Godot Version
Godot v4.6.2-stable
Question
Hi everyone, I am working a project and recently started experiencing mad lag spikes/slow down in general after adding some more environment features into the game.
While investigating the issue I have realized that even with a blank screen and just a few Autoloads in the background I am still getting my average Frame Time above the Physics Time, which is peculiar to say the least.
To be fair I am working on a laptop with integrated graphics, I’m assuming that would be the reason but I can’t really pin-point any issue from the Profiler, so I was wondering if you might have any idea about what could be causing this, if it’s just the laptop’s fault or if there’s anything else I can do to improve the situation.
With the empty screen it averages 55 FPS which isn’t too bad - until you consider that it’s literally an empty screen. In game it’s more like 7 FPS with a total Frame Time above 150-160ms.
Also side note, on my desktop the project does not cause any issue, but there’s quite the specs gap between the two machines.
After you see the spike you should stop the capture and select the frame index that the spike happened. There is a frame control at the top right of the profiler tab. Then scroll through the metrics to find culprit.
Showing us the graph doesnt tell us much.
I did go through the metrics already. There’s nothing outstanding in the profiler as it is also visible from the screenshots. If you ignore that spike for a second, which I believe it’s just my poor laptop loading the resources, the rest is completely fine and below the Physics Time reference.
If you need more specific info to help me debug this feel free to point out what exactly I should provide 
The profiler time breakdown at the spike frame.
I have done a bit more testing. Also a completely new, empty, project yields the same result. Googling around a bit I found an interesting post about this on reddit where somebody was hinting at not having any fps limiter - hence it would always try to squeeze as much performance as possible, even when not needed.
I tried limiting the FPS through the settings and having anything below 60fps actually aligns the process time with the expected behavior.
Having integrated graphics card also is another point mentioned in that post. From the task manager I can infect see that my GPU is struggling even with an empty scene.
So the moral I guess is: if you have a poor laptop with discrete integrated graphics, perhaps 3D is not the way to go but I’m glad to have concluded there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the game and most of the issues are coming from poor hardware.
Sure there might be a way to optimize, but I’m not really aiming at making it a mobile-friendly or (very) low-specs friendly game, so I’m good as it is now.
Yo what processor you got. I’m on Ryzen 7 7730u integrated graphics and works like a charm.
