After around 40 minutes of playing, I get awful freezes every 5 or 10 seconds and after I get them I’m forced to quit OW and re-launch, though that also complicates things. Is there anyway to prevent the freezes? Drivers are up to date, windows is up to date, I can’t think of anything that’s causing it
Any help would be greatly appreciated
Sounds like a possible overheating issue with your GPU/CPU i had this issue too and found a background problem causing this.
Check your temps and in your task manager check what is eating your GPU and CPU.
GPU Temp never goes above 72, but usually averages 60. Though I heard OW is more CPU intensive? In task manager the CPU % is never that high, but I don’t know how to check its temp
I second the suggestion to check your temps. That’s usually a good place to start troubleshooting. I have to imagine you would be encountering issues much quicker than after ~40 minutes if it was overheating, but it’s still a good idea to check and see if your temps are high.
And not that I necessarily think this is your issue, but I had one of the most bizarre issues with my PC when I built it ~7 years ago. I would get hard freezes after anywhere from 30-40 minutes, so I thought it was most likely an issue with my RAM or PSU. I ended up trying a spare PSU and the issue still occurred. I ended up buying new RAM and the issue still occurred. After days of troubleshooting, I found that the issue was my PCI-E WiFi card, specifically its drivers. I never imagined it would be possible for something like a WiFi card to cause such a massive issue like a hard lock, but after installing the proper drivers (from the site, not from the disc that came with the card), the issue was fixed and I was finally able to enjoy my first self-built PC.
I use a program called SpeedFan to check my temps and see how heavily your CPU is being worked. As the name suggests, you can also manually adjust fan speeds but I don’t usually tweak those.
Could be some background process that doesnt get along with overwatch fighting it,
does this happen with other games? if not just, contact support,
meanwhile, ill summon WyomingMyst
My PCI-E WiFi card is from a friend, when my wifi just stopped working randomly one day. I dare not touch it usually though, getting it to work properly after pulgging it back in is a huge pain. So I don’t have a disc or anything, but would you know how to update its drivers or anything?
Sorry for my technical incompetance xd
You just need to figure out the manufacturer of the card you’re using and go to their website. There should be a page with all their devices and drivers listed. Get the most up-to-date one and install it (usually a very simple process).
The only thing I ever leave open is firefox, but even closing that changes nothing. I don’t really play many other games, but when I do, it’s not for too long or they’re really quite low-intensity (idk how to describe it)
small games like factorio or terraria, shouldn’t affect gpu or cpu much at all
if firefox is anything like google chrome, it eats all your ram,
just like the memes say
May as well try closing it
The only background process I can think of would be something like Windows Defender. It shows up as “Antimalware Service Executable” in the task manager, and I always have that open on my second monitor so I can see if anything screwy is happening.
I’ve actually been meaning to troubleshoot that myself, because it sometimes shoots up to like 30% of my CPU usage which tanks my FPS from ~165 to like… 40 and choppy. I’d suggest running task manager while playing the game and sorting by CPU/Memory usage to see if anything is hogging resources for whatever reason.
I actually saw that earlier, while closing an unrelated program. It said access denied whenever I tried to close it though?
Yeah, the Antimalware Service Executable is Windows Defender, so you should be cautious about disabling it entirely. I guess it just boils down to your internet browsing habits and if you’re worried about potentially getting a virus or malware on your computer.
If you’re not worried about that (or if you use another antimalware program), there are ways to manually disable Windows Defender. Frankly, I’m probably gonna look into that myself because I almost had a game ruined by a sudden spike in CPU usage yesterday…
Alright, I’ll look into that. Thanks for your help!
Use compressed air to get all of the dust out of your machine?
I’d definitely suggest just running task manager (and checking your CPU temps) while playing OW first. You should be able to see if there’s anything fishy hogging resources first, which will help you track down the real problem maker.
This is a BIG CPU eater. There are safe ways to disable this. I had to do it at one point too.
I had an overheating issue myself recently…you’d be surprised how much just cleaning helps…my cpu heat sink for example was a mess…went and got some extra fans too…but before they came in just cleaning lowered my temps a good 10 degrees
I’m kinda worried to clean my PC. Everything is kinda perfectly balanced in there from damage over the years, and I don’t have the money to fix anything if it breaks. Like the PCI-E WiFi thing or the HDMI slot, if I move them a tiny bit it can take aaaaaaages to fix
and odds are that’s still too high for the ram on the GPU or whatever and you’re getting a thermal lock. The bulk of slow downs that happen after a bit of time playing are almost always temp issues with the PC, even if the temps seem ok at first. Something doesn’t like that 72 temp or doesn’t like it over a bit of time or maybe the temp at that location is much higher and it’s really just 72 near the sensor.
I bought a new XFX R580 card a few months back for el-cheap and almost right away it ran into hard thermal locking issues. Even in a house at sub 60 degrees as I don’t run the heat in winter being i’m in California.
I had to go in and set the GPU fan profile to manual scale up WAY higher then the base line. As a lot of new cards now error on the side of less noise at the cost of less cooling.
So maybe tinker with that side of it or if you have a cheap house fan just take the side off your case and fire the fan in there at high speed and if you can all of a sudden play for 2-3 hours, you know it’s temp issues.