[SOLVED] - High end machine - FPS drops

Hello everyone,

I’m going to try and be quite detailed, I understand that “Fps drops” is an extremely broad symptom with an extremely broad list of possible causes.
Essentially, I’ll be playing, normally around 200fps, I’ll get a ‘stutter’ which is very jarring and massively interupts gameplay. The fps does drop during this stutter, maybe by around 60 frames.

Here are my PC specs;
1080Ti
I7 -7700k @ 5ghz
16gb RAM 2400mhz
Samsung 850 EVO SSD.

We can most likely rule out hardware issues

Now - I’m pretty certain we can rule out any hardware instabilities or errors, and here’s why - I run very high end games in 4k on ultra with no FPS issues - The fps is always decent, and more importantly, stable. Examples of these games would be shadow of the tomb raider, Assassins’ Creedy Odyssey, The witcher 3, Heavily modded Skyrim. CPU and GPU always stable and perfectly fine temps. No lag issues. - I believe this means we can safely rule out thermal throttling, or hardware issues, as I usually play overwatch on a 144hz 1440p monitor.

Secondly, this is only a fairly recent problem, maybe in the last 3 weeks to a month it started occuring.

Net graph overlay
When these fps drops occur, if I open the net graph overly in OW there will be a white box corresponding to how severe the stutter of the fps drop is.

What I have tried so far to fix the problem
1- Ensuring that my GPU driver is up to date
2- Changing between my 4k 60hz screen and 1440p 166hz screen
3- Changing and lowering graphics settings on each of these screens
4- Overwatch scan and repair tool
5- Disabling fullscreen optimisation on the overwatch.exe
6- Trying borderless windowed and Fullscreen
7- Disabling windows 10 DVR xbox integration

Potential points of relevance or interest
-When tracking GPU usage and temp via MSI afterburner, it correctly shows the GPU usage @ 100% When tracking GPU usage via windows task manager the GPU usage is at 6%, whether this is relevant or not I don’t know, but I’ll put it here just in case.

-This seemed to start happening when I installed the new PTR to tryout Ashe - All of the FPS issues I’ve talked about are happening on the live servers, on the PTR I would put it down to a bug or optimisation issue perhaps. Nonetheless, I think that my lag spikes on live seemed to start after installing the PTR again.

Thankyou for taking the time to assist me, hopefully we can figure this out so I can get ready for Ashe’s release!

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been having the same issues and in my case it also started with the PTR update.
my pc is horsesh1t compared to yours but i’ve never had this issues in the past and i’ve been having them ever since’d I installed the PTR with the Ashe update, literally unplayable.

Hello PlsNurfMe,

Thanks for your very detailed post.

Could you please create your DxDiag and MSInfo files?
battle.net/support/article/12988

You can paste the content of each file on a web like Pastebin and provide us with the links. If it doesn’t let you publish your message because of the links, try to paste them using the preformatted text option (</> button).


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Hi Delmoryth,

Thanks for your reply, Here are the files you requested

As a side note, I have a sneaking suspicion that my lag issues will be fixed in the latest Overwatch patch, as there is a complete new install and I have a feeling that it started since the PTR update.

[MSinfo32](https://pastebin.com/fvqr3v5H)
[DxDiag](https://pastebin.com/FqLNugWM)

Thanks for the diagnostics, PlsNurfMe.

I can see some programs that could affect performance. Let’s try uninstalling them to see if the situation improves:

  • Razer Chroma SDK
  • Razer software in general (it’s not so common that the other Razer software causes issues, but I’ve seen some cases)
  • Avast
  • TeamViewer
  • Corsair Utility Engine
  • Trade Skill Master (at least make sure it’s closed when you open Overwatch, just in case)

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Hi Delmoryth,
UPDATE: I’ve noticed that Overwatch will often say that I need to patch, and then scan my files before loading up, when I’ve already patched - I feel like this must be related to the issues I’ve been having - I have already tried a scan and repair and complete uninstall

I have tried with those programs uninstalled - I’m still having the same issue - Here’s a few pictures of the netgraph when the spikes happen if that helps;

http://tinypic.com/r/214s011/9
http://tinypic.com/r/2qjbuco/9

(As I mentioned earlier, the white boxes correlate to the lag spikes, my FPS usually stays at or above 144 at this resolution)

I have also completely uninstalled and re-installed Overwatch and I can confirm that this is the only game that I’m having this issue with, I was hoping that the most recent patch would fix the issue but it has not.

[Solved]

It seems that installing Overwatch on a different SD to my OS seems to have fixed the problem, however I’ve had Overwatch for a long time and it’s always been installed in the same place which is odd. Nonetheless, my problem is fixed - Hope this helps anyone else in a similar situation to me!

Any info below is old

I seemed to have been able to fix the issue and find slightly more information on the problem.

First of all I completely uninstalled Chroma.SDK as you originally said, as Overwatch completely stopped launching and when I checked the windows error logs, it was a .dll from Chroma. I assumed completely closing all processes related to Chroma SDK would be enough to alleviate the issue if it was causing one.

Secondly, I noticed that these lag spikes correlated with a spike in disk usage when looking at the performance tab on task manager - I played last night with maybe one or 2 tiny lag spikes in total, whereas before it was every 10 seconds.

I believe part of the issue may be due to Overwatch being installed on the same SSD as my operating system, maybe they are competing for resources. It is strange though, as this issue only started around when Ashe was released to PTR.

I hope this can help you guys find the route of the problem and help others who may be in a similar situation to me.

I would like to leave this thread open for a few more days, as I’ve only had around an hour to play and see that it is fixed. I will put another response over the weekend to see if the problem is completely gone after further testing.

Thanks for updating the thread and letting us know. This is definitely uncommon, but definitely something to keep in mind. Sometimes hardware can be the cause of this kind of issue.


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