FC26 is unplayable, locked at 5FPS on PC
I'm hoping someone here or an EA staff member can help, because I've genuinely run out of things to try.
My PC is a Ryzen 5 5500 with a GTX 1650 Super (single dedicated GPU, no integrated graphics involved). Every other game I own runs perfectly, stable framerates, no stutter, nothing unusual. FC 26 is the only title doing this.
The problem: the moment I load into an game or any time a new graphic/animation loads in, the game locks to around 5 FPS and becomes completely unplayable. The strange part is that my GPU usage never goes above 5% during this. The card isn't being stressed — it's sitting almost idle while the game crawls. So this isn't my hardware struggling; the game simply stops feeding work to the GPU and gets stuck. VRAM doesn't fill up either, so it's not a memory ceiling.
I've spent days on this and tried basically everything that gets recommended:
- Forced DirectX 11 via the -dx11 launch option
- Switched to Windowed Borderless, disabled in-game V-Sync
- Capped FPS through the NVIDIA Control Panel instead of in-game
- Set everything to lowest settings, Render Scale at 80%, Strand-Based Hair OFF, then locked fcsetup.ini as read-only so the game can't override it
- Clean GPU driver reinstall via DDU in safe mode (not an install-over-top)
- Disabled VRR/FreeSync/G-Sync, tested at a flat 60Hz desktop refresh
- Closed all overlays (Discord, GeForce Experience, Steam, RTSS) and disabled hardware acceleration where relevant
- Full clean reinstall — removed FC 26 and the EA app, deleted leftover EA folders and the Documents config folder, reinstalled fresh on an SSD
- Reinstalled EA AntiCheat and ran a Repair
- Confirmed it happens in offline Kick-Off too, not just online — so it isn't a network or anti-cheat issue
After all of that, the symptom is identical: ~5 FPS, GPU pinned under 5%, unplayable the second a match starts.
From searching around, I can see I'm far from the only one — plenty of people across very different hardware are reporting the same low-GPU-usage stall. At this point it really looks like something in the game's render/present path rather than anything on the user's end.
Has anyone actually resolved this, or is there an official acknowledgement / fix in progress? I'd really appreciate any direction. Happy to provide DxDiag, a clip of the issue with an on-screen GPU/FPS overlay, or any logs that would help diagnose it.
Thanks.
