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I have Steam installed along with CS:GO, HL2, and Payday 2, and this happens in all of the games: when I start a game, the game seems to run fine at over 60 FPS. Then, the game starts to stutter, to the point where there are severe FPS drops (2 FPS).

I am running a Core i5-2520M (dual-core hyper-threaded) with HD 3000 graphics. In Windows, I get lower FPS (30+) on my games, but I have never seen frame drops like the ones I'm getting on Ubuntu. In fact, everything always ran smoothly. I don't know whether this is an issue with the drivers, or it's an issue with thermals.

The Additional Drivers tab shows:

no additional drivers available

The output of top shows:

Output of top

What can be done to fix this?

NGRhodes
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john bob
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    If this is on a laptop, you may be right that you may have issues with thermals. What version of Ubuntu are you sporting? – G Trawo Jul 08 '18 at 22:03
  • It's Ubuntu 18.04. – john bob Jul 08 '18 at 23:00
  • Do the frame rates return to the higher ones after turning the game off and starting it right away? If not, if you were to turn off the game, wait 5 minutes and start it again, would it it return to the higher frame rates? Or does it take a full reboot to return to high rates? – G Trawo Jul 09 '18 at 01:13
  • Also, check and see what your memory usage is with 'top' or 'htop' during game play. Since you are using the Intel Graphics you would be using system memory, since there is no dedicated memory for the GPU. Depending on your configuration, that memory can be dynamically allocated. 'grep -i memory /var/log/Xorg.0.log' might show what it's set at. – G Trawo Jul 09 '18 at 01:22
  • My framerates reset right after starting a new game. I updated my post to include the results in 'top' – john bob Jul 10 '18 at 01:17
  • If the fps returns right after restarting the game, it *may* not be thermals. To make sure it isn't, install the 'i7z' package (`sudo apt-get install i7z && sudo i7z`). It will tell you the CPU load, power state and thermals of the Intel CPU. Since the GPU sits right next to it, it will be *close* to the temps of the CPU. It may also tell you if it's a power state issue. Have you tried setting the governor (https://askubuntu.com/questions/20271/how-do-i-set-the-cpu-frequency-scaling-governor-for-all-cores-at-once) to performance? – G Trawo Jul 10 '18 at 14:16
  • I opened the i7z, and I just noticed that my PC is running lower than the specified speed (1.3 GHz, 2.5 GHz specified speed). I don't know if this is normal or not. EDIT: Set the scaling governor to performance, and my CPU speed is back to normal. – john bob Jul 10 '18 at 23:35
  • The games still stutter after setting the performance mode. Also, the laptop isn't heating as much as it did before, for some odd reason... – john bob Jul 11 '18 at 00:25
  • Did you note the temperature of the cores? Since the GPU and the CPU sit on the same bit of silicon, they would share similar temperatures. This is just to rule out thermal limit idea. I would run the game in windowed mode, with the terminal window just behind with the temperatures visible. Then you can note the temps when the stuttering happens. – G Trawo Jul 11 '18 at 01:04
  • I note that your load is 8.8 for the 1M 7.07 for the 5m and 4.4 for 15m. This indicates that your CPU is way overworked. Have a look at this for load averages: https://www.howtogeek.com/194642/understanding-the-load-average-on-linux-and-other-unix-like-systems/ .... basically you have some process eating cpu. Can you provide top output when the computer is sitting completely idle? – stratus Dec 09 '19 at 14:41

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