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I have been having this problem with a variety of games. The ones I can recall specifically right now are Life is Strange and the one I was just playing, The Old City.

Both games, and at least one other I can't remember, play fine for the first ten minutes or so. Life is Strange is getting about 80fps, and The Old City is just over 60fps. But after a little while, both games drop to 22fps. I thought it was just specific to Life is Strange initially, and beat that entire game, but that was about a month ago and now I'm having the same problem with yet another game. What could cause it and how could I fix it?

I've tried stopping as many other processes as possible, turning off every video game and streaming overlay I can think of, and just now I tried going into the BaseEngine.ini file and increasing the PoolSize value from 160 to 2048, with I believe corresponds to MB of GPU memory. My rig is an AMD FX-8350, 16GB of RAM, an nVidia GTX 760 with 4GB of RAM, and 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium. I'm using an ASUS VG248QE 144Hz monitor.

badp
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Joe M
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  • Maybe try turning on Vsync (and probably dropping your monitor refresh rate if your PC can't run the games at 144fps) and see if it still happens. – MC ΔT Feb 07 '16 at 04:02
  • @indeed I already had Vsync on, but I just tried switching my refresh rate to 60Hz. When I started up the game, it was actually stuck at 20fps in the menu screen, then it worked its way up to 60fps when I started really playing. But after the usual delay, it dropped down to 22fps again. – Joe M Feb 07 '16 at 04:25
  • Do you have MSI Afterburner or similar graphics monitoring software? Try checking graphics memory usage and temperature around when you get the fps drop – MC ΔT Feb 07 '16 at 04:35
  • I had a generic fan and temp monitor I used before, and it was dropping with GPU temps only in the 50s Celsius. I just downloaded GPUz (http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/) and tried that. It's pretty handy, definitely a cool little program to have installed. But it showed the memory usage only hitting about 1/3 of the total capacity of the card, and the temp never really topped 60C. The GPU load was also in the 55% area. Interestingly, when the fps dropped to 22, the load dropped to about 20-25%. So the GPU isn't even breaking a sweat when this happens. – Joe M Feb 07 '16 at 05:26
  • Maybe something strange is happening with power usage? Is your power supply wattage well above that of your graphics card, CPU, etc? Also (this is going to sound like generic Microsoft forums level of help) are your graphics drivers up to date? (Don't rely on Windows to do this, use GeForce Experience.) – MC ΔT Feb 07 '16 at 05:36
  • Yeah, this has been happening through multiple driver updates. The PSU is 750W, which I'm pretty sure is reasonably close to the what the system would need, definitely not some huge monster. – Joe M Feb 07 '16 at 05:56
  • Same issue here. Afer about 30 min the CPU Usage on one Core goes up until the frames go down while the rest of the CPU is ideling... Im talking about all Unreal 3 based games (Batman / Borderlands 1+2 / Dirty Bomb) –  Apr 05 '16 at 14:31

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What does Unreal engine have in common with most software? It has framerate hitches. Android always does and many windows applications such as browsers do no matter the hardware.

Obviously, it takes very good programmers to be able to make games that have very good framerates. Unreal engine is meant to be a 'general purpose' engine, so being easy to pickup and use is the tradeoff they chose. Other game companies have to constantly modify their engine for each game they make while unreal engine has been used for 100s of games.

Here are some in technical explanations to support my point of view:

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/tech-blog/performance-at-scale-sequencer-in-unreal-engine-4-26?sessionInvalidated=true

Herreracapac
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  • This sounds like pure speculation/opinion. If the video indeed argues in favour of your case, can you relay the relevant information please? – Joachim May 29 '21 at 10:58
  • I am not a professional game programmer but it is easy to find people on youtube picking on object-oriented design (which is the way unreal engine is coded). Here is a good example of someone modifying unreal's code to get better performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlKXPBFh5BM . Also unreal engine wrote a long post about modifying their "movie animation system" to get better performance: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/tech-blog/performance-at-scale-sequencer-in-unreal-engine-4-26?sessionInvalidated=true – Herreracapac Jun 04 '21 at 02:00