Finally fixed my GPU

Gregory Hayes87 said:Honestly, I’m about five seconds away from tossing this thing right out the window.
My CPU stays around 55°C and the GPU sits at 64-66°C while gaming—everything looks fine at 60 FPS—but then it just tanks to 10 FPS for a few seconds before bouncing back. It’s like a glitchy heartbeat—honestly, it's driving me nuts.
We're talking specifically about gaming. Madden NFL 16 I'm playing Call of Duty.
I cranked my afterburner fan up to max, but honestly—there’s zero performance gain, just more noise.
Give me some ideas—I'm losing my mind here. My vacation is slipping away, and I haven't even picked up a controller yet.

You aren't the only one struggling with Madden NFL 16—I’m seeing the same thing where the frame rate tanks from 60 down to about 20 or 25 and just stays stuck there. Everything else I play runs smoothly without those kinds of massive performance dips, even on my GTX 950.

Oh yeah, I just remembered another trick: try capping your FPS in the macOS Control Panel. It’s under the performance section, right by the frame rate settings.

A quick update on the situation: if I boot up my computer and jump straight into a game, there’s no issue. However, if the machine has been running all day and then I try to launch it, I get stuck in a three-hour queue.
It's honestly pathetic; I might as well just give this thing to a junk dealer and buy a new one.

Either you’re looking at a complete disk reformat followed by a clean macOS installation, or your CPU is simply overheating beyond belief.

Honestly, if your CPU is staying under 75 degrees, you aren't overheating at all, so it definitely shouldn't be messing with your FPS...

If I had to guess, I'd say you're probably looking at some poorly written driver software or maybe just a game that hasn't been optimized properly, because I really don't think this is a hardware issue, and since you're pretty sure nothing happened while you were cleaning out your PC, I'm certain any actual damage would have caused much nastier problems than just a little stuttering during gameplay.

It’s possible he’s hitting CPU throttling. From what I can tell, he’s only monitoring temperatures rather than actual processor clock speeds. It’s interesting that it hits a wall right at that recommended max temp of 61.5°C. Have him run a stress test using OCCT—there’s a specific graph for that too—to see if the clock speed actually drops (say, down to 1.4GHz) after running for a while once the heat reaches its peak.

If that isn't the culprit, try benchmarking the hard drive—use HDD Tune to check its benchmark, health, and run an error scan. If the drive is fine, then we're looking at a software issue: maybe the game is poorly optimized, the settings are pushing the GPU too hard, there's a glitch in macOS, or some background process is hogging all the resources...