4Game

I scrolled through 10 pages on new and haven't seen anyone with this exact issue, and I haven't seen anyone give this much info on this particular topic. I have an Acer Predator Helios 300 gaming laptop, which has these specs:

-Intel Core i7-8750H
-GTX 1060
-16GB RAM
-1920 x 1080 resolution
-60/144 hz refresh rate (I don't know what else needs to be said, I can give more info if needed)

The game settings are set up like this:

Resolution: 1920×1080, 144 hz
Vegetation Quality: High
Particle Lights: High
Draw Distance/Level of Detail: Very High
Shadow Quality: Medium
Active Point Lights: Very High
Active Point Light Shadows: High
Bloom: On
SSAO: On
Sun Shafts: On
Motion Blur: Off
Tesselation: On
Soft Particles: On
Depth of Field: Off
Anti-Aliasing: On
Chromatic Aberration: Off
Vsync: On

And I used these tips from other posts and articles to help increase the fps:

-typing "-window-mode exclusive -screen-fullscreen" into the launch options in steam (huge help)
-adding "gfx-enable-gfx-jobs=1" and "gfx-enable-native-gfx-jobs=1" into the boot.config text file (can't tell if it helps, but I don't think it hurts)
-tried giving it high priority in task manager but it didn't do anything to stop the fps drops so I don't bother anymore
-starting the game with Vulkan didn't seem to help at all, actually if I clicked during a loading screen the game almost crashed so I don't use it anymore
That's all I can remember trying to do to help myself, any other tips would be nice.

As for the actual gameplay (I was testing earlier while I was making a draft of this post then reddit decided to have an error and make me delete it), in previous play sessions, the fps would drop from 80-100 with my current set-up to 10-20 (maybe less, couldn't monitor the fps 100% of the time, but those numbers I for sure saw) about every minute or so (sometimes several times a minute) for a few seconds no matter where I was in regards to my base (which is pretty small and basic, basically just a small hut with enough room for a bed, a few chests and a lvl 3 craft station). This most recent one, it still happened far from my base, just less frequently, and I don't think I was much farther away than previous play sessions.

Using the PredatorSense application my laptop has, I can see that during normal gameplay, CPU usage hovers around 35% and GPU is at 100% (thanks to the true fullscreen), except when an fps drop happens, then it goes as low as 14% (shows as large inverted spikes on the graph), actually to 0% in some spots, which is weird, guess the game just stops at that point. I'm, like, bare-minimum tech savvy to be talking about this, but I think something is causing the GPU to stop being fully utilized, which causes the fps drop. I thought it might have been the CPU temp, but basically every other game also causes that to max out, and I don't have this problem with those games, also the fps drops happen regardless of the temperature anyways.

I don't know what's going on exactly, or if I should have tagged this as a bug, but I hope people read this because if I could play this at 80-100 fps consistently, I would love this game more than I already do, and the more people that read this, the more likely it is that someone who knows what to do with this info will see it and hopefully come up with a solution. If not, it might just be another optimization thing for the devs.