FPS drops then recovers every 5 sec

[Illustrious II]

Hello. Wondering if you clever folks can give me a hand here. Bit of a puzzle. Been playing ED on this PC over a year now, no graphics related problems. I play at 1920 x 1080 and get 60 fps.

System info:
Dell Inc. Inspiron 5577
Microsoft Windows 10 Home (64-bit)
Intel® Core™ i7-7700HQ CPU @ 2.80GHz
Intel® 100 Series/C230 Series Chipset Family
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 – it is set to default to this card all the time
Intel® HD Graphics 630
8GB RAM
SSD: SK hynix SC311 SATA 256GB - all game files are stored on here and it's less than 50% full
HDD: TOSHIBA MQ01ABD100 1TB

In the last couple of days, as per title, the frame rate drops to ~45 fps and then recovers back to 60 fps. This happens consistently at intervals of ~5 seconds throughout the game. All drivers are up to date. Rolling back to an earlier driver does not make a difference. Changing the graphics settings in the game does not appear to make a difference either. All AV scans, antimalwarebytes etc are coming up clean. According to Task Manager the GPU is not being more than 50% used, same for the CPU. No other applications running while I play the game.

Any thoughts on what this could be please?

 

[MickyG1982]

That's about par for the course really, the GTX 1050 is not a very high powered card, I usually get between 45 & 60fps on my own laptop with the same card.

Things you can check however:

Dust - Laptops are already runny fairly near thermal limits, if you haven't done it in a while blow out the vents with an air duster (or better yet open it up if you are feeling confident). A hot running laptop will throttle itself down & increase noticeable stutter

Be aware of where the laptop is situated - same reason. If it's on your lap or on a bed/fabric, vents may be blocked decreasing airflow & increasing heat. Is the ambiant temperature quite high again, heat.

Is the laptop plugged in, if it isn't then you will find that the CPU will be running at stock speed rather than boosting up, when needed causing stutter & slowdown, this will also have a similar effect on the GPU.

Is the laptop running in high performance mode even when plugged in? I have seen a case just recently where someones laptop was refusing to boost up (or even use the onboard Nvdia card causing a crash in his case) even though it was plugged in. A way to show this is to plug the laptop into a monitor or tv via HDMI - whilst plugged into the charger. This forces the Laptop to go into high performance mode and may eliminate (or reduce any stutter). Note this would indicate a problem with your system rather than the game itself.

Are you running the steam version of the game? Steam may well be downloading updates in the background, AV software may be causing issues too. Of course, Windows may also be downloading updates in the background.

 

[Illustrious II]

The concern isn't the overall performance. The concern is that it has changed. It used to run stable at ~60fps. But now it changes fps from 45 to 60 every 5 seconds.
It's not dust or heat, it's sat on a desk; it's running on mains power; it's running in high performance mode and it's connected to a monitor via HDMI for all my ED gameplay.
I'm not running Steam, Windows thinks it's on a metered connection and there are no other downloads going on that I can see in Task Manager.

 

[Chong-su]

Maybe this thread can help

 

[the100thmonkey]

The 7700HQ tends to run hot, or so I've heard.

Check your temps using MSI Afterburner (download links are right at the botrtom of the page) - that CPU has a maximum TDP of 45w and a TjMax of 100°C. If you're hitting the power limit or the thermal limit, the CPU will clock down.

You should also check your GPU's vRAM usage and temperatures - laptops tend to share the same heatsink assembly between CPU and GPU, meaning that when both are under load the thermal limit will be reached sooner, leading to CPU and GPU downclocking to prevent damage. The GTX 1050 on the 5577 has 4GB of vRAM, but the card isn't really powerful enough to run the game at high, especially on planet surfaces (I have a laptop with the same GPU but an 8300H), so you will get drops on anything above medium.

You might also benefit from running RAM in dual channel (it's not clear whether you have 2x4GB or 1x8GB in the machine.)

If thermal or power throttling is the issue, you may be able to address it by undervolting. A brief Google suggests that you might expect to undervolt by 100mV at least, which should have a noticeable impact on temperatures and power limit throttling. I use Intel XTU to undervolt my G5 5587. You should also install Dell Power Manager (if it's not already installed - it's not clear if it's still available for that model and I can't check compatibility, obviously, as I don't have that laptop) and choose the power plan with the most aggressive fan curves - the default plan kicks fan speeds up far too late and the CPU throttles to bring temps down. This may require a BIOS update.

