FIX FOR FPS DROP 100% WORKING (PC) VRAM LEAK (4GB GPUS)
Hello, so I was investigating an issue where, whenever you start playing a match or a cutscene/halftime sequence appears, the game suddenly drops to 3–5 FPS, making it completely unplayable. If you don't restart the game, the FPS never recover, and even after restarting, the issue happens again sooner or later.
Months ago, this used to happen constantly on my laptop, which has an RTX 3050M with 4 GB of VRAM. I found several posts on these forums and on Reddit suggesting that GPUs with 4 GB of VRAM may have some kind of memory leak that causes this massive FPS drop. Apparently, this issue has never been fixed, even though there are quite a few reports about it since the game launch. No matter what graphics settings I use or change, either in-game or externally, the issue always occurs and navigating through forums i found not one but two possible workarounds that worked fine for me:
1-THE EASY FIX:
If you have a 4K display this is going to be easier than 1080p ones but it works on both.
The first match you play has to be at 1920x1080p.
When the FPS start to drop, pause the game, go into the settings, and change the resolution to 3840x1440 (not 2560x1440). Then, when the popup asking you to confirm the resolution change appears, either press the button to REVERT the change or confirm it and then switch back to 1920x1080p. After doing this, the FPS should start recovering normally, and you should be able to play without any further problems. If you have a 1080p display, you have to do this first: go to the NVIDIA Control Panel (or AMD Adrenalin), go to Manage 3D Settings, find DSR Factors and select 2.00x and 4.00x. Then go back to the game and change the resolution to a higher one. There should now be two extra resolutions available; just pick the highest one and revert to 1080p to solve the issue.
From my experience, I have to do this at least once every time I launch the game. After that, I can play normally for the entire session as long as I don't close the game.
2-ANOTHER APP/GAME RUNNING:
I found another workaround that seems to be related to the same issue. When the FPS suddenly drop from around 75 FPS to 3–10 FPS, opening another game or a benchmark application for a few minutes can sometimes make the FPS return to normal. However, launching another heavy game can use a lot of RAM/VRAM and potentially cause even more problems, especially on systems with limited RAM.
A user named mmdtayebi posted a much lighter workaround on this forum using Unigine Heaven Benchmark:
-Press Alt + Enter in FC 26 to switch out of exclusive fullscreen.
-Launch Unigine Heaven Benchmark.
-Set Graphics Quality to High or Ultra.
-Enable Fullscreen and use your normal screen resolution.
-Let the benchmark run while FC 26 is still running in the background.
-Wait until the FPS in FC 26 return to normal.
-Close Unigine Heaven and continue playing FC 26.
There is no need to launch another heavy game anymore. A lightweight benchmark like Unigine Heaven seems to be enough to trigger the fix. Using High/Ultra settings also seems to restore the FPS faster than using Low settings.
