Hello fellow GB community, I'm hoping you can help clear this one up.

This has started to happen suddenly - Games would lock up for a few seconds after a short while of play. Once it starts it will keep doing this at random, but still frequently. Some games are acting like this, others would not lock up entirely but would cut off audio instead while the game will keep running. For instance, GTA 5 and Genshin Impact would lock up, but Destiny 2 and Pillars of Eternity 2 would cut off the audio.

This seems to be happening only in Games, I have not experienced anything like this during other uses. I'm not sure what would cause this suddenly, there was really no special update to the PC recently including any driver changes. I tried to do a System Restore, though I remembered kind of late and I had a restore point back to a couple of days before - which should be on the cusp of this issue starting, so it's kind of a 50/50.
I also tried moving games between my various drives (SSD/HDD/M2) thinking that it might be a storage issue, but no change.

I monitored my temps of my CPU and GPU and could not see anything unusual during these lock ups. GPU would not go over 70c, while the CPU would max out at about 73c which is normal for me.

I know that these kind of things can be a result of a wide variety factors, but would love a nudge in different directions so that I could troubleshoot this thing.

My PC:

Windows 10 64bit 1909
Ryzen 9 3900X
32GB Ram
RTX 2070
650W PSU

Thanks in advance!

not sure if this is your issue- but my pc does this and it's usually due to a mechanical drive that is spinning up from a dormant/energy-saving state. although to be fair it happens to my pc across a variety of use cases (watching movies, playing games, regular productivity stuff). maybe there's a background process that is 'waking' your drives that causes a stutter?

@mellotronrules: Unfortunately I don't think that this is my issue because I tried GTA 5 several times after I transferred it to my HDD and I still got those freezes. I also monitored my drives usages during one those lock ups and could not see anything out of the ordinary.

The only pattern that I could find while monitoring various stuff during a game session was that the CPU usage would spike slightly every time there was a freeze. It happened each and every time there was a freeze so there's definitely some connection there.

I think I might have figured it out.

While monitoring my processes I've found services relating to sound were popping up in the CPU usage when these lock ups happened. After checking a little bit and testing some various things, I noticed that the enabled microphone device is my webcam instead of my headset. I then remembered that this whole thing started at kind of the same time that I've plugged in my webcam for some work meeting that I had (I usually have it unplugged). So I unplugged it, and I now had a session of over an hour with no issue.

I can't say for sure that this is resolved, but it looks like it. It lines up with it being audio related and also with having the issues starting right around the time I plugged this thing in.

Seems really weird that one affected the other, but... computers I guess...

@toastman: Sounds right, I had some issues with multiple sound drivers that were causing crashes in games. It's something that seems easily overlooked, I think I just ended up stumbling on an answer through google and found out it was my issue.

@toastman: Oh I can't thank you enough for your suggestion about the sound issues. I have been uninstalling apps, reinstalling others, removing external hard drives plus no end of other settings changes to see if I could resolve games like Pinball FX3 and City Car Driving from pausing for 2 seconds and more lately 8 seconds at a time after about 15 minutes of playing the game, although other games worked okay.

I found in the security settings some Inbound apps allowed for an external drive that's not connected so I removed those but then I checked the sound settings and the default Realtek audio was enabled and it showed a recently installed NVIDIA Broadcast sound setting enabled as well. I decided to change that to disabled and reluctantly tried the games again and played City Car Racing for about 45 minutes and apart from the initial tiny stutters at the beginning of the gameplay, it played perfectly afterwards without any pausing whatsoever.

Once again, many thanks to you for your help and I am so glad that I found this website and suggestion. :)

Sigh, turns out it's still not sorted Pinball FX3. I've just played it and it paused for about 8 seconds again. :(