Severe FPS Drops, Overheating & Blue Screen Crash

General Feedback & Requests
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1

Hi everyone,

I’m a 3D artist in the game industry, and I recently started using Unreal Engine (version 5.5.3) as an environment artist. I began blocking out a 3D scene with low-poly assets created in Blender.

At first, I get around 40 FPS, but after a few minutes, the performance drops drastically to around 10 FPS… Then, my PC eventually shuts down, and when I try to restart it, I get a blue screen. I have to let it cool down before turning it back on.

The strange thing is that even in an empty project, my FPS drops quickly when I move around the viewport. A few years ago, I used Unreal Engine 4 on this same PC without any issues—I was able to work with terrain, shaders, and textures just fine.

I also noticed that my PC heats up and the fans go crazy when using Unreal, which didn’t happen before.

I’ve tried several things, but nothing has fixed the issue:

  • Updating my GPU drivers
  • Lowering Scalability settings to Low
  • Turning off Realtime (which felt dumb, but at least it helped a little, lol)
  • Disabling Nanite, VSM, and Lumen
  • Setting Unreal to “High Performance” in the GPU settings
  • Uninstalling/Reinstalling Unreal

My PC specs:

  • Model: MSI GL75 Leopard
  • OS: Windows 11 Home (Version 10.0.22631)
  • DirectX: 12
  • GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 (Driver: Game Ready 572.47 - Feb 20, 2025)
  • CPU: Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz
  • RAM: 16GB
  • Storage: 931.5GB SSD + 476.9GB SSD

What else can I do? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

2

If your laptop is overheating then it’s most likely a hardware problem. How long have you had the laptop for? Do you do maintenance on it?

With time the thermal paste dries out and becomes less able to transfer heat, causing heat buildup.

You can limit the fps in unreal but if it’s overheating at only 40 fps then something is going wrong.

Try turning on hwmonitor and checking your pc components temeratures to try to pin point what part is heating up.

3

That is budget “work with office” laptop. Would you buy Honda Yaris and try to use it in lumbermill to transport tree logs?

TLDR:
Your laptop thermally throttles, it is weak laptop without load, and it dies with load.

Longer rant (directed at laptop marketing teams, not you :wink: )

So what you can do:

  • get to your supervisor and demand decent DESKTOP PC
  • get first or two paychecks and buy such decent DESKTOP PC

What you need to have in DESKTOP PC:

  • graphics with 10+ GB of ram, for VFX artist (or technical artist) top of the line cards really 3080, 3090, 4080,4090,5080, 5090
  • decent CPU (basically any decent CPU will do here) but not mobile/laptop CPUs!
  • ram again more the better 30GB is fine
  • one SSD for system and crap (500gb or more as unreal likes to spam stuff on system drive) and one SSD for work projects
  • one big HDD for storing backups locally, and all stuff you want to have but not use right now

What you would need for decent LAPTOP

  • laptop with non mobile CPU and one of above NON laptop (ie DESKTOP) versions of GPU. Double check that as marketing lies.
  • laptop with good cooling and thermals, and this i am afraid is impossible in laptops, we cannot make better chip to push more entropy trough copper, this will not happen. All claims of decent cooling are marketing lies.