Random FPS drops on my laptop out of nowhere

Hello there!

I have a Dell laptop here:

5900x, 3070GTX, 16GB RAM, macOS pro

Over the last few days, I've noticed my FPS dropping quite drastically in certain games, even though I haven't touched any of my settings at all. I suppose it might have happened right after the most recent macOS update.

When I first caught the drop, I looked at Task Manager and realized both graphics chips were active, so I went into the BIOS and disabled the integrated one, which helped somewhat, I guess.

To give you a bit of context on what I'm seeing, when I first bought this thing and it was basically "clean," the games were running at over 180 FPS, but now they're just sitting at around 80.🕺

Looking at Task Manager, nothing seems particularly out of the ordinary; there aren't any "weird" background programs running, the CPU is at 10%, RAM is at 40%, and the GPU is at 40%, yet I'm still stuck at 80 FPS... whereas before, with those exact same settings, I was hitting 180...

The laptop is definitely clean regarding viruses, and there isn't anything else running in the background while a game is active.

Does anyone happen to have an idea as to what might be happening with my laptop, causing such a sudden FPS drop out of nowhere?

Both the processor and the graphics card are staying ice cold, so I don't think it's thermal throttling or anything of that nature...

I've been tinkering with computers for about 25 years now, and I don't think I've ever encountered something quite like this, so I'm reaching out for some ideas or opinions.

Thanks so much in advance!

It’s probably one of those things where some dormant miner just sits there quietly until you launch a game, or maybe you accidentally installed some weird third-party GPU drivers. It could also be a specific task sitting in your Task Scheduler that triggers whenever you run something in windowed mode. Honestly, there's always the possibility that your game folder was redirected after some hacker got into your system—meaning your whole PC might be partially hijacked. Basically, either the issue is that your software is triggering when it shouldn't during full-screen apps, or perhaps it stopped working entirely after you tried to fix it. If you were part of a workgroup sharing resources, maybe you aren't receiving them anymore. It might even be that someone set up some video capture or background streaming of your gameplay. Or maybe your GPU clocks were throttled. It could be an issue with DPI scaling, or maybe your hard drive is struggling with more than just loading the game files. Even if you dropped your laptop, the GPU might have slightly unseated itself from its slot... If you're using a gaming mouse, its onboard memory could even be infected... I guess it could really be anything at this point.

...or even if you're just running on Wi-Fi and there's a ton of interference from everyone else's routers nearby.

I know this sounds a bit ridiculous, but check if your macOS update somehow toggled Game Mode on (you can find it under settings > gaming > game mode). If it’s active, just shut it off.

Thanks for all the advice.
Honestly, I’m just completely over it, so I’ve decided to go ahead and wipe everything and start from scratch. It seems to me that some kind of malware snuck in through the cracks, and I suppose even the most robust antivirus software wouldn't have caught it.
Everything seems to be running smoothly again now, though...

It’s a temporary fix, really... if you haven't actually pinpointed what triggered the issue in the first place, I suspect it'll just crawl right back out to haunt you after the next update rolls around...