In Afterburner, monitor:

1. CPU temperature (log all eight logical CPUs. I think Afterburner will enumerate the physical CPU then its associated hyperthread, but I'm not sure)
2. CPU frequency (again for all 8 logical cores)
3. CPU usage (all 8 - we want to see if one of the threads is getting overwhelmed)
4. Framerate
5. GPU temperature
6. GPU load
7. GPU vRAM usage

You can save the data to a log file which you can later open in Afterburner - you should try to find correlations between the framerate drop and other factors. My money's on CPU thermal throttling though - My G5 5587 used to do exactly the same thing.

 

[Kingston@#]

i resonantly got a 1050ti 4g one thing that is not needed is vsinc. only needed for low end monitors. monitors that are 50-60hz its not needed turn it off and frame rate will be higher.
my fps on planets 60fps, SC 140fps, stations 60fps, battles 60fps, cmdrs 50-60fps,

 

[the100thmonkey]

The Ti suffix makes a big difference! The 1050 Ti scores about 25% higher than the vanilla 1050 in benchmarks.

 

[Old Duck]

OP, does framerate drop coincide with one the latest patches to the game?

 

[Para Handy]

i resonantly got a 1050ti 4g one thing that is not needed is vsinc. only needed for low end monitors. monitors that are 50-60hz its not needed turn it off and frame rate will be higher.
my fps on planets 60fps, SC 140fps, stations 60fps, battles 60fps, cmdrs 50-60fps,

Excuse my slightly off-topic interjection about this. You fail to take into account that by running unlimited fps (by turning off v-sync) you increase your GPU temperatures and hence your card fan speed increases (or actually turns on) - this added noise in anathema to me so I always keep v-sync on unless I am doing lots of body scans when exploring (the scan time is directly related to fps ). So just an FYI - increased fps = increased heat = increased noise + increased stress on GPU itself. Your choice.

 

[Old Duck]

Excuse my slightly off-topic interjection about this. You fail to take into account that by running unlimited fps (by turning off v-sync) you increase your GPU temperatures and hence your card fan speed increases (or actually turns on) - this added noise in anathema to me so I always keep v-sync on unless I am doing lots of body scans when exploring (the scan time is directly related to fps ). So just an FYI - increased fps = increased heat = increased noise + increased stress on GPU itself. Your choice.

I also lock framerate and vsync, because normally this gets rid of any stutter for a buttery-smooth experience. Digital Foundry recently released a video validating this observation, where they say this allows the CPU / GPU extra time to stream textures and such.

That and my laptop runs cooler, quieter, and draws a lot less power

 

[Kingston@#]

Excuse my slightly off-topic interjection about this. You fail to take into account that by running unlimited fps (by turning off v-sync) you increase your GPU temperatures and hence your card fan speed increases (or actually turns on) - this added noise in anathema to me so I always keep v-sync on unless I am doing lots of body scans when exploring (the scan time is directly related to fps ). So just an FYI - increased fps = increased heat = increased noise + increased stress on GPU itself. Your choice.

then i suggest a better system because mine is quiet, no increase of heat/fans. vsinc is to stablelise framerate on monitors that cant handle it. there vsync is also old hat as well.

VSync, or vertical sync, is a graphics technology that syncs up the frame rate of a game and the refresh rate of a gaming monitor.

VSync was first developed by GPU manufacturers as a way to deal with screen tearing. Screen tearing occurs when two different “screens” of an image crash into each other because the game FPS (frames per second) is delivering information that the monitor’s refresh rate can’t keep up with. The results are glitchy images where objects appear fragmented, or part of the screen looks dislocated — annoying stuff. This happens most often in advanced games with 60 FPS or beyond, paired with monitors that don’t really go beyond a 60Hz refresh rate, although it can happen with much higher refresh rates if you are playing a particularly demanding game or are making things more complicated via overclocking, etc.

