Question nVidia GPU underperforming whilst background downloading


Apr 17, 2013
Hey guys,

I've been having a weird problem for a while now .

My PC is performing as expected when playing games, so no issues here, but as soon as I start using some program to download something at the background while I am playing my FPS drops by around 40-50%.

To give an example - I am playing Far Cry New Dawn through "uconnect" (Ubisoft's client). I get constant 100 FPS while out and about with drops to about 75 fps when engaged in combat with a lot of enemies with explosions etc. So far so good.

I decide to download a different game through Epic games client . Suddenly my FPS drops down to 45-50 fps with nothing around me (when I usually get 100fps).

It feel like as soon as the client at the background starts downloading the GPU stops running in full screen mode, although looking at the game options it is still in full screen mode.

This above was just an example. The problem is not limited to only these 2 clients, or this specific game etc. Another example - running a game through Steam - when I start downloading something through uTorrent and I get the same FPS drop. And I'm not even talking about some multiplayer game.
Another example - World of Warcraft - I had to disable "hardware cursor" thought the game options due to the fact that when I move my mouse around in game, and have a web browser running at the background, it feels like my mouse cursor is trying to change shape to indicate a "clickable" link or a window etc.

So this leads me to the conclusion that my GPS refuses to run any game in real full screen mode and it gets affected by background windows/browsers etc.

I have tried a clean nVidia drivers installation using a drive sweeper and still nothing. I'm running a Windows 10 with all current updates and my GPU drivers to latest version. Also...this has been happening for probably over a year so it's not due to latest driver version etc.

Games and windows are installed on a separate SSDs.

My full hardware setup in my signature.
hi, can u run latencymon in backgroound while playin game and donwloading to see if its just driver stall issue?

as far as network card goes these days, they do offload some work to CPU, which can be configured in network adapter settings
see interrupt moderation/rate, large send offload, ipv/tcp/udp checksum offload, offload tcp segmentation, arp offload, ns offload to disable those and reduce transmit and receive buffers
this will effectively reduce cpu usage, internet speed might get affected (that depends on your network adapter if its cheap enough to offload all of it to cpu)