FC 26 PC: 100% GPU and 7 FPS after cutscenes/menu transitions

Hi everyone,

I have a very specific performance issue in EA Sports FC 26 and I’m running out of things to try.

My system:

ASUS TUF Gaming A15 laptop

RTX 3050 Laptop GPU, 4 GB VRAM

16 GB RAM

Windows 11

1080p / 144 Hz display

Game installed through Steam

The strange thing is that the game can sometimes run perfectly for several hours at a stable 60 FPS, while the GPU usage stays around 50–70%.

However, at some point—usually during the first pre-match cutscene, after a match, or when returning to the main/career menu—the GPU suddenly gets stuck at 99–100% usage and the game drops to around 7 FPS.

Once this happens, the entire game remains extremely slow, including the menus. The GPU stays at 99–100%, but temperatures remain normal.

Things I have already tried:

Lowest and different graphics settings

Strand Based Hair disabled

Manually setting StrandBasedHair = 0 and locking the configuration files

NVIDIA Control Panel 60 FPS limit

Different V-Sync settings

Fullscreen, Borderless and Windowed modes

Alt + Enter

High-performance GPU selection in Windows

ASUS Armoury Crate Ultimate GPU mode / MUX switch

Performance and Turbo modes

Clearing FC 26 cache and letting the game create a new AppData folder

Starting another 3D game while FC was stuck, to force a new GPU rendering context

Updated NVIDIA drivers

I also confirmed that FC 26 did not overwrite the Strand Based Hair setting, but the bug still happened, so that was not the cause in my case.

This does not look like normal low performance because the same laptop can run the exact same match at 60 FPS with only 50–70% GPU usage. The problem only starts after a cutscene or menu transition, and then the GPU gets stuck at 100% while producing only around 7 FPS.

Has anyone experienced this exact issue and found a real fix? At this point, I’m wondering whether this is simply an FC 26 rendering/VRAM bug that requires an EA patch.

I’d really appreciate any help, suggestions, or experiences from people who had the same issue. Thanks in advance! 😄