VSync comes along and gets everyone on the same page by imposing a strict cap on how high the game’s FPS can go. It says, “Hey, this looks like a 60Hz monitor that’s struggling to keep up, so you’re not going to go above 60 FPS, all right? Now sync up your refresh rate and image data.” The result is a smoother gaming experience that no longer struggles with screen tearing — at least, that’s the goal.

 

[Para Handy]

then i surgest a better system because mine is quiet, no increase of heat/fans. ...........l.

Don't talk rubbish. I have a much more capable card than your 1050i and I know what I am talking about as I was an electronics engineer in military avionics.

I suggest you run TechPowerUp GPU-Z and look at the sensors page during different conditions of play - then you will see what nonsense you were postulating.

 

[the100thmonkey]

then i suggest a better system because mine is quiet, no increase of heat/fans. vsinc is to stablelise framerate on monitors that cant handle it. there vsync is also old hat as well.

VSync, or vertical sync, is a graphics technology that syncs up the frame rate of a game and the refresh rate of a gaming monitor.

VSync was first developed by GPU manufacturers as a way to deal with screen tearing. Screen tearing occurs when two different “screens” of an image crash into each other because the game FPS (frames per second) is delivering information that the monitor’s refresh rate can’t keep up with. The results are glitchy images where objects appear fragmented, or part of the screen looks dislocated — annoying stuff. This happens most often in advanced games with 60 FPS or beyond, paired with monitors that don’t really go beyond a 60Hz refresh rate, although it can happen with much higher refresh rates if you are playing a particularly demanding game or are making things more complicated via overclocking, etc.

VSync comes along and gets everyone on the same page by imposing a strict cap on how high the game’s FPS can go. It says, “Hey, this looks like a 60Hz monitor that’s struggling to keep up, so you’re not going to go above 60 FPS, all right? Now sync up your refresh rate and image data.” The result is a smoother gaming experience that no longer struggles with screen tearing — at least, that’s the goal.

If you're getting less than 60fps on a 60Hz monitor, you're getting either screen tearing or noticeable stutter: Vsync is about reducing stutter and tearing; it's only about the monitor in that non-Gsync/Freesync displays typically adhere to certain standards - 60Hz, 120Hz and 144Hz.

Running uncapped FPS is literally wasting frames (and, therefore--as ParaHandy and Old Duck say--power, through wasted GPU cycles) if your FPS is significantly higher than the display refresh rate. Why play at 85 fps if your display can only show 60 of them?

If you have a card that can easily do 60Hz but not, say 100 or 120Hz, then capping the refresh rate and turning Vsync on is a logical thing to do - it reduces stress on the GPU and CPU, lowers power consumption (same thing really), and stops any stuttering that might arise from a GPU producing frames that aren't in sync with the monitor refresh. If you have a card that is capable of pushing frames in the 120-144fps range at a given resolution, then you should buy a monitor that is capable of showing them - it will look significantly better. Screen tearing is a lot less noticeable at high refresh rates, as the "torn" image is visible for much less time, although aiming for a solid FPS will still lead to a smoother perception of the game universe.

 

[Illustrious II]

The 7700HQ tends to run hot, or so I've heard.

Check your temps using MSI Afterburner (download links are right at the botrtom of the page) - that CPU has a maximum TDP of 45w and a TjMax of 100°C. If you're hitting the power limit or the thermal limit, the CPU will clock down.

You should also check your GPU's vRAM usage and temperatures - laptops tend to share the same heatsink assembly between CPU and GPU, meaning that when both are under load the thermal limit will be reached sooner, leading to CPU and GPU downclocking to prevent damage. The GTX 1050 on the 5577 has 4GB of vRAM, but the card isn't really powerful enough to run the game at high, especially on planet surfaces (I have a laptop with the same GPU but an 8300H), so you will get drops on anything above medium.

You might also benefit from running RAM in dual channel (it's not clear whether you have 2x4GB or 1x8GB in the machine.)

If thermal or power throttling is the issue, you may be able to address it by undervolting. A brief Google suggests that you might expect to undervolt by 100mV at least, which should have a noticeable impact on temperatures and power limit throttling. I use Intel XTU to undervolt my G5 5587. You should also install Dell Power Manager (if it's not already installed - it's not clear if it's still available for that model and I can't check compatibility, obviously, as I don't have that laptop) and choose the power plan with the most aggressive fan curves - the default plan kicks fan speeds up far too late and the CPU throttles to bring temps down. This may require a BIOS update.

