Troubleshooting Technique for Frame Drops

Gaming
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1

This is more of a cool little troubleshooting process I found than a specific issue with Apex and Launchy.

I started having consistent, noticeable spikes in frame times after the last Apex Legends patch installed. I’ve been pulling my hair out the last few weeks until I got the bright idea to use OBS to capture Apex, MSI Afterburner, and Process Lasso.

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I looked for a spike in frame time + drop in GPU utilization, then went frame by frame to see what thread suddenly came alive in the “Active Processes” tab in Process Lasso.

Turns out there were quite a few, but Launchy stuck out. I killed it and the new, noticeable frame drops stopped.

I’m not sure why VLC has a ‘next frame’, but not ‘previous’ hotkey. I ended up switching to Da Vinci Resolve for more granular scrubbing control to see exactly which process activated around the frame spike.

2

If Process Lasso integrates with Rivatuner it can detect this via the Rivatuner API. It’s commercial software so there’s no reason this can’t happen if people pay for this to happen.

3

Oh, I definitely think there’s a market for a ‘who touched my GPU?’ app. It would make sense for NVidia/AMD to expose a process activity metric of some sort.