FPS drops since the past few weeks
As the title says, I've been experiencing FPS drop for the past few weeks and I wonder if it's something that can be resolved somehow or if it's just my computer getting cooked...
I've tried lowering my settings, reinstalling my drivers but it doesn't help.
And there is only Genshin open on my computer, no google tabs open or steam/discord in the background. I even forcefully close them with the task manager.
My config (Acer Nitro 5) :
AMD Ryzen 5 5600H
Nvidea RTX 3060 Laptop 6GB
16GB RAM
Here are two videos that show how it looks like :
https://reddit.com/link/1q59oau/video/hdpe4i1evnbg1/player
https://reddit.com/link/1q59oau/video/428p5j0evnbg1/player
I've tried lowering my settings, reinstalling my drivers but it doesn't help.
And there is only Genshin open on my computer, no google tabs open or steam/discord in the background. I even forcefully close them with the task manager.
My config (Acer Nitro 5) :
AMD Ryzen 5 5600H
Nvidea RTX 3060 Laptop 6GB
16GB RAM
Here are two videos that show how it looks like :
https://reddit.com/link/1q59oau/video/hdpe4i1evnbg1/player
https://reddit.com/link/1q59oau/video/428p5j0evnbg1/player
Commentaires
Why did you go into the NK main quest domain to take the first video? Were you running around looking for a place where the stutter would happen?
If you go back to Mondstadt again, does it still stutter? Does it stutter in the same place?
Also, instead of / along with posting a video, download MSI Afterburner / GPU-Z and post a performance graph of what your PC is doing during a lag spike, that'd provide far more information.
The game stutters no matter where I am on the map, even in domains.
I’ll use MSI afterburner when I get back home I’ll give you an update.
Thank you very much for the help !
If yes, then you'll need some more troubleshooting.
If not, then it's fine.
Here are 3 screenshots I took of MSI Afterburner (https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Ydyo3-X26a-s5fu1ZDG9uGmjXmhUHCny?usp=drive\_link) + a legend to understand what i did.
I don't want to force you to do anything tho so don't worry if you don't have the time/the energy.
Nonetheless, thank you very much !
**According to Afterburner, you're actually having problems because your GPU is overheating.**
The section at the bottom of the second screenshot has a bunch of graphs labelled "limite de ...", which tell you why the GPU isn't working harder. GPU2 is the 3060, so those are the graphs you should be interested in.
If it says 0, it's not the reason, if it's 1, it is the reason.
There should be 4 charts like that (duplicated again for GPU1, probably), with one, I assume, being cut off in the screenshot; it's usually titled "no load limit" in English, which is telling you you're bottlenecked somewhere other than your GPU.
The 3 in the screenshot are telling you if the GPU is not getting enough power (puissance?), voltage (tension?), or if it's overheating - your issue, temperature.
Looking at GPU frequency/clock speed (Horlage?), that checks out, as it's showing that your GPU is capable of hitting a maximum of 1920MHz, but it's spending most of your run bouncing around 1300MHz instead - modern processors will automatically reduce performance when they sense they're getting too hot, so that they don't damage themselves.
The actual temperature readout says temperature maxed out at 90C, which is technically a couple degrees below the processors limit, but Acer might have set their laptop to start pulling back slightly before the limit, or, the sensor the GPU is basing those decisions on is in a different, hotter location than the sensor that's reporting data to software.
> my stutters are triggered when the usage of my GPU exceeds 85-90%
Generally speaking, if GPU utilization isn't 100%, then it's not the component holding you back (other than when it is). in fact, you kind of want it at 100%, because that means you're using all of the performance you paid for.
In this case, it's not hitting 100% because it's overheating.
Reading CPU utilization is harder because multicore throws things off - if one core is at 100%, but all the other cores aren't doing anything, you could be CPU limited at the same time the CPU is reporting 10% total utilization.
--------------------------------------------------
As for solutions:
- Blow the dust out of it's vents. Use an air duster or a can of compressed air. Do it in short pulses and let the fans spin down before the next puff (or hold them in place with a pin or something). Vacuuming is less effective (a vacuum pulls air from a wide area, while an air duster pushes all of it's flow through a small nozzle, so it can generate more force), and some people claim it carries risk of static damage.
