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.
Keep an eye on temperatures while you play, because often when the frame rate drops mid-game it's actually CPU throttling from overheating after a while, not a RAM or GPU issue. I had the same thing happen with my PC - I'd play fine for the first 20-30 minutes and then performance would tank, turned out the thermal paste was bone dry and just replacing it fixed everything.
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.
What others haven't considered is that with Baldur's Gate 3 and Starfield the problem could also be system RAM pressure. These games eat through RAM like crazy, especially midway through a playthrough when the game has loaded even more assets. If you've got 16 GB that's basically the bare minimum, with 32 GB you'll be way more comfortable. Before you drop money on new RAM though, open task manager while you're playing and check the memory column under "Performance" - if you see RAM going over 90-95% for long stretches and your disk is working overtime (pagefile going nuts), that's your culprit.
The second thing is to check whether it's actually an issue with old config files or corrupted cache. I don't know if you're cleaning out AppData folders and save files, because sometimes those games accumulate dirty data over time that causes memory leaks. Try doing a clean uninstall (something like Revo Uninstaller that removes hidden traces) and reinstall from scratch. It's surprisingly effective in a lot of cases and beats any hardware tweaks.
Check your temperatures anyway though - running something like HWiNFO64 while you play tells you right away if your CPU or GPU is throttling. But considering it tanks midway through specifically, I don't think that's the main issue. I'd prioritize insufficient RAM and corrupted cache before worrying about hardware that's getting too old.
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