In Afterburner, monitor:

1. CPU temperature (log all eight logical CPUs. I think Afterburner will enumerate the physical CPU then its associated hyperthread, but I'm not sure)
2. CPU frequency (again for all 8 logical cores)
3. CPU usage (all 8 - we want to see if one of the threads is getting overwhelmed)
4. Framerate
5. GPU temperature
6. GPU load
7. GPU vRAM usage

You can save the data to a log file which you can later open in Afterburner - you should try to find correlations between the framerate drop and other factors. My money's on CPU thermal throttling though - My G5 5587 used to do exactly the same thing.

Gosh. That's all a bit complicated for me. Don't know what most of this stuff means, spent ages trying to understand it. I did download the program but it's not easy to use. Big readme file but no instructions. It did some stuff recording temperatures, took ages. None of them went above 72°C. The RAM is 1 x 8GB. From what I can understand of it all the CPU load is 60 - 70%, the frequency goes up to 3.55GHz and the GPU about 50%, uses 3.2 GB of its RAM. No idea how to get all this in a log file.

 

[MickyG1982]

The CPU at 60-70% load could well be an issue it sounds like it's quite well throttled.

But, you may have the ability to enable performance mode in he BIOS. Seems DELL has a habit of not enabling this by default so you end up hitting the power limit for the CPU much earlier than you should and it throttles.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/7700hq-power-limit-throttling.805765/

 

[the100thmonkey]

To write data to a log file, open Afterburner and click the gear icon. On the default skin, it's here:

In the window that pops up, go to "Monitoring" and scroll down to the bottom - you'll need to drag and drop the scroll bar; it doesn't respond to mouse wheels for some reason.
Once there, check the box marked "Log history to file" and choose a suitable save location.

Now scroll back to the top and select the sensors you want Afterburner to log You click the check mark on the left. If you want some (or all) of the information on-screen, you should make sure that you check "Show in on-screen display". Showing too much info can make the screen very busy, so it's probably better to have fewer rather than more sensors in the OSD. There are options to log data from temp limit, power limit and voltage limit. Make sure you monitor them!

Play a session (I'd suggest at least ten minutes, more data is better) with afterburner running and try to make the FPS drop as you describe. Once you're done, exit the game and double click the log file - it will open in Afterburner. You can then look at the framerate drops and compare across with the output from the sensors at the same time. Hopefully you'll be able to find a correlation between some of the sensor data and the FPS drops, which will then suggest a solution.

The overall CPU load looks OK, but Elite runs on several threads, so it may be that one of them is going even higher and the game is bottlenecking.

With regard to Intel XTU, I run an AMD chip on my desktop so can't access it right now.

 

[Illustrious II]

To write data to a log file, open Afterburner and click the gear icon. On the default skin, it's here:

In the window that pops up, go to "Monitoring" and scroll down to the bottom - you'll need to drag and drop the scroll bar; it doesn't respond to mouse wheels for some reason.
Once there, check the box marked "Log history to file" and choose a suitable save location.

Now scroll back to the top and select the sensors you want Afterburner to log You click the check mark on the left. If you want some (or all) of the information on-screen, you should make sure that you check "Show in on-screen display". Showing too much info can make the screen very busy, so it's probably better to have fewer rather than more sensors in the OSD. There are options to log data from temp limit, power limit and voltage limit. Make sure you monitor them!

Play a session (I'd suggest at least ten minutes, more data is better) with afterburner running and try to make the FPS drop as you describe. Once you're done, exit the game and double click the log file - it will open in Afterburner. You can then look at the framerate drops and compare across with the output from the sensors at the same time. Hopefully you'll be able to find a correlation between some of the sensor data and the FPS drops, which will then suggest a solution.

The overall CPU load looks OK, but Elite runs on several threads, so it may be that one of them is going even higher and the game is bottlenecking.

With regard to Intel XTU, I run an AMD chip on my desktop so can't access it right now.

