I have a decent gaming PC with an RTX 4060 and i5-12400F, but lately when I play Baldur's Gate 3 or Starfield the framerate drops drastically halfway through a game. I clean the drivers every month but the problem persists. Does anyone have an idea if it's a RAM issue or the graphics card?
It's probably not the GPU since the 4060 handles those titles just fine. Check the resource monitor while you're playing - if RAM is maxed out (especially with pagefile full) or the CPU is running too hot, that's your problem. Also try disabling some graphics settings and lowering texture resolution to see if that makes a difference. If it keeps happening anyway, it could be a memory leak in the game itself, in which case just restart before long gaming sessions.
The problem is probably not your graphics card or RAM, it's more likely thermal throttling on your GPU or CPU - check the temperatures while you're playing, maybe with MSI Afterburner or HWInfo. If you see it's getting too hot try cleaning out the fans and heatsinks, or bump up the fan speed a bit, usually that fixes it pretty quick. Same thing happened to me when I started gaming more seriously, and my heatsink was full of dust that I didn't even notice.
The problem is probably not hardware but software 😅 With a 4060 and an i5-12400F you should run smoothly even those titles, but the fact that it drops midgame makes me think of a memory leak or background processes eating up resources. First of all check Task Manager while you're playing - if RAM fills up progressively or a CPU core is at 100%, then you've found the culprit. If everything looks fine there, try disabling ray tracing or shadow quality in the game, and make sure your Windows power plan is set to "High Performance" and not "Balanced", because that setting often throttles performance without you noticing 🎮
It's probably not the GPU since the 4060 handles those games fine, but rather check if you don't have high temps somewhere - like the CPU that maybe throttles after a while of gaming, or check your RAM usage during gameplay with task manager (if you go over 16GB it starts to lag a lot). Also try doing a clean install of the nvidia drivers, not just an update, because sometimes old files stick around and cause issues. And then maybe lower the heaviest settings like ray tracing maxed out or ambient occlusion, Starfield especially is pretty demanding from that perspective.
With an RTX 4060 and i5-12400F you should be able to play both games just fine, at least at 1080p with medium-high settings. The fact that your framerate drops halfway through a match makes me think it's not a hardware shortage issue, but rather something that builds up during gameplay. Probably RAM - how much do you have? Baldur's Gate 3 and Starfield are pretty hungry, especially BG3 where the difference between 16 and 24 GB is night and day. If you only have 8GB, that's already cause number one. Also check if you're using non-optimal RAM speed - sometimes the BIOS doesn't set it properly by default.
Another thing I see a lot is thermal throttling. After months of use your PC accumulates dust and ventilation gets worse, like when I was lazy about cleaning my case a few years ago - I just had to do a good internal cleaning and the problem disappeared. Check your GPU and CPU temperatures under load with a tool like HWInfo64. If they go over 80-85°C on the GPU you're already in the danger zone. Try lowering your graphics settings a bit, especially ray tracing and upscaling - sometimes badly configured DLSS or FSR causes instability. And yeah, updating your drivers is good, but make sure you uninstall the old ones first, don't just overwrite them.
One last thing: Starfield in particular had quite a few optimization issues at launch in 2023, and it's gotten better with updates but it's not perfect. If the problem is more localized to that game, it could also be a bug with your specific setup. Also take a look at how much VRAM you're using - if you go over your card's 6GB (which is the limit anyway), Windows starts swapping to main RAM and everything slows down.
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