Unusual FPS drop encountered; this has never happened before.
Unusual FPS drop encountered; this has never happened before.
I own a 13900K, a Zotac RTX 4090 Trinity OC with 128GB DDR5. My system is nearing its first anniversary and has never faced problems before. Two days ago, after updating the Nvidia driver to the newest release, my framerate dropped in Forza Horizon 5 from a steady 60fps to around 42fps or less. Restarting the game or Windows didn’t resolve the issue. I reinstalled the game—no improvement. Then I tried the Microsoft Store version, which worked briefly before fast travel caused the same problem again. After that, I reinstalled it there too, but it failed once more. I’ve tested other games I always used smoothly; the same pattern appears. I’m checking temperatures and found the GPU never exceeded 60°C, usually staying between 40-45°C. The CPU is running at a steady 5.8Ghz even when idle. In BIOS I saw Asus optimizations enabled, so I disabled them and set strict Intel limits—still no help. I considered formatting the SSD and installing a fresh Windows 11 build, but the problem returned. I tried various driver versions in the 546 branch, all failed. Eventually I switched to another branch, which fixed it. Last night I played all evening without issues. Now it’s Sunday morning and the same thing happened again—consistent frame drops and erratic pacing. I’m running the 1.2 VBIOS for my GPU (it came with this version), and I’m not aware of any newer updates. My CPU still shows higher clock speeds than necessary. I only have the browser open right now, and it’s loading at 5.7Ghz without explanation. I’m trying to understand what’s going on and would really appreciate advice from anyone experiencing similar issues.
Check if automatic driver updates are turned off in Windows. It’s possible the system hasn’t performed a forced update recently.
I wasn't aware of this setting, so I disabled it just as a precaution. I also reviewed the driver update log, but no Intel or GPU entries appeared. The motherboard BIOS was updated recently. I'll try a few games and let you know the results soon.
Updated the BIOS but didn’t resolve the problem. Removed the GPU driver using DDU Uninstaller and reinstalled the same version I had before—no issues this time. It seems there might be a corruption in the GPU driver. Anyone know if this is common and how to fix it?
My PC remains as basic as possible. It’s odd that the 546 branch keeps having performance problems across all versions. The stable version I switched to is the one the Reddit user mentioned. I’ve updated the latest MEI driver from Intel—though I don’t understand the impact yet—and completely reinstalled a working branch of 537 after using DDU to wipe the same version. It’s functioning smoothly for the past couple of hours. This is my second GPU driver reinstall attempt. I restarted the computer once and then powered it off for 30 minutes before turning it back on; no issues detected so far.