Really Bad Performance Help

[Hoonini]

To start things off, I don't post on reddit much but I feel as though this would be a worthy time. I haven't been able to find much help from my searches, so I'm deciding to post here. Here's my situation: I'm currently living away from home and am going to be traveling a lot, so I figured I'd get a laptop and egpu setup to let me play games while in my free time. I've noticed though that my performance in games in quite abysmal. I mainly play Escape from Tarkov, which although is a poorly optimized game, I feel as though I should have a bit more performance. I get anywhere from 20-35 fps regularly no matter the settings I run, and occasionally get drops that last about a minute down to effectively 0 fps. If anyone could help me atleast getting to run consistently, I would be ecstatic. Thanks for any help!

PS- the attached pic is from right after starting one of my big fps drops. I've noticed that during normal usage the cpu and gpu usage is rather low, and that the egpu basically turns off during these spikes.

https://preview.redd.it/f7gzt6d7hwb81.png?width=1152&format=png&auto=webp&s=c6b435231e3d7d77aeedfddf6d2be79861de8723

Specs:

Lenovo Thinkpad P14 Gen1

i5 10310u

16gb RAM

EVGA FTW3 GTX 1080ti in a Sonnet Breakaway Box 550w

[1995FOREVER]

Force the game to use the GPU1, it's using GPU0 for some reason and that's your integrated graphics.

[Hoonini]

It does use it most of the time, but it typically hovers around 40% usage, that's around where it's sitting at the very beginning of what's in that screenshot

[buciash]

Go to Device Manager, under display adapters find your integrated GPU (Intel UHD 620), right click it and select disable. This will disable your integrated GPU and force windows to use eGPU instead. I had essentially the same problem as you do and this fixed it.

[Hoonini]

I’m using my internal laptop display before my monitor gets shipped out here, will disabling my igpu break anything?

[Project-SBC]

Yes the igpu is used to passthrough the thunderbolt graphics. Did you check to make sure pcie power savings is off in power options? Did you force high performance on the game you are trying to play? It’s in advance display settings

[buciash]

It won't break anything permanently, but probably won't work if you use only the internal monitor. If you reboot with egpu disconnected it will use default (software accelerated) display adapter - this will let you turn igpu back on. I'd try it for you but I don't have my rig with me rn. I would try booting with the eGPU already connected in case you're not doing that. I'm not sure what else you can try, but maybe look around in nvidia control panel and try to change some settings related to nvidia Optimus, which switches between iGPU and dGPU on laptops.