My PC is fully up to date, with plenty of storage and everything else required to run a game. This issue just started today. My latency is fine, I’ve restarted my computer (twice), and I’ve unchecked all of the boxes that everyone says to do (reduce buffering, vsync on and off, etc). My fps should have a cap of 300 according to my settings, but caps at 60 in-game and jumps anywhere from 20-60 fps constantly. The audio bugs and becomes really choppy as well. Nothing is running in the background, and other apps such as discord voice work perfectly. Any tips?
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my game is having the same issue
Same here…blizzard is to busy harassing females to do any good work with their game/servers. Crappy company.
same, been having this problem for more than a week in ow only, and a lot of people do too, i keep waiting for an update but nada 
i’m been having this problem since the beta 
it got fixed after a time but when the halloween event came, the game started stuttering again and they ignored us everytime we complained abt.
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what are you current pc specs? also are you using msi afterburner to see what your gpu is doing?
I5-7200u 8gb ram 920mx it meets the minimum requirements
lol, I thought my computer was broken and was going to look into new memory even though I just got this computer less than 6 months ago. Wild to see how many having the same issues.
I have the same problem. In OW1 I could run at 144 fps consistently with a GTX 970, now with a card double the performance it stays around 100 and after 2-3 games it drops below 60 but restarting the game fixes it for a little while. Same exact settings too because the settings migrated from OW1
it is a game issue. they must fix it, it’s been months we have been playing like that
First things, first.
Can you inform what hardware and in settings your pc has?
Cpu, gpu, ram, storage(s)
Graphics settings, with things like reduced buffering, triple buffering, vsync, nvidia reflex, fsr, dynamic scale/resolution.
In your particular case game resolution at 720p or similar. With triple buffering should be adviseable. Their minimum requirements are related to 1024x768 screen, which 720p would be the “similar” on widescreen monitors.
While 8gb ram often are enough. You should pay attention on background processes. Sometimes the system can use way more resources and the game need to use chunks of RAM that could be on disk increasing the latency to it and decrease the performance during that moment.
Most of performance drops are often due overheating or longer disk time access both due too much RAM compromised and fragmented RAM blocks, also windows updates, drivers updates and so on. If your game changes too much fps.
Same here,
I’ve been struggling a lot with fps drops/stuttering since around the Ramattra update (it ran almost flawlesst before then). It feels like the drops are somewhat “artificial” as the games runs smoothly @100+ fps when it does not stutter, at any moment during the gameplay.
I’ve tried to reinstall Windows, put the overwatch process on High priority via Task Manager, tried to close down any unnecessary background process, to almost no avail. As it is right now it is almost unplayable for me, I have to quit the game after a couple of matches due to headache from these annoying and irregular fps drops.
System Specs: i5-4670, Radeon RX 580, 8 GB Ram, Win10 64bit. I know the system is old but it used to run the game smoothly as I said
I know my laptop isn’t the best of the world but i’m sure it’s a game problem. Overwatch 1 ran fine on my laptop with 60 fps going to 40-50 sometimes in teamfights but it was still playable.
I’m experiencing this issue since the beta, but I thought it was a beta problem so I ignored it. Then the game released and the problem persisted and it started crashing all the time. After a while they fixed the problem but it came back in halloween event.
They increased the requirements from OW1. Which is why the beta ran worse than OW1. Partially was becase was beta but also because the game engine got more demanding.
If you’re running more than 720p your gpu will suffer, if you run at 720p would be cpu on certain moments.
While if you’re using other stuff the culprint of the drops could be the memory, due part of your memory will often request from storage and the game often runs on the same storage as windows. Meaning 3 things competing and waiting the bottleneck that often is de disk.
While you got a bit more performance for whatever reason may be. Your drops could be related to updated driver messing with in game settings, os updates/scan, game itself being updated (as live service), background apps in general, constant i/o request on disk increasing the response times and affecting your fps and so on.
Expect to run as if was OW1 is the same as expect to have win xp machine and expect it to run well win vista.
While if you had a brief period of stable performance, something on your end or overwatch itself (because is a live service) put a bit burden on your machine.
I would argue that could be a bit both, but your device isn’t on the most reliable spectrum of it if you play above 720p or running multiple things on background.
I literally close everything before opening the game. I can’t even play with discord open anymore bc the game lags even more.
As I said, they fixed the problem before, the game started running like OW1 again, but after the halloween event it came back. So it’s not my laptop causing the drops.
- I’m not the only one experiecing this, people with better specs are experiecing the same, it’s not that hard to admit it’s a game problem.
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That means, that your hardware is bottlenecked. Otherwise you wouldn’t have issues running those apps on the background to begin with.
While I never said they didn’t messed up with their software I never stated that couldn’t be a problem in your end also.
Windows isn’t an immutable thing, most softwares right now aren’t either. While point fingers is easier to actually consider that could have partially something going on in your machine which you already stated that was sensitive to other tasks and unless you disable a ton of windows services and tasks it’s a thing outside your control.
I’m not defending their bad software. Just stated that their software is a “live service” which will change over time. Like Windows also is. If you’re on the minimum/below range you’re subject to be impacted by it.
https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/65159
https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/000035895
Your hardware falls on minimum and 1024x768 range. Which also has a note that there’s no particular mentioning on your gpu itself while they mentioned 800M series they didn’t mention 900M series. Even if both are rebrand from 700M.
Also that 920m series lost nvidia driver support since 2020. Which could hurt the performance both from windows itself but also any change they do on OW2 due it’s live service model.
Keeping also in mind that they have 2 pages about gpus.
one states gtx 600 series, which would mean gtx 650+.
While the another has:
Note: Overwatch will attempt to run on hardware below minimum specifications, including older CPUs and integrated GPUs. However, the game experience may be significantly diminished.
You suppose your problem is the same as others. But more often than not, isn’t the case. Unless you’re quoting the 2-core thread. In that regard they never actually fixed the issue. Otherwise folks wouldn’t kept complaining since ever.
I tried to help the diagnose, which I did with a friend with a laptop with gpu similar to yours. She runs a laptop with 920m and an i5 of I think 5th gen.
She had issues with gpu above 720p. While at 720p her cpu mas the culprint. I done some tweaks and she started to run at 20-25 fps at 1080p to avoid cpu bottlenecks. While prior to it she had 15-45fps at 720p and 10-32 at 1080p.
While her machine uses hdd and her RAM was 8gb. With a ssd her machine worked better when she replaced her dvd drive for a ssd.
Then, that improved and she started to run at 25-28fps. The only upgrade that could make her play around 30fps would be ram. But even that wouldn’t be a “smart” decision due the age of the hardware and due ow2 tendency to become more resource hungry.
Which is why, she is saving some bucks for a gear/setup upgrade with ability to pick her ssd to the new machine while using her old hdd as external drive. That or simply invest on a desktop with igpu/apu.
Blizzard does a poor job supporting older hardware and their hardware compatibility page are often bad.
Using minimum specs or below you’re bound to take some performance hits if the game, system or something else changes.
I tried to help you to narrow the things you can control. If those things changes the performance isn’t only “their software problem”. Keep that in mind. Otherwise your performance wouldn’t be affected at all.
I finally managed to fix my fps problem with the game. It turns out I made some unfortunate changes in my system BIOS that somehow ruined OW’s performance.
I don’t know what setting exactly was the culprit, but all I had to do is to load the optimized default config and do some minor changes that I needed and I was sure couldn’t affect the game in any way.
I hope this may be of help to someone.
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