Game becomes unfocused dropping fps to 24

[briang8]

The game will randomly become unfocused and the fps will drop down and lock to 24 fps. Alt-tabbing both in Borderless Window and Fullscreen temporarily resolves the issue for a short time. Going into the menus can cause this to happen without even leaving the game window. This has been an issue for years and I'm not sure if its a NVidia/Windows issue or the game not communicating properly with drivers. I have found from this forum post that manually setting the Vulkan/OpenGL present method to "Preferlayered on DXGI Swapchain" fixes the issue. Is there a way to fix this so players experiencing this issue don't have to mess with the NVidia driver settings for X4?

[Rothank]

The FPS drop when unfocused is a game setting meant to reduce the strain on your PC, it can be disabled in game Settings.

Losing focus is another matter though, but is typically caused by something on one's PC opening up. Is it happening only in X4 for you?
If so, I imagine devs would need the logs detailed in viewtopic.php?t=402324 to be able to even consider investigating your report.

[briang8]

The FPS drop when unfocused is a game setting meant to reduce the strain on your PC, it can be disabled in game Settings.

Losing focus is another matter though, but is typically caused by something on one's PC opening up. Is it happening only in X4 for you?
If so, I imagine devs would need the logs detailed in viewtopic.php?t=402324 to be able to even consider investigating your report.

This only happens in X4. Its not actually losing focus but is behaving like it is with the the fps drop. I will have to look into what logs are needed for a follow up post. I might have to revert the NVidia settings back to default so I can replicate the problem.

[taztaz502]

Same thing is happening with me, Game goes to 24 fps every few minutes making the game pretty unplayable.

Alt/Tabbing from the game temporarily fixes it for a few minutes. I play in borderless windows.

System Specs.

7800X3D, 4080 Super, 32GB CL 32 Memory and game is installed on 4th gen SSD.

OP what are your system specs? Is it a newer system? Never had this in my 2,800 hrs.

[taztaz502]

I'm curious OP did you download 2024-11 Cumulative Update for .NET Framework 3.5 and 4.8.1 for Windows 11, version 23H2 for x64 (The latest windows update)?

I couldn't deal with the FPS drops anymore so reformatted my PC as i only noticed the FPS issues after i updated this update for windows. After a format i didn't download this update and no longer have issues so maybe that could be the cause if you can try to rollback the update.

[EGO_Aut]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding it, but...
I think it's good to have the game on one monitor and Windows apps on the second monitor.
If the mouse switches from the game to apps, the FPS and POWER of the GPU are drastically reduced - that's good for me. The game runs in background and i save money

[Cainmosni]

Has anyone found a solution to this? I am experiencing the exact same behavior. The game will run perfectly fine at 144fps for a few minutes, then at some point, usually when opening a menu, it will drop to 24fps and be locked there. Alt-tabbing in and out repeatedly seems to fix it, but only for minutes at best. Looking at task manager shows that nothing is even close to maxed out, so I dont think it is a hardware issue. This is also the only game I have seen this behavior in. My older, much slower computer did not have this problem. Was looking forward to trying this game again with my new setup.

Win 11
9800x3d
RTX 4070TI - super
32gb ram

[CBJ]

As pointed out by an earlier poster, we are unlikely to be able to offer any relevant advice without the information requested in the very first thread at the top of the forum.

And just to point out, the OP described something else stealing the focus from the game. If so then it would be something outside the game doing that. In the past I've seen reports of badly-behaved printer monitoring software doing that, for example, but it could be anything.