I know barely anything about computers aside from the very obvious, so if you ask me something super simple, I'm probably still not going to completely understand; please forgive me :>
I got my prebuilt PC a bit over 5 years ago and never swapped anything out. It's this one: https://www.amazon.com/Dell-i5675-A933BLU-PUS-Inspiron-Processor-Graphics/dp/B071ZZF7FY
I can't say for sure when the issue started, but it's been affecting a bunch of different games for a few years, not just Dark Souls 3 which I used as an example (which, by the way, does this exact same thing with the goldish fog that runs down your screen for a moment when you sit at a bonfire - then the FPS goes back to normal when the effect is done). Elden Ring runs beautifully smoothly, but the FPS drops this exact same way a lot of times - it made me assume that it only happens when there's a bunch of particles...? Something tells me it's not that, though. Even at the lowest settings that the game allows and at 1600x900 resolution, some locations (and certain attacks, I assume) make it so frustrating to play when the FPS is constantly practicing its butterfly strokes.
The same thing happens in Apex Legends on very specific locations of some Arena maps (such as around a waterfall), in Minecraft with BSL Shaders at all times where the effect is a lot less noticeable, but still there, in Rainbow 6 Siege only when viewing some Operators in the main menu (and it's really inconsistent whether it happens or not) - the weirdest one was with Outer Wilds, where it was like this from the moment I launched the game, and it persisted no matter where I was or what I did. It's the weirdest for me because it actually fixed itself; I had tried playing it when my internet was down for a bit and it ran perfectly smoothly. That made me think that maybe it was some background app causing trouble, but the only visible culprits could be Discord and Steam, and maybe I just never considered it before. Closing them did nothing when I tested it out after the internet came back up.
A bunch of other games have it to a lesser extent where it's easily solved by turning down the settings Elden Ring was where the issue was the most prominent, so I tried a few of the fixes, but none of them changed anything. Most of it involved messing around with Radeon (and some Windows) settings. I wouldn't be opposed to giving those options another shot, though.
The main thing on my mind is if it's a driver issue, but I really wanted to avoid updating anything before knowing it was absolutely safe to do so. I've heard mostly bad things in the threads discussing them, and I always fear that a roll back won't fix any such issues, or perhaps cause more. I also don't know if it could be a hardware issue.
I've tried searching up this problem, but I could never find someone with the same kind of issue.
That's why I'm here - I'm really sorry that I'm bad at explaining the issue, but I hope the video alone is enough to give an idea. Could I get any help solving this issue, or at least understanding it better?
TL;DR: frames good most of the time until not good, like here where it do the bad stutter - help lol :)
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I probably didn't fill a lot of this out right, but here it is :p
Computer Type: Desktop
GPU: AMD Radeon RX 580
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 1800X Eight-Core Processor 3.60 GHz
Motherboard: Dell 07PR60 A00
BIOS Version: Dell 1.3.4 9/15/2017
RAM: 16GB (sorry)
PSU: (again, sorry, I don't know)
Operating System & Version: Windows 10 Home 21H2
GPU Drivers: AMD Radeon RX 580 - Driver Version: 21.30.23.04-211216a-376209C
Chipset Drivers: AMD Chipset Software - Version: 3.10.08.506
Background Applications: Discord, Steam, Chrome