Periodic FPS drops in CS:GO

Question

My ingame FPS drops every few seconds from ~200 to ~20. The game starts perfectly, and in the beginning it runs smoothly, and after a map change it always starts the FPS drops and will not get better until I restart the game.

It has many triggers besides the map change, sometimes it starts dropping when I open the main menu with ESC, sometimes when a flash grenade pops near me, or any kind of smoke in my vision can trigger the effect (zooming to smoke with sniper, standing in smoke, particles after a HE grenade).

I usually have a good in-game fps (between 200 and 300), BUT sometimes when I open the ESC menu, go in smoke, or any other reason I detailed in my previous message my fps drops to 20 for 2 seconds, then its goes back to normal for a 3-4 seconds, then it drops again to 20 FPS for 2 seconds, then back to normal again. It repeats this cycle until I restart my whole game. If the lags starts in-game and I quit to main menu the fps drops is still there with the same intervals.

The game didnt have any problems before.

I dont run any other programs in the background just Steam and CS:GO.

Here is a poor quality recording of the problem, maybe it helps comprehend my issue.

I tried:

• Reinstalling CS:GO
• Updating all of my drivers
• Completely remove GPU driver with DDU, then install newest, and 3 older driver versions
• Reinstall operating system (Win10)
• Disabling anti-virus, firewall
• Running CS:GO in different compatibility options
• Tweaked with my CS:GO settings, launch options, NVIDIA settings
• Checked my power management settings

My laptop configuration:

• Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-5500 CPU @ 2.40GHz, 2397 Mhz, 2 Cores, 4 Logical Processors
• RAM: 8 GB
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GT940M 2GB
• Operating System: Windows 10 64-bit build 15063

I would really appreciate some help resolving the issue, it really has a huge negative effect on the gaming experience. During a competitive match usually I have to restart my game atleast 3 times, but my worst case have been 8 restarts during only 1 game.

Answer 1

In your case it's very likely that your laptop is overheating. When that happens it will throttle the performance (as you already figured), which results in those lag spikes.

You can try to...

• Lower the graphics settings
• Get a cooler

There are more options, but as it seems you have already tried everything.

Answer 2

One thing I would suggest is making sure you have the correct Nvidia 3d settings. This mainly means the maximum amount of prerendered frames is one. I doubt this is to do with your general settings and rather a very specific issue since you seem to be getting good fps otherwise.

One test you could do is see if the game performs well while removing certain parts of the HUD or remove it entirely as the menu and HUD are both related.

Also try unparking the cores and use some of the startup commands(in steam) such as

-tickrate 128 -console -novid +cl_forcepreload 1 -nod3d9ex1

This will help preload the map and help you tab in faster and generally minimise what disturbances can do.