Across multiple sessions I have identified several consistent patterns that explain when and why the FPS drops occur, and all of them point toward a problem in how the game handles shaders, textures and rendering states.
Ultimate Team constantly loads and unloads assets as you move between menus, stadiums, cutscenes and gameplay. After a few transitions, some of these cached assets, especially shaders or textures, seem to get stuck in memory in an inefficient state. When this happens the GPU jumps to 99 percent usage but the temperatures stay low, which means it is not performing heavy computations. Instead, it appears to be looping through bad or redundant shader data.
Every time I switch graphics presets, for example Medium to Low to Medium like shown in the video below, the FPS immediately returns to normal. Changing presets forces the game to flush the current shader and texture cache, refresh DirectX states and reallocate VRAM. This creates a soft reset of the renderer without restarting the game. That is why this workaround restores performance for the rest of the session.
Another pattern is that the FPS drops often happen after the game has been idle for a while, such as when I stay in menus or leave the game open before starting a match. After sitting idle the next match usually begins with severe FPS drops. This suggests that some shaders or render states are being unloaded or partially cleared while the game is inactive, and when they reload at the start of the match they do not rebuild correctly. The result is high GPU usage with low temperatures and major performance loss until I manually reset the renderer by changing a setting in the main menu after quitting Ultimate Team.
The issue returns every time I restart the game. This indicates that the underlying shader cache or engine configuration file is being loaded in a corrupted or mismanaged state each time the game starts. Because of this I am forced to change a very specific graphics setting from the main menu after quitting Ultimate Team to force the game to rebuild the rendering pipeline manually.
Taken together these observations strongly indicate a problem related to shader cache management or render state handling within the engine.
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