Lately I've had this issue where no matter what I do, the game will freeze for 5 to 10 seconds. I thought it was my HDD that was dying but after moving my games to a new SSD that I bought, it occurs but much rarer! Still happens and seems to happen every 10 to 15 minutes, happening in games such as League of Legends, Apex Legends, Garry's Mod and even 100% Orange Juice! I've tried seeing if it was the temperatures but nothing of the sort seems to happen out of the ordinary. I have a GTX 960 with 3 GBs of VRAM, an i5-4460 (3.20 GHz) and 8 GB of RAM. With an 144hz monitor, this stuff just started happening around the time Apex Legends released.
In Orange Juice, the audio starts to stutter and then it freezes. In Apex Legends, audio just starts to disappear and fade. In League of Legends, it just freezes and all audio immediately stops until it resumes to playing all that I missed right away.
I've searched and searched, changed my HDD and it still happens. I'm on my knees at this point because the freezing is kind of getting annoying, especially for online games. If anybody has any ideas or if this happened before, please, I'll try just about anything. I keep all my driver's up to date, I run Spotify, Discord, Steam and Firefox on the background as well, if it matters. Any solution, please, I'd be grateful!
Page file? Could you explain? I'm not really sure that that is! Also, I don't have stutters (unless you count for audio dying out) and it's really just freezing. My OS is on my SSD and my games are all on another SSD.
Have you tried without these applications running in the background (except Steam if you need it)? Spotify and Discord are both Electron-based applications, which basically mean they eat a lot more resources than they should. Firefox is obviously a web browser as well which can take up a lot of RAM but that depends on extensions and number of open pages
I'll try both of these out when I'm home, I think the paging file might be a plausible source of the problem since my freezing was more common when I had my games installed on my HDD (and boy, that thing has like five years now, so I figured that it's starting to fail with age). If the freezing stops after I change my paging file, I'll be so dang happy.
I tried running games without those things in the background but I could never notice a difference, it's really weird and I'm not even sure why it'd start freezing now because I've always had these things open! It's just weird that it started when Apex released. Double weird when it sort of started to happen less frequently when I moved my games to my new SSD...
do you have KB4482887 installed
Latest Windows 10 update destroys performance in games
Oh wow. This might be it, will start off by uninstalling this update and then checking out to see if it improves. Will reply soon!
OK! So, I uninstalled the Windows Update along with the relocation of the pagefile thing. I only played two games though, which were Tower Unite and Orange Juice, funnily enough, when playing Orange Juice, all of my audio seemed to die out this time! Instead of the game freezing, it'd just stutter all of my audio and then freeze it, shortly returning it after. Could it possibly be a memory problem at this point? In Tower Unite, I wouldn't be judging it since that game's an early access title and currently is a bit unstable. I'm gonna try out League of Legends when I'm home later today to see if the problem persists.
Thanks for the help so far though!
Did you say you have a GTX 960 with 3GB of VRAM or am I hallucinating?
Well, I did both things and I tested in several games.
Nope. Still same issue. I went around searching again and tried this 'power saving' thing that Windows 10 did. Still, nope! Thinking about disabling C-States on my CPU, since that could also be a cause. Thanks again for the help to you guys, I just wanna get to the bottom of this and figure out why this happens! If all else fails, I might just resort to doing a fresh install...
Well! I figured out the issue. Eight gigabytes of memory is not enough anymore for these times. Checked and bench marked (Oof, 70% used when doing nothing, was shocked to see how it was when in-game! No wonder it was freezing!), the sole cause for all these things was because memory was running out, aw. Thank you all for the help still! I'll be gettin' an upgrade but since you all kindly helped, I'll just have to split up the rewards.
