I’ve been having a frustrating issue where Fortnite causes my CPU to max out at 100%. Despite having a powerful setup with an i9-10900K CPU, an RTX 4090, and 64GB of RAM, I can’t seem to figure out why this is happening. I’ve updated all my drivers, but I couldn’t find any specific chipset drivers for my CPU—only some graphics drivers that I don’t need. My Windows is fully updated as well. I’ve even let Nvidia GeForce optimize my graphic settings in Fortnite.
I’ve tried some suggestions I’ve found online, like lowering the CPU’s minimum power to 1% and adjusting the in-game settings to medium, but nothing seems to work. This issue only happens in Fortnite; all my other games run perfectly fine. I’m really stumped and would appreciate any advice on where to go from here!
3 Answers
You might have some unwanted processes eating up CPU power! A good first step is to check Task Manager for anything unusual running in the background. Sometimes viruses or rogue applications can cause random spikes.
Setting an FPS cap could help reduce CPU usage. If you haven’t already, try capping it to 60 or 120 frames per second to see if that stabilizes your CPU usage. Sometimes a cap can help with performance issues too.
I did try capping at both 120 and 60 FPS, but neither seemed to lower my CPU usage.
It could be related to how Fortnite interacts with your CPU specifically. Have you checked for any CPU driver updates? If that doesn’t help, it might indicate a deeper issue within your CPU itself.
I would normally agree but the fact that this issue is exclusive to Fortnite makes it seem less likely to be a hardware problem. Have you tried tuning any background apps?
Checked Task Manager, and it looks normal except for Windows Defender using a little bit of CPU. Fortnite itself spikes up to 100% while in-game though.