Your PC is lacking the required Battlefield mods or updates to play the game properly.
Your PC is lacking the required Battlefield mods or updates to play the game properly.
It's tricky to imagine anything else based on those charts… The large jumps in CPU activity seem to match the big drops in GPU activity, which probably explains the FPS changes you're noticing. This doesn't mean an i5 can't run BF1 well. I'm managing a smooth 60 FPS with an overclocked i5-6600K, and it seems others are seeing decent results with locked i5 models. Your Task Manager shows 95% CPU usage during the screenshot but only 87% for bf1.exe. The missing roughly 6% likely comes from background processes. If you forcefully close everything in Task Manager to see a clean slate, your CPU usage should drop to zero, and then you can test BF1. Also, notice how performance changes when you adjust the settings—does it drop more at higher detail levels?
Hey, I dug deeper into the details and stumbled on something odd. I opened GeForce Experience to check the NVIDIA settings it suggests, which recommend a range of low, medium, and high performance levels. To my surprise, when I increased those settings, my FPS jumped from around 40–50 to 55–70. I’m puzzled—why does this happen? The resolution stays the same, the game doesn’t scale down, but it feels smoother and more stable. Plus, I’m curious about whether it’s safe to reset all system settings in Task Manager except for essential ones.
Upgrading from 8 to 16GB RAM solved the issue and eliminated frame drops. However, you may still encounter challenges with your 2GB GPU. With the GPU no longer being the main constraint, performance could improve. Running at higher settings would likely give a smoother experience.
It's hard to grasp why the higher options work for you, but I'm fine with that.
In general, I haven’t encountered anything that’s outright dangerous to terminate in Task Manager. There might be certain tasks that won’t stop, and some processes could keep restarting. Even if you manage to shut down something vital, a system reboot should restore everything. What I intended was to power down non-essential components and those not necessary for running BF1. I’m suggesting that if BF1 is heavily taxing your CPU, a small background process consuming 5-7% could be noticeable. Under heavy CPU strain, settings that burden the GPU often remain unaffected and don’t impact performance. Noticing improved performance can be surprising, but it’s conceivable that moving workloads to the GPU might lead to steadier results because the GPU handles consistent tasks more reliably. When your main processing is CPU-heavy, your gameplay tends to be more affected by sudden spikes or complex physics events.