It depends how many things you're running. With Spotify/Discord being Electron-based, they can take up a lot of RAM. The irony of Discord is that it was made for video games, yet uses a bloated framework. Web browsers can take up a lot of RAM if you've got a lot of tabs open. It's worth checking what's eating the most of your RAM when these problems start happening, you might simply be able to close a few things without having to upgrade
Heck. Well, apart from RAM. It's... It's not just RAM. The freeze comes from my newly acquired SSD (where my games are stored and from where I run them now)! And... The cause of all freezes begins with a sudden spike of 100% in disk usage!? From the new SSD! I got no idea at this point, I checked performance and I find nothing of the sort. I disabled Windows Search and Superfetch! What else could it possibly be at this point? Still random freezing with the sudden spike of 100% in disk and the lowering of CPU usage right after, only coming back up after it settles down, I guess.
I'm really running out of ideas. Should I just do a fresh install?
Well, since I absolutely could not find any solution to my problem, I ended up doing a fresh install of my computer. Will update if things get fixed, hoping the issue is gone afterwards too...
70% of 8GB while doing absolutely nothing is not normal, trust me I'm playing games on my system with 8GB and an SSD and it still works just fine. Open the task manager, sort processes by memory usage and see if there's any unnecessary shit running in the background that you don't need. Also disable anything that you don't need under the startup tab for a start.
Does the 100% usage happen after your memory fills up completely? If yes, that's normal because some app allocated more memory than is physically available, you run out of ram and your system has to start swapping things in and out of your SSD so that the app can keep running, but obviously accessing data on the SSD is a lot slower than RAM, hence the freezes.
Don't go around disabling search and superfetch, they aren't resource intensive and it's more trouble than it's worth. You can see it did fuck all in your scenario, now you're gonna have slower searches and app launches as well on top of that. Some people got a hateboner for them back in Vista days and the advice keeps getting perpetuated for some reason. Same with C-states, they're enabled by default for a reason. You should only touch those things in some very very specific scenarios if you know what you're doing.
I had plenty of free space in my RAM! I engage in gaming like any game, keeping my RAM free around 70% and out of nowhere, game (along with system in certain circumstances) will freeze, my performance indicates that the SSD is at 100% with no read or write, and the CPU goes down right after, since the game is no longer active. It's really weird and I don't know at this point so I excluded RAM.
I have three drives, one SSD for system with programs, one SSD for games and an HDD for everything else. I just assume those things would help since googling around only found me such solutions and I really can't find anything else at this point.
https://i.imgur.com/MocjhF3.png
This is how it looks like at the moment of freezing. E is the game SSD, C is the system and yeah, I got no idea. Don't mind the RAM here, I specifically had Firefox open to search for solutions but even with it open, it was still happening. I'm really desperate for a solution at this point. ;(
Alright, it's asspull time.
See that button down there that says "open resource monitor"?
Click that, go to the "Disk" tab and on the middle section, click "total" to sort it so what's using the most is put at the top, and see what it looks like when your SSD hits 100% usage. A screenshot preferable.
You may also want to take a peek at a SMART health utility to make sure nothing's wrong with the drive itself. (Can CrystalDiskInfo do that with SSDs? I uh, I've never owned a SSD so I don't know...)
Something similar happened with my mom's laptop once, and I pulled out the hard drive and put it back in and it was fine. Something must've gotten knocked loose. Re-seating your SSD may do something.
I'm not currently home, sadly but I've done it before with the 'resource monitor' during peak freeze. I don't remember exactly what popped up at the top during the moment of the freeze but I recall it being nothing too important. I can check again when I'm home. I've checked with Crystal Disk as well and nope, nothing said it was wrong for all three drives of mine!
I did a 'reset' of my PC (remove all apps, keep personal files) and gonna test it out when I'm home. If the problem is solved, great! Must have been some dumb software, if not I'll just be double-checking things and go with the feeling that my original SSD for system is running dead.
Yeah that 100% drive active time with 0 reads and writes looks weird, and why is it called "Microsoft storage space device"? The drive model name is usually written there.
And keep in mind that physical memory usage isn't the same as the actual amount of memory that the system has allocated to a process. You can go to the details tab and compare "Memory (private working set)" to "Commit size" and there can be quite a sizeable difference between the two. It's pretty much guaranteed that the page file will be in use at any time with more memory committed than you have RAM available, but the OS should be smart about keeping only the pages that are currently needed in RAM. However, once it's almost filled up, your page file can start getting hit hard.
