Sudden FPS drop/Stutter

Question

Since 2 days ago, I just turned on my Computer, and it starting having issues while I was playing Witcher 3 (starts with decent fpsm and then very low fps, dropping to 35, then 20, and stopping at 12 or so, in a matter of seconds, in a matter of 1min of starting the game), also stuttering without any high demanding programs, randomly. I was playing at 45-60 fps, without any stutters or sudden fps drop. Have tried other games the issue persists. Even setup everything to low settings. I have ran several tests with several tools, all seems normal, no sudden memory spikes, or temperature raising out of the ordinary, nothing that would indicate such an fps drop or stuttering.

MSI Afterburner

Specs:
Graph card: GeForce GTX 770
RAM: 8Gb
CPU: i5-4670k  3.4GHz
OS: Windows 10 Pro 64 bits

I also did the reset option on Windows10, completly cleaned out all my personal info from the windows partition. So at this point, I am not sure if it is a software issue or a hardware issue. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Edit: I kept doing some tests to find out the issue. And this happened before and I was able to replicate it. Same thing happened as before, till I set it up to fullscreen, Alt+Tab from the game and then back to the game, FPS went up to 50 again, stable and good, dropped after a couple of seconds. After a bit it went to 2-5 fps, and I had to shutdown the game, because even the sound was getting messed up.

MSI Afterburner 2

In this image those ups and downs in the GPU usage are when the fps dropped really hard and the sound got messed up.

Answer 1

Yea and if not that, check all that Xbox and Xbox live garbage like game mode and auto recording. If you switched a setting by mistake Windows could very well restore it after the soft reset.

Uninstall and reinstall your graphics drivers to the latest. If your letting Windows update install then try getting them from nvidia or ati's website. And vice versa. If you've been installing the websites latest whql, let Windows update install their version. Often they have unreleased stuff anyways.

Check your fan settings on msi afterburner. If you don't know what you're doing then reset the setting to make sure your fans are activating at appropriate thermal levels.

Is your gpu overclocked? What kind of psu? The 12v rail could be less than stellar and what may have worked in the past may not always work in the future... If you're cutting corners.