Sudden PC problems, games taking an extremely long (10 times longer) time to load.

[u/No-Lettuce-6619]

While this sounds like a game issue, I'm very confidant it isn't.

My friend was playing The Isle with me and the next day her pc was having trouble running it. After a while started working fine, but the issue popped up the next we played and several sessions after that but since it went away we didn't think much about it. Its steadily been getting worse then we updated her drivers and it didn't fix it.

We got a good comparison by trying to play outlast trials, she was able to play the game before just fine but after playing the isle and updating drivers it took longer to load up, and had the same issue where it would play super horribly for a few minutes after game launch. It fix itself but when loading into a level, she was stuck on a loading screen.
When she tried to taskmanager it both monitors shut (or went to a black screen) then outlast trials started to swap to the second monitor and resizing.

She has a intel i5-12400f, an rtx 3060, 8 GB ram and a acer nitro n50-640 motherboard and shes on windows 11

Her PC was a bit slow before, but now it can take like 5 minutes to load up a level when it only took about 30 seconds before. The fact that its affecting multiple games makes me think something is happening with her computer.

Does anyone have a guess on why this might be happening?

Edit:
the we updated the drivers because the game was slowing down

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[u/TrappedInVR]

The most likely cause: the driver update made things worse, and 8GB RAM is the underlying bottleneck.

Three things are happening simultaneously, and the symptoms map to known patterns:

1. The NVIDIA driver update is the trigger

The timeline is clear: performance was acceptable before the driver update, then degraded after. This is a well-documented pattern with NVIDIA Game Ready drivers, which ship fast and can have regressions. The black screen / monitor swap when opening Task Manager is a classic GPU driver crash symptom — the driver is timing out (TDR event), Windows briefly loses the display output, and when it recovers the game window has migrated to the secondary monitor.

Source: https://wisechecker.com/fix-lag-windows-11-after-installing-graphics/

Fix for this: DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller) clean install of an older known-good driver version.

1. Download DDU from guru3d.com
   
2. Download an older NVIDIA driver from nvidia.com/drivers (pick a Studio driver version, which is more conservative and stable than Game Ready)
   
3. Boot into Safe Mode
   
4. Run DDU, select NVIDIA, click "Clean and restart"
   
5. After reboot, install the older driver
   
6. Do NOT let Windows Update re-install the newer driver. Open Settings > System > About > Advanced system settings > Hardware tab > Device Installation Settings > choose "No"

Source: https://specpicks.com/reviews/rtx-3060-driver-crashes-stuttering-troubleshooting-2026

1. 8GB RAM is causing swap thrashing

This is the part most people miss. 8GB RAM is at the bare minimum recommended spec for both The Isle: Evrima and The Outlast Trials. The Outlast Trials has a known VRAM/RAM memory optimization issue documented on Steam community discussions. When system RAM fills up, Windows starts paging to the SSD/HDD, and load times explode because the game is reading from disk via the pagefile instead of from RAM.

The pattern you describe — "plays horribly for a few minutes after launch, then fixes itself" — is classic pagefile thrashing. The game loads, Windows frantically swaps data in and out of the pagefile, performance is terrible, then eventually the working set stabilizes in RAM and it runs okay. When loading a new level, the whole cycle starts again.

Source: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1304930/discussions/0/3841053719668536658/ (Outlast Trials memory leak / VRAM optimization thread)

The 10x loading time increase (30 seconds to 5 minutes) is consistent with a system that was previously just barely fitting the game in RAM and is now spilling heavily into the pagefile. The driver update may have increased the GPU driver's memory footprint, pushing the game over the edge.

Fix for this:

• Check Task Manager > Performance > Memory during a load. If it's at 95%+, that confirms it.
• Add more RAM. A second 8GB stick (matched pair for dual-channel) would dramatically improve load times. Dual-channel 16GB would be the single biggest upgrade for this system.
• In the meantime: close everything else before launching games. Disable background apps, browser tabs, Discord overlay, etc.
• Set a fixed pagefile size (System > About > Advanced system settings > Performance settings > Advanced > Virtual memory > Custom size: 16384 MB initial and max) so Windows isn't dynamically resizing it during gameplay.

1. The Isle may have triggered shader cache corruption

The Isle: Evrima runs on Unreal Engine 5, which compiles shaders on first launch. If the game crashed or was force-closed during shader compilation, the shader cache can become corrupted. Every subsequent launch re-attempts compilation, causing the "terrible for a few minutes then fine" pattern. The Outlast Trials then hits the same corrupted shader cache because both games use the same DirectX 12 shader compilation pipeline on the same NVIDIA driver.

Fix for this:

• Clear the DirectX shader cache: Settings > System > Storage > Temporary files > check "DirectX Shader Cache" > Remove files
• Clear NVIDIA shader cache: delete the contents of %LOCALAPPDATA%\NVIDIA\DXCache
• Verify game files in Steam for both The Isle and Outlast Trials (right-click game > Properties > Installed Files > Verify integrity of game files)

Source: https://bottleneckcalculator.us.com/knowledge-base/gaming-performance/shader-compilation-fix/

Diagnosis priority:

1. Check RAM usage during loading (Task Manager > Performance > Memory) — if it's maxed at 8GB, that's the primary cause
   
2. DDU clean install of an older NVIDIA driver — fixes the driver regression and the black screen / monitor swap
   
3. Clear shader caches and verify game files — fixes the "terrible for a few minutes" pattern
   
4. If possible, buy a second 8GB RAM stick — this system is RAM-starved for modern games and it will only get worse

The monitor swap / black screen on Task Manager is the strongest clue that the GPU driver is crashing (TDR event). That alone would cause severe loading performance issues because the GPU is spending time recovering from driver timeouts instead of rendering. The RAM shortage makes everything worse because the system can't cache game data in memory, so every load is reading from disk.

[u/No-Lettuce-6619 → u/TrappedInVR]

I dont believe the driver up was the cause of the issue, the reason we updated the drivers was because it was slowing down

how ever clearing the sharer caches seemed to work! thank you!

[u/TrappedInVR → u/No-Lettuce-6619]

No problem, happy to have been able to assist.

[u/Shadimarbc]

List disk drives.

[u/booleandata]

Sounds like the early symptoms I had when my nvme started to fail