normal account are interfering, but I’d first test with background apps closed and Windows and AMD drivers updated. If the issue continues, recording the CPU, GPU, RAM, disk usage, and temperatures during one of the spikes should reveal what is maxing out.
Since this laptop uses integrated Radeon graphics, it shares system RAM instead of having much dedicated VRAM. A game may briefly pause while loading assets, especially if the graphics settings are too high. Try lowering texture quality and resolution, closing other programs, and checking whether your RAM usage is near 100% while the spike happens. Updating the AMD graphics driver may also help.
Also check temperatures and background activity. Use Task Manager or a hardware-monitoring tool while the game is running and look at CPU/GPU temperature, memory usage, disk usage, and which process becomes busy during the spike. If temperatures are very high, the laptop could be throttling; if disk or memory usage jumps, a background update, antivirus scan, or other program may be causing the pauses. Make sure the vents are clear and the laptop is on a hard surface.
Would lowering the graphics settings be the main way to fix the shared-memory problem?