Hardware & Technical ED: fps drops and fps cap at 60 Hz

[LifesAJourney]

Hi all,

Two problems I have.

1) Massive fps drops. From time to time (I'd say once every 4-5 ingame hours) fps gets down to 20 and stays at this level for 2-3 minutes. Regardless of what's on the screen (planet surface, space, galaxy map) and what I'm doing at the moment. After 2-3 minutes it goes up again to 60 and the game works like a charm until next drop occurs. CPU load stays at 10-15%, GPU load is below 35% at all times, no strange processes in task manager, no temperature problems, no RAM shortage. And no such fps drops in other games.

2) I play ED in borderless window mode, with 60 fps limit defined in game settings. I'd like to switch to 120 fps but I can't. It stays at 60 fps even if limits in game settings are set to 120 Hz. But when I alt-tab to any other application, say the browser or word/excel, with the game still visible in the background, I can see the fps rises up to 120 fps. When I switch back to the game, fps gets down to 60 fps again.

My hardware: 4790k@4,4GHz, 16GB RAM, GTX 1070, 1440p 144Hz G-Sync monitor.

Will appreciate any help.

 

[the100thmonkey]

Have you got VSYNC on?
Have you enabled G-sync in the Nvidia control panel (or wherever it is)?

 

[LifesAJourney]

VSync off in the game. VSync on and set to G-Sync in Nvidia control panel.

 

[CMDR MAIN SEQUENCE]

Do you get the same symptoms when playing in Fullscreen?

Are you playing with Game Mode on or off? Try toggling it.

Do you have something like RTSS running with a frame rate limit?

Which driver version? Tried a clean install? Tried setting the Control Panel settings to defaults?

 

[Necronaught]

My Free-Sync screen won't activate unless v-sync is off and the games are in fullscreen.

 

[LifesAJourney]

Do you get the same symptoms when playing in Fullscreen?

Haven't tried. I need to be in window mode to be able to use 3rd party tools and other stuff.

Are you playing with Game Mode on or off? Try toggling it.

Windows 8.1, so no Game Mode available, thanks to ancient gods.

Do you have something like RTSS running with a frame rate limit?

Yes, Afterburner+RTSS are there, frame limit set to 141 fps.

Which driver version? Tried a clean install? Tried setting the Control Panel settings to defaults?

Drivers 390.77, clean installed many weeks ago. Will try to do the clean install of newest ones.

 

[the100thmonkey]

Try it in full screen. If it fixes your problem, you'll find a way to adapt.

 

[CMDR MAIN SEQUENCE]

OP did you manage to fix this?

 

[LifesAJourney]

Haven't played since start of this thread. Going to play with drivers today.

 

[LifesAJourney]

A small update:
- Clean install of the newest graphics drivers: No changes, the issue still occurred.
- Clean install of the newest Corsair mouse drivers: I've noticed that something wrong is going on with my mouse, it refused working on several occasions and the Corsair configuration software was refusing to even display its main window. So I removed it completely and installed again from the scratch. Have never encountered these several-minute FPS drops since then (12-15 in-game hours).
- But now I'm getting drops when arriving in a system. Between the first view of the system and my ship going at 30 km/s I can see 3-4 frames only. It happens several times per playing session, rather at the beginning of playing, so just after the game is started. Harmless but annoying.
- No progress on 60 fps limit.

 

[Caramel Clown]

Try using hardware monitor from Precision or Afterburner. Specifically look for CPU clocks/temp, and GPU parameters. Also, memory. Maybe there's something going on in a background in your system that's causing this?
Also, maybe try setting high priority for ED's process in task manager? I don't know. Grasping straws at this point. Can't make it worse, right?

 

[TorTorden_VR]

Last ditch effort.

Instead of thermal paste, try using thermite paste ?

That could hurt I guess.

 

[LifesAJourney]

I've been verifying hardware parameters and load many times. As I wrote in the OP: CPU load stays at 10-15%, GPU load is below 35% at all times, no strange processes in task manager, no temperature problems, no RAM shortage. And no such fps drops in other games.

The game is installed on SSD, so data read performance should not be a problem, too.

Maybe I should try to reinstall the game completely...?

 

[LifesAJourney]

Maybe I should try to reinstall the game completely...?

For the record - this solved the FPS drop problem. I removed the game completely, together with configuration data stored in the %AppData% folder, installed it from the scratch and now it works perfectly.

 

[the100thmonkey]

For the record - this solved the FPS drop problem. I removed the game completely, together with configuration data stored in the %AppData% folder, installed it from the scratch and now it works perfectly.

Nice. Glad you got it fixed.

 

[LifesAJourney]

I took me a while, but I've eventually solved FPS cap issue, too.

It turned out that in the borderless window mode the in-game refresh rate is limited by the desktop refresh rate. I had 60 Hz here, it hasn't made much sense to me to have my desktop cursor refreshed more often. Today I tested 100 Hz and 120 Hz and ED displays 100 fps and 120 fps respectively (unless fps is not limited by in-game settings).

Not sure whether it's a driver's bug, a game bug or... a feature.

 

[Lucius-Darcia]

For the record - this solved the FPS drop problem. I removed the game completely, together with configuration data stored in the %AppData% folder, installed it from the scratch and now it works perfectly.

Thanks for letting us know [up]
Yes in windowed mode refresh rate of desktop makes sense since it is running on desktop
Didn't thought about that myself since i'm still stuck at a 60hz monitor

 

[Patrick_68000]

For the record - this solved the FPS drop problem. I removed the game completely, together with configuration data stored in the %AppData% folder, installed it from the scratch and now it works perfectly.

Maybe report this event to Frontier ?

Would generate a search of bugs ?

 

[LifesAJourney]

Yes in windowed mode refresh rate of desktop makes sense since it is running on desktop

Well, it's not that obvious. Sounds logic, but in my case it has been limiting the number of fps only if the game window was active. But when I switched to some other application (say, the browser), the number of fps in the background game window went up to maximum allowed in the game options.

So it's not consistent.

Moreover - an average load of my graphic card decreased after switching from 60 to 100 fps and almost reached the 60-fps level only after I switched to 120 fps (still remained bit lower, though).

All those make me believe that something does not work as supposed here.

This way or another, ED in 120 fps looks absolutely stunning!

 

[Chris Simon]

Well, it's not that obvious. Sounds logic, but in my case it has been limiting the number of fps only if the game window was active. But when I switched to some other application (say, the browser), the number of fps in the background game window went up to maximum allowed in the game options.

So it's not consistent.

Moreover - an average load of my graphic card decreased after switching from 60 to 100 fps and almost reached the 60-fps level only after I switched to 120 fps (still remained bit lower, though).

All those make me believe that something does not work as supposed here.

This way or another, ED in 120 fps looks absolutely stunning!

Have you looked at other programs that could be hogging your system? It could be something as stupid as malware or simply old and clogged-up Windows installation.
I'd also run speed and consistency checks on the SSD. I've had one failing on me in a similar manner. It would work normally for most of the time and then slow down to a point when even loading the contents of a folder in windows explorer would take 10 seconds.
RAM could also be at fault.