Thanks for the reply!
i saw your recommendations.
added unreal editor to high performance in windows settings - didn’t help.
in nvidia control plane changed display mode from auto to nvidia gpu - this ended up reducing my max fps in unreal from 40 to 30, and still didn’t fix the drops.
i already switched my engine scalability to low - it didn’t have any effect on my max fps or the drops.
whenever i get big drops, i also notice that windows generally becomes somewhat unresponsive - even though looking at task manager my ram and gpu utilization is around 50-60%.
any other ideas?