Long freezes while playing any games
Hey everyone!
I have a Lenovo Thinkpad P1; Intel Core Ultra 9 with 64Gb; Nvidia RTX 3000 Ada with 8Gb, and I've been playing different games for quite some time without any problems! I can play some fairly recent big games without heating issues, and at 60 fps easily if I don't push the visuals crazy.
However, for the past 2-3 months, I have been experiencing some very sporadic but very long (2-3 seconds) video + audio freezes while gaming. They never crash the pc nor the game and everything resumes to normal after the freeze (no framerate drops between them or anything), but they are getting very annoying. I can't recall anything specific happening that would correlate with their apparition. I remember having experienced them for the first time when I downloaded and started playing Helldivers 2. It might also correlates with me re-installing the SteelSeries Headset app, but shutting down the app doesn't seem to solve the issue.
I experience those freezes on all my games, ranging from Helldivers 2, to way smaller games such as Hades, Celeste or even Undusted.
I have a feeling that they occur when something loads, as when I play Hades, Celeste or Undusted, they would appear during screen/level transitions. I've also noticed them happening sometimes when talking to NPCs in Hades. For Helldivers 2, it is harder to tell as it feels that they happen very randomly during missions, but also loading of elements is harder to pinpoint.
I've tried to update my drivers, empty some memory as my laptop was quite full and track for errors in the event viewers, but nothing to declare from that. I've tried to relocate my games from my HDD to my SSD as well, but nothing.
However I've noticed in the Performance tab or my task manager sudden drops in CPU and GPU usage when this occurs. You can see below for the GPU the constant spikes, then a short drop to zero when the freeze occurred, then going back to normal (it then goes to full 0 when I alt+tab to look at the task manager).
Does anyone have any idea what this could and what I could try to solve this issue?
Thank you very much for your help! ❤️