Thank you for the guidance here, it's very helpful of you. Unfortunately, the log file is of a filetype which cannot be uploaded here. For some reason the framerate wasn't in the log file at all so I had another go and used the Ctrl-F FPS thingy in the game and a stopwatch. What I noticed was:
The game was not behaving as it normally does. This time it had lower FPS at the start, while exiting a station. FPS drops mainly occurred when entering a new system and dropping out of supercruise. No FPS drops when I went to land on a planet and no regular 5-second drops at all. Odd.
GPU memory usage was 3.9GB at the start, then it dropped to 3.5 - 3.6 for the remainder of the game, GPU usage was in the high 90's at the start then settled to 55 - 70% apart from a few spikes which appear to be when the FPS drops happened.
CPU usage across all 8 was fairly uniform, between 40 - 70 %; as were CPU temps, 65 - 75°C; and clockspeeds 3410 - 3811.
Max RAM usage was 6639.
I'll have another go when I have more time and maybe select some additional stuff to monitor. I'll also see if I can get it to put FPS in the log file. I might also increase the graphics settings in the game to see if it makes the FPS worse.

 

[TheSaiZo]

Ok, so I do not know if this information is relevant or can help at all..
But I used to have the same issue: FPS drops mainly occurred when entering a new system and dropping out of supercruise. No FPS drops when I went to land on a planet and no regular 5-second drops at all.

Could it be the graphics card? I do know that most laptops can't change them. But when I started to play ED, I had no direct issues, but after updates - my computer acted exactly like that when entering a new system. Changed the graphics card, and problem was solved..

Also, someone who knew computers told me it was something that my current card was "64 bit", and not enough memory on it, it was too technical for me to remember exactly.

 

[the100thmonkey]

Thank you for the guidance here, it's very helpful of you. Unfortunately, the log file is of a filetype which cannot be uploaded here. For some reason the framerate wasn't in the log file at all so I had another go and used the Ctrl-F FPS thingy in the game and a stopwatch. What I noticed was:
The game was not behaving as it normally does. This time it had lower FPS at the start, while exiting a station. FPS drops mainly occurred when entering a new system and dropping out of supercruise. No FPS drops when I went to land on a planet and no regular 5-second drops at all. Odd.
GPU memory usage was 3.9GB at the start, then it dropped to 3.5 - 3.6 for the remainder of the game, GPU usage was in the high 90's at the start then settled to 55 - 70% apart from a few spikes which appear to be when the FPS drops happened.
CPU usage across all 8 was fairly uniform, between 40 - 70 %; as were CPU temps, 65 - 75°C; and clockspeeds 3410 - 3811.
Max RAM usage was 6639.
I'll have another go when I have more time and maybe select some additional stuff to monitor. I'll also see if I can get it to put FPS in the log file. I might also increase the graphics settings in the game to see if it makes the FPS worse.

No problem. You seem to have decent temps on the CPU. They can, of course, always be lower, but given what you wrote, I'm leaning away from thermal throttling.

FPS drops on system entry and supercruise dropout are common. I get them too.

At 1080p ultra, the game uses 5.5GB of vRAM on my RTX2060. In your case, your machine has 4GB of vRAM, and it looks like that's being maxed out. Perhaps reducing texture quality will help - if your vRAM is maxed out, the client will stream textures from storage to swap them out as necessary. This is far slower than having them in vRAM ready and waiting, and leads to framerate drops.

 

[Illustrious II]

I have some more information from the Afterburner log, I wonder if @the100thmonkey can review and comment please? The title problem started again today. I'd been playing ED for some time, doing that Community Goal in Teveri when it started suddenly.
The FPS was up and down every 5 seconds. So I got Afterburner started and then went back to playing for 10 mins or so before exiting ED. I've posted the full log as a series of jpgs below.
You can see the framerate problem (right at the bottom of the pics below). The only thing which appears to change in sync with it is the GPU 1 usage (that's the GTX 1050, GPU 2 is the Intel HD 630). But it is not running hotter than normal. What's odd is the GPU 1 usage is noticeably lower than when the game is running smoothly - you can see it's regularly dropping to <20% whereas normally it sits in the 55 - 70% range. So I guess the question is what's causing the GPU to run lower than normal and keep dropping at regular intervals?
Everything else like the CPU performance appears normal.
The other question I have is the "commit charge" number, what's that all about?
Grateful for any clues as to what I might need to do to solve this!