So as my title suggests, lately I’ve been having some unexpected FPS problems. Normally the game always runs flawlessly, constantly staying well above 60 frames. For the past two days or so, however, the game has been going back and forth between two different ranges of FPS whenever I play. It’ll run at its usual FPS for 15-20 seconds, and then suddenly take a sharp drop to around 25-30ish FPS. It stays there for an equal amount of time before going back to the original, solid FPS and repeats the cycle infinitely.
It is beyond frustrating, it makes the game essentially unplayable because of how frequent the FPS drops are. It’s also very confusing to me, as I’ve played Overwatch on this machine for almost two years and it has always ran 100% perfectly (even on high settings) until now. Nothing has changed, the game just all of a sudden doesn’t run anywhere near as well as it used to.
I am not a tech-savvy person in the slightest so I don’t know too much about the specs of my PC or any of that lingo, but it is a Dell Inspiron 7577 (2017-18 model) with an Intel Core i7-7700HQ processor and the usual 16GB of RAM. I have updated my drivers and everything else I possibly can on my computer, and have tried uninstalling and reinstalling the game twice, to no avail.
My first guess is going to be overheating, but let’s take a look at a DxDiag first.
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Here’s what you requested from me; the hash code for my dxdiag on pastebin is 8xCe1954.
In regards to what you said about overheating, Overwatch has definitely always made my computer pretty toasty, but never to the point where it causes performance issues. I’d find it quite odd if it’s true that I’ve been playing on here for so long with flawless in-game performance and with heat never being an issue, and now all of a sudden it is one. I should also mention that the FPS issue i described occurs even in my first match in any given play session, so it starts happening pretty quickly, before my computer’s even had a chance to get really hot.
Then again, I trust your knowledge a lot more than mine. So I hope the dxdiag gives you the info you were looking for.
SSDs need about 12-15% free space to perform well, so you could try the Windows Disk Cleanup Utility. Usually deleting old Windows install files will really clean up some space.
Just to make sure the Razer SDK isn’t causing your fps to drop, try following the advice from the staff here.
This error means that your GPU is taking too long to respond to Windows.
- Download your GPU driver to your desktop, but don’t install.
- Remove all versions of your previous drivers with a utility called Display Driver Uninstaller. Unlike the GeForce Experience or Windows itself, this app will remove all fragments of previous drivers leftover from updates.
- Install latest driver again.
Even if one step remedies the issue, I still recommend doing everything here. Your computer will be much faster with more space on the SSD, getting the latest driver for your Razer device will help with future updates, and your GPU driver will perform better without having corrupted info (like it does now).
If you’re still having issues, we’ll investigate overheating, but hopefully it doesn’t come to that.
I used Disk Cleanup to get rid of a few gigs’ worth of unneeded files, and I also found a few system + driver updates tucked away I needed to perform that I didn’t get notifications for for some reason, so I took care of those as well. Lastly, I checked my Razer Chroma and everything appears to be in order there.
I gave the game a try after doing those things, and it ran flawlessly for about three games (so, an improvement over the usual “issue pops up during the first match” scenario) before the same back-and-forth FPS phases came right back. I noticed that my computer actually didn’t get as hot as it usually does when playing Overwatch. It was noticeably cooler during my little play session, yet the main issue came back eventually, much to my dismay.
The only thing I’ve yet to do is your recommendation to download my driver to my desktop and all that other stuff that would clear out this corrputed info I have. I didn’t do it purely because like I said the other day, I’m not very wise when it comes to this sort of thing and I didn’t want to go in blind and potentially mess anything up on my PC. could you perhaps give me a bit more of a step-by-step on how to do those things? I apologize for the inconvenience, but I’d really appreciate it.
Good afternoon NightVisions,
You could try a clean reinstall of the current driver by using DDU: Display Driver Uninstaller Download version 18.0.6.0
On this page, scroll to the bottom where it says Download Locations, and choose the link closest to your location.
This should automatically start a download and when that’s finished, right-click the folder and choose ‘Extract All’ and click Browse, then choose your desktop for the location on the left. Then click New Folder at the top and name it DDU, then click Select Folder then Extract.
When that’s finished, the folder should automatically open, but if not, find the DDU folder on the desktop and open that.
Inside you should see a DDU file. Double clicking this should give you the option to Run and then Extract. When that’s finished, you should see a Display Driver Uninstaller file. Click on this to open the file.
On the right-hand side, you should see a drop down box and in that, you can change it to your graphics card. Then choose Clean and restart on the left.
This will go through and completely remove all the old driver files which will allow a clean install of the new driver. This helps, because sometimes old files can cause conflicts with the new driver.
And then, once your computer restarts, download the latest driver and hopefully that does the trick.
