My friend and me really want to play 7 days to die but a bug keeps happening to him. This bug causes his game to go from 60fps down to 2fps. It just happens randomly, we can play for one day or so, then randomly some other day it drops down to 2fps out of nowhere. It does get fixed after a random increment of time. Last time we waited a month for it to be fixed. But another time it was fixed after a week or so. He has tried everything to fix it. It is not his computer being bad because he runs other games perfectly fine(ex. Battlefield 1) and 7 days to die also works until the bug kicks in. Also it’s nothing to do with his graphics settings because the main menu also lags. Also it’s not anything to do with multiplayer it also happens in single player. Which makes the game unplayable for him. I hope someone can help us.
Friend having problems
- Thread starter Aiden939
- Start date
Jugginator
QA
That sounds like a GPU driver issue. Post a log file from your friend's machine
Jugginator
QA
Not really, uninstalling the GPU driver using DDU (from guru3d) and installing a fresh driver is the solution for that, but it could be many things which would need a log file to see. I would use the Studio driver rather than the Game Ready driver
https://pastebin.com/embed_js/fCv9jmLa
https://pastebin.com/embed_js/U4Vu2jV2
Those are the two logs from that day. The second one is earlier in the day and the first one is later in the day. Also I pretty sure the second log is the one where the bug happened. The first one is where he was trying to join whilst the bug was active.
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Beelzybub
Tester
Still looks like a GPU driver issue. Your friend is using the default microsoft driver. Have them get the latest driver directly from the Nvidia site.
And secondly, there are mutliple attempts to connect by your friend without restarting. They have only 8Gb or ram and every attempt to connect
will use up more ram. They should restart the game before reattempting to connect to free up that ram. Also, don't run any other apps while playing.
Upgrading to 16Gb would be a good thing.
Jugginator
QA
I'm leaning towards this actually happening: Your friend randomly has lag spikes that brings his game down to low fps for a moment then it frees up right? That's what I see in the log.
In that case, yes a bogged down system memory would do it, but also a slow hard drive will do it too. The game is hanging up quite a bit, which is one or the two. This game will want to use at least 6gb, and he only has 2 free after that, and it REALLY loves an SSD for performance.
If the GPU was the main issue, you would have a bad experience consistently; not saying it could be, since it is rather old, but it's fine enough).
In that case, yes a bogged down system memory would do it, but also a slow hard drive will do it too. The game is hanging up quite a bit, which is one or the two. This game will want to use at least 6gb, and he only has 2 free after that, and it REALLY loves an SSD for performance.
If the GPU was the main issue, you would have a bad experience consistently; not saying it could be, since it is rather old, but it's fine enough).
Thank you both I'll get my friend to test these options out.
The biggest thing I am confused about is how the game fixes it self after a while.
The fps gets brought down for like a month then it gets freed up and starts working again.
The biggest thing I am confused about is how the game fixes it self after a while.
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Beelzybub
Tester
Your machine was paused during this log, so they would not have been able to connect, bug or not.
From that log: "2025-01-26T18:09:00 251.037 INF [NET] Kicked from server: Server is paused"
In #2 It looks like they played for roughly 40 minutes before the fps drop, then it was a sudden, drastic drop.
That laptop has Dual GPUs. I suppose it's possible that the machine has switched to using the iGPU instead of
the discrete Nvidia GPU. They could try disabling the integrated gpu. Also, still update the GPU driver.
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This kinda makes sense of why it could cause the drop in fps. But how come it gets fixed after a month or so?
My friend has to sleep so he can't test it today but he will tomorrow.
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Jugginator
QA
Yeah sometimes laptops will switch, either by hardware/software fault or something. I had a friend have one that the gpu just died and it auto switched to the igpu without any warning. If it's periodically, something is telling it to switch.
But, I still also stand by a slow hdd (or a full drive) where the game is on and the save data (usually boot drive, in appdata) is on and the lack of ram can cause this too. We already do a lot of asset unloading/loading, if you have low memory more needs to do so and it will take it longer. This can happen during connection too (bogged down storage for read/write/transfer, ram for memory being loaded to run the game).
But, I still also stand by a slow hdd (or a full drive) where the game is on and the save data (usually boot drive, in appdata) is on and the lack of ram can cause this too. We already do a lot of asset unloading/loading, if you have low memory more needs to do so and it will take it longer. This can happen during connection too (bogged down storage for read/write/transfer, ram for memory being loaded to run the game).
Jugginator
QA
How is your friend's storage? HDD, SSD? How full/old is it? Those can matter too
Jugginator
QA
120gb free out of? That's important too, as once you go below about 35%free they can get as slow as a hard drive
Beelzybub
Tester
Out of 1 terabyte
His own words, “All of the bull@%$# with disabling my other GPU, I updated the GPU driver *again* for the fifth time, I got the "latest driver" that I supposedly didn't have, I tried reinstalling my other one again, I increased RAM, I spam-verified files, I hard reinstalled the entire game three times between each fix, *and* I restarted my computer between every fix.” He’s just angry that it’s not working, he has been dealing with this for a year or longer.
Jugginator
QA
Ah yeah that's way too full. Ask him to try freeing up space, up to about 300-400GB. It really does slow things down and can wear the SSD out faster; one of my NVME drives got to about 80% full once and I noticed it being really slow, the speeds went from like 3GB to about 100-200mb with bursts of a few hundred mbs
But how will that cause the game to Randomly drop in FPS and fix it self after a month or so? If every other game he plays works?