Performance issues (SIM spikes and FPS drops)

Technical Support
1

Hello!

So recently I noticed that I started having some minor stutters and input lag of sorts. Naturally, I pressed Ctrl+shift+N and saw SIM spiking a lot.

Here is an example of what it looks like
youtu.be/FEz-rfp4Ouk

After trying out different things, I decided to reinstall my game, which didn’t help.
For a while, I also wanted to upgrade to windows 10 because it seemed like my CPU was not supported by windows 7.

So, after reinstalling to windows 10, SIM spikes didn’t go anywhere (example above is recorded on new system). However, I started getting random fps minor drops.

Here is an example of that.
youtu.be/UVQCg1y5ndI
I know it’s very minor and it’s barely visible, but you can see fps being at 153/154 at most times and then randomly dropping to 149~ and staying like this for a second. At these moments, it sometimes feels like the game freezes for a moment.

Before, I used to have fps drops in fight if I had OBS and Discord open but they were never that frequent and out of the blue. The problem for me as well is that I don’t think i should have ANY fps drops with my setup, which is:

i7-7700K 4.2 GHz
1080 ti
16gb 2667 freq RAM
kingston shfs37a120g SSD

Things I tried:
Reinstalling windows
Reinstalling game
Disabling windows 10 DVR and game mode
Updating network card and GPU drivers
Installed brand new APC PM5B-RS (Thought it could be power issues)
Tried two different ISPs (Thought it might be connection issues)
All in game settings naturally low
Nvidia panel settings, everything high performance.
Disabled windows update service.

I also did a DxDiag and ETW tracing.
I did two ETW traces of short overwatch sessions and I noticed RzSynapse using 2% of CPU sometimes. But in general CPU is never loaded for more than 50%, so I doubt it is an issue.

Now again, I know it’s very minor and far less extreme than most cases on this forum. However this thing has been driving me absolutely crazy lately and I really hope you could help me solve it. Thanks in advance!

DxDiag and .etl files here (can’t put links for some reason, remove space after google)
drive.google.com/drive/folders/11AxRu_Ey7xfKRArNZAzqZP3yHv-Y_Mud?usp=sharing

2

I’ve read that the razer synapse program has been causing issues for people, and have seen that uninstalling it has helped.

3

Hey, Txao!

Even if you uninstall Razer Synapse and the SDK, the Razer Chroma SDK will still be loaded in Windows Environment Variables. You will need to follow steps in a very specific order to resolve the issue.

First, you need to have your Razer devices connected to your system. This is very important!

Download and install Synapse 3 here: Razer Synapse 3 - Cloud-Based Hardware Configuration Tool | Razer United States then reboot your computer.

This will update the Razer Chroma SDK to the newest version.

If you are still having FPS issues after doing this, you will need to uninstall Synapse 3 (Razer Chroma SDK), reboot your system, then try again.

4

I tried reinstalling synapse doing everything like you said as well as uninstalling it completely.

Most of the time lag looks like this

imgur.com/a/cQMgi2z

, but it is much more severe (fps drops more and for longer time) on big maps in 6v6 scenarios, in DM it’s barely noticible.

I tried changing gpu, SSD, no background processes running. Checked my CPU for overheating, it wasn’t. Do you have any other suggestions? Im almost out of ideas at this point.

Edit:
Actually I realised, that these fps drops don’t feel any different, even though they occure it feels smooth. Something else is stuttering and causing freezes though. Could be connection but i tried 2 ISPs and both had these freezes, as well as it doesn’t just freeze a map, it freezes a screen (mouse gets stuck mid movement etc).

5

Txao,

That definitely looks like a third party overlay, like Rivatuner or MSI afterburner. Overwatch has an in game FPS tracker, and any program which uses an overlay can basically fight us for control of your drivers. Can you try totally disabling that overlay? It may fix up the micro freezes you’re seeing.

As for the fps drops, there’s no setup around that will never FPS drop when you’re at super high framerates. Even turning your camera puts a new load on your GPU so you’re going to have instability. We need to focus not on the FPS drops (as you mentioned, they don’t feel different because your FPS is already pretty high) and more on whatever freezing you’re seeing. Can you get us a video of what the netgraph looks like and what kind of hangups you’re having instead?

1 Like
6

My games running flawless when not having synpase installed at all. Really glad i found a solution, but i kind of dont want to renounce on being able to decide how my keyboard lights.