Yeah, don't know either, again, I've reset my page file following another early post's guide here so it only spawns on the newly acquired SSD which, for some reason, is called that! It's actually a kingston of 480 GBs that I bought recently. Oddly enough, it won't be identified by the Kingston SSD manager but I read that it's because I use Intel's SATA controller driver and not the default SATA controller driver that Windows 10 has. I'm not sure if this could be the issue but, again, I've never touched anything of the sort in a long while and these problems started occurring way before I got a new SSD to store my games only.
Hmm, all the advice I can give you right now is the usual stuff that you need to do to get SSDs performing optimally: make sure your SATA devices are set to AHCI mode in bios, and check that it's getting TRIMmed regularly (should be on by default):
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/209687/17e9ee26-01e2-45a6-82d6-dc953441859e/Capture.PNG
You can also run a quick benchmark to check if it's performing as it should (CrystalDiskMark is pretty handy).
Yeah, got those things set as well! Using TeamViewer from my laptop to check and, yep, they're on. I'm not sure about the AHCI mode though, is that normal? I never touched my computer related to BIOS mode ever since I got the motherboard (it's a B85M-E45, by the by!) and how could these issues start rising recently if I never touched them?
Can they by default not be AHCI mode? Is there something I should worry when touching such options?
The defaults probably depend on the mobo, with older ones you definitely had to enable it manually. If you set it up when you got the mobo, it's possible that it could've set itself back to the legacy IDE mode if your bios got reset for whatever reason.
Anyway, best to just run a benchmark, if you're getting good numbers it probably means everything's set up properly.
On my drivers, says I got the AHCI thing on, specifically Intel's one. Do I still need to check the BIOS to see if AHCI is on? Gonna run a benchmark though, let's see what I get out of this.
Yup that's looking good. Perhaps it's more of a screwed up software/driver situation then, it's hard to say at this point.
Well, after a clean install, freezes still happen! Not as often but I caught one and I checked resources.
https://i.imgur.com/38FQ6yH.png
These are what pop up at the moment of the freeze during LoL gameplay. Yes, they're all low but after it unfreezes, a huuuuge bunch of processes jump up. Couldn't snatch a screenshot but I'm gonna sleep, check it out tomorrow and see what actually happens at the end of the freeze.
I'm having a very similar issue to this, for a few months actually. Games visually freeze but the audio still plays, then after 10-15 seconds it resumes. Had it in Resident Evil 2, Sekiro, DMCV and Rainbow Six Siege. Hasn't ever happened in older/less demanding games e.g. Killing Floor 2. In Siege if I freeze I can still talk on Discord, so it's probably not a "full" computer hang?
There's one other clue, when my printer turns off at 1am every night, my PC freezes in exactly the same fashion as all the other freezes. Weird.
I've started to believe (but don't want to) that it's a failing CPU, but I'm due for an upgrade anyway and probably will in July when the new Ryzen is released. It'd be nice to have this issue solved so I can keep going for a few months though. Did you manage to get this fixed for you? If not I might have to make my own thread.
I managed to get it fixed, recently, too! After I got my SSD, I managed to properly update it and put all my games on it, after that, no more issues. I had to fix my boot configuration file as well (because I'm a dummy who messed with active partitions), so I'm not sure if it was the SSD getting updated that fixed it or the boot configuration file being fixed. Additionally, I moved my pagefile to my newest SSD too! Feel free to try these fixes but I have a hunch it might be time for a new SSD.
I got my OS SSD in 2014 I think, but I'm pretty sure SSDs are supposed to last much longer than hard drives. Samsung Magician doesn't throw up any errors, if it would for something like this anyway.
My OS SSD has always been too small at 128GB though, so I have ordered a new 500GB one. What do you mean by "update" your SSD? You mean replace it with a new one or some kind of software thing?
Might have to make my own thread.
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