it's completely random and incongruent with anything that is or isn't happening. same game (Starcraft 2 and Far Cry 5 are currently in rotation) runs fine and then it just doesn't. yesterday launched SC2, played it for a while, everything is butter smooth. left it open to go make dinner. started a new game after like 15 mins - choppy, drops to 15 fps, horrible. played a couple rounds this morning - everything back to normal. and so on.

no huge temp spikes, no huge CPU loads, nothing I can pin down as correlated. both games are well within the capabilities of both CPU and GPU. I have C-states and Cool & Quiet disabled, so it's nothing power-throttling related.

I don't like rebooting, got way too much stuff open all the time, I do that maybe once a month; the rest is just suspend in the evening and wake in the morning.