- It looks like the bottom cover on that laptop is fairly easy to remove, if you're comfortable doing that, so that you can blow more directly at the fans and heatsinks. Also allows you to use a toothbrush or something to directly clean the heat sinks. Either way, just make sure the fans don't get spun too fast while you're cleaning them. [iFixit has basic teardown guides](https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Acer+Nitro+5+AN517-52+Basic+Teardown/155317), they have maintenance guides for several Nitro 5 chassis types if that one isn't your specific model.
- Make sure the air intakes and exhausts aren't blocked. The intakes are usually on the bottom, so make sure you have your laptop on a hard surface. You can also put something under the back of the laptop to prop it up and give the fans more space under the laptop to pull air in.
- Check if your laptop's software allows you to make the fans spin faster.
- Check your game settings. Especially render resolution. Setting that to anything over 1 is just making your laptop work harder for not much benefit.
- Going more technical, you could try undervolting the GPU. You'll have to find a guide for that yourself. It's not as complicated or hard as it sounds, and you can potentially save a ton of power (and heat generation) without giving up any performance.
--------------------------------------------------
And, last section, setting up Afterburner.
If you open up settings (bottom right corner in the default skin), then open the tab called "monitoring", there'll be a list of things that Afterburner can/is monitoring. You click on the check beside each entry to turn the graph on or off, and you just click and drag the entries to change their position. For general purpose monitoring, I'd recommend setting your graphs up something like this:
https://imgur.com/a/evby1zH
FPS, CPU/GPU/Memory usage, and temperatures are the most relevant stats for general troubleshooting, so just bump them up to the top. Most of the graphs are per core CPU stats, which don't really matter, so just push them down to the bottom.
Also, for reference, shader compilation stutter - what I thought the issue was originally, would look something like this:
https://imgur.com/a/Dg7iT2c
GPU usage was low at the same time FPS was low, while there was a spike in CPU utilization, and it was gone in a second. That would be "normal" stutter.
"No load limit" would also change to 1, if it weren't already there, which with Genshin on my PC, it always is, so there's no point screenshotting that.
Once again thank you very very much for your time and be blessed man
If so, deleting all files 'game folder*/GenshinImpactGame/ShaderCache should help. (Not at PC right now but I think this was the path).
Recompiling shaders can also be forced through Nvidia control panel by turning shader cache for the game to off, then back to on and restarting PC I think, but never tried that method.
Just to clarify, it's not that the shaders are compiled wrong, it's that the shaders are compiling *at all*.
Shader compilation needs to run any time you change your hardware, your drivers, or game files - like the first time you go somewhere after a new update. Or after you update your drivers to troubleshoot a problem.
Because shaders are specific to your specific GPU and driver version, and because PC and Android phones have such a wide variety of potential combinations of all of those, game devs can't just create the shaders beforehand and send them with the game - they have to be compiled by the client. This isn't an issue on iPhone and consoles because the hardware and software environments there are heavily controlled, which means it does become viable for Mihoyo to just compile shaders ahead of time and send them along with the update.
In any case, shader compilation is an extremely CPU intensive task (i.e., 100% all core load even on fairly beefy processors, for a second), and that load results in stuttering. The reason it doesn't happen again when you go to the same place in the future is because the shaders are already compiled, and the game can just load the ones it made before instead of compiling new ones.
There are ways of doing this without affecting gameplay (i.e., on Android, Genshin compiles shaders all in one go on the first boot after a patch - and it takes *forever*), but Mihoyo decided PCs are powerful enough to just run shader compilation during gameplay.
Deleting the shader cache won't "fix" this issue, it'll just force the game to compile shaders *again*, causing it to stutter again the first time you go places after you do that. If you're noticing persistent graphical artifacts, like, idk, some object turned blue and won't go back, that would be when you might consider deleting the shader cache.
Seems I misunderstood how it works and gave a bad advice here, sorry OP!
If it's not persistent, it's not a problem.
You should expect to see stuttering if it's the first time you're going to a location after a patch or driver update.
Any other time, you might have a problem. That specific scenario, it's normal.