Severe FPS drop and sound stutter out of nowhere (1.6-2.1)

[RiceDragon_]

Recently I played Cyberpunk for about 40 hours without any issues, until today the game decided to drop my FPS from 60-80 to around 20 and make the game's sound stutter severely when I loaded into the world (the more action going in the game - the more sound is stuttering). This problem occurred to me about a year ago in 1.6 (I took a break from playing Cyberpunk because of it), but got fixed seemingly for no reason, because when I installed the game again a few weeks ago, it ran normally. So, I don't want to wait another year for this issue to temporary resolve on its own, and that's why I'm asking for any help here.

I tried fixing the game myself by various methods:
- Changing settings - I think that they doesn't even matter, because my PC can easily run Cyberpunk on high settings with 60-80 FPS. Like, I somehow played 40 hours with these settings without any problems, right?
- Restarting PC numerous times - didn't work;
- Checking game's local files -didn't work;
- Reinstalling the game 3 times total - didn't work, I think? After all, I doubt that when I reinstalled the game for the second time (After my 1 year break) exactly it fixed my issue;
- Updating drivers - didn't work.
Maybe I tried something else earlier in the 1.6, but that's all I could remember. I also tried to find any solution on the Internet, but to no avail.

Also, I should note a few side effects that I noticed and that could be related to this problem:
- After I click play button in CDPR launcher, my screen becomes more contrast (This also happens in a few other games, but when I launched Cyberpunk yesterday, my monitor's screen didn't change at all);
- The game now loads twice if not thrice as long as it loaded earlier. It is very likely related to the next side effect;
- Also, I noticed that when I try to play the game with this issue, task manager shows that Cyberpunk basically doesn't use all or most of my PC's resources. It only uses around 4,5 Gb RAM and only 20-40% of my GPU and CPU (When FPS drops literally to the floor, GPU and CPU values goes under 10% respectively, almost 0% sometimes. And it happens frequently). That's probably the reason of my game's sudden massive performance drop, but I don't understand how to fix it.

My specs:
- CPU - Intel Core i5 10400
- GPU - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti
- RAM - 16,0Gb Dual-Channel Corsair Vengeance
If I need to provide more information to help resolve this issue, I'll be glad to do so. Cyberpunk is such a cool game, and it's a frustrating that I can't fully enjoy it. Also, my English knowledge isn't great, so I apologize if i wrote something wrong.

P.S. Thankfully, clean installation solved the problem.

 

[Thorsicequeen]

Hey, I just wanted you to know that this is also happening to me, story below. So far the only thing that seemed to work at least once is a complete clean re-install, as you have mentioned. However, this is the second time I have to try this as it did happen again, I have no idea what is causing this. Our issues sound very similar.

I played the Steam version game happily for 28 hours before experiencing this bug the first time. I was playing with RT on with adjusted settings and was getting anywhere from 57 to 74 frames. Then suddenly mid game at about 28 hours of play, I ended up with massive stuttering, frame dropping and sound interference. I tried loading another save, turning off the game, restarting, checked file integrity, and nothing worked to fix the issue. I scoured forums to change different graphical settings, sound settings, and absolutely nothing worked. I then uninstalled the game, reinstalled, started up a new game, and still had the issue. I tried to lower all settings to low or off, and weirdly it did not change a thing and I was still getting extremely low FPS.

So I uninstalled the game again, and manually deleted any and all Cyberpunk files I could locate on my PC after the Steam uninstall and restarted another game. This time it worked. I tweaked the game further and turned RT completely off, adjusted some settings and was getting 77 to 103 frames in game. Again, I played the game perfectly, no stutters, no issue, no crashing, and then again at about 30 hours of play, massive frame drops, stuttering, sound glitches mid play. This issue has happened twice now while in combat (not sure if this makes a difference).

When this happens I get anywhere from 1 to 25 frames on average, with erratic frame jumps up to 58 or so. I even get very low frame rates in the very start the as the Cyberpunk logo splashes the screen. The game is not even on and the splash screen is stuttering. As the game is loading it experiences stutters as well and the frame rate is highly erratic going anywhere from 120 to 1 FPS. I also seem to have much longer loading times that include the time from starting from Steam and getting the CD Project launcher. I will then press play on the launcher and get a minute or two of nothing (have to check that Steam actually says the game is running as nothing shows in the drop tray), then I get a black screen for a few moments, and then the game will start to load, but takes much longer than expected.

I tried using a different save, I tried to fully restart the game, I left the game off for several hours and restarted, I tried to leave it on to see if it is a shader loading issue. I tried changing the DLSS settings from auto to quality, or quality to auto (as suggested in another post), but absolutely nothing fixes this.

The second time I loaded the game I was running MSI Afterburner the whole time and was not noticing any unusual loads on the CPU with temps from 53 to 60, GPU temps 73 to 77, so reasonable parameters. I however did not notice what was happening the to CPU and GPU when the issue occurred again for the second time, but I have a feeling that like you CPU and GPU were not being fully utilized. I ran a Superposition Benchmark to check if my issue was my PC, but got decent scores.

GPU - EVGA RTX3080 (12GB of Ram)
CPU - i7-10700K processor (8 cores, 16 threads)
RAM - 32 G

I hope they figure out this problem. I have yet to see if the second clean install worked, but even if it does this cannot be a fix. It take over 2 hours to uninstall, and clean install every time. It cannot be an issue with our set ups CPU or GPU as for both of us it runs fine and perfectly well, until suddenly it doesn't.