After leaving Overwatch open for a little while and getting into a game it will always start to lag like crazy. Anyone else have this issue? Its only Overwatch that does this.
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Be sure to not have any background processes running.
I haven’t been in the tech stuff for a while but this can also be caused by components overheating, at least if i’m correct.
Please do move this topic to #technical-support.
You can do so by editing the topic and changing the post destination to #technical-support.
They’ll be ready to help you!
Nope never.
How much RAM you have? How much is OW using when you start playing and then how much is OW using when it starts to stutter?
Need more info.
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This could be any number of things, but for a start, make sure you close the Battle.net launcher when you run the game. The cycling ad banners on there can take a major toll on lower-end CPUs, so if you’re seeing it periodically lag for a few seconds at a time, it’s likely from that.
Have this on and off, kinda works itself out after a week.
- Make sure your drivers are up to date/using a driver that you know is compatible with the game
- No other high CPU/GPU/RAM/Disk usage program is sapping load from your gameplay experience
Other things to check or do:
- Playing exclusively in Full Screen mode
- Set Overwatch as a higher priority in Task Manager
- Turn off Xbox Gamebar and Gaming Optimization if running Windows 10
- Tune your GPU settings
- Apply a performance power mode in power management options
Just spitballing here
It has been going on like this for a couple of years now. It is a programming issue with the game. Myself and a few other support people have talked about this problem quite a bit. Support says the game engineering dpt has major obstacles to Overcome.
The question is:
Does a person want Hit-scan accuracy or cleanly rendered images. With overwatch. It CANNOT handle both. I mean, we ALL like a game that looks good and plays good. But with good looking images, it means that accuracy and frames DROP considerably. SO for a hitscan player. They have to play with the game with settings that are more “Grainy” vs someone who tanks.
But because of the dynamics of this game. It really has a few problems.
- The game can either be rendered by the CPU or the GPU. there are options in the game where the player can chose to allocate processing. However, the GPU lags the more the player adjusts for this. It is called “RENDER SCALE”. Which decides how you want it to run.
Auto Render scale means that it will swap between both hardware automatically. (CPU or GPU) when it thinks to. This leads to hard losses on frames. Because it is constantly swapping between the two.
So a person can lock it IN at 100% and it holds it steady. The more a person reduces this number. The more it hands the processes OVER to the CPU. and takes away from the GPU.
The other issues are graphics card MFG drivers. The SHADER CACHE is a big “lag” right there. If the shader Cache is using the DISK and a person is using a spindle hard drive. It means MORE latency. Yes, Shader Cache means higher frame peaks, but when it writes extra graphics card data to that disk. It WILL lag with the disk. So a person turns it OFF>
1 ) HPET - High Process even timer. Another poor decision on Microsoft’s part. Players turn this OFF.
2 ) Aspect Ratio settings on your GPU.
3 ) RAM timings. Intel users have to adjust their XMP profile on their ram, or the game runs bad. Yes, in the BIOS. This effects Overwatch for some reason.
Ultimately. Overwatch has a ton of settings for the GPU, because the game allows us to tweak it just right. For our situations. And as a Widow player. I find it annoying. Because even IF i am aiming at my target. I pull the trigger, and the shot does NOT land. It means I have to go in there and ADJUST settings over a period of time.
Even network latency means under the custom-aim in option I have to enter the “widow specific” aim and adjust by 00.01 +/- depending upon the time of the day and the traffic from My pc, to my ISP and Blizzard. so someone playing me at the start of a match, may think I am bad. But I raise that up or down, and then suddenly I get accused of Aim-botting 
Does this mean players need better CPU or GPU. The Answer really is a CPU vs a graphics card Upgrade… I play with the latest RTX card, and my friend played this game with a Titan Card. Same CPU. It really did NOT make a difference until they up graded their CPU and went up to 16GB of RAM. GPU makes SOME difference here. But not amazing amounts.
GL. this is just a ramble of 3 years of trying to decode THEIR settings 
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