Laptop - graphics performance changed significantly recently, need help troubleshooting.

I have a Lenovo Ideapad Y500, with a Geforce GT 750M graphics card, purchased in 2013. The hardware isn't amazing, but it's been adequate for my needs - IE, I can run most games, even modernish ones, on low settings with stable highish framerates. Recently (as in, the last 2-3 days), performance has taken a nose dive. I am unsure how to approach this diagnostically.

As a concrete example, I've been able to play Path of Exile with a solid 30 FPS under most circumstances, and when I launch the game right now I get 12 FPS in town with substantial input lag. I don't have framerate numbers, but Heroes of the Storm was running smoothly and clearly earlier last week and is now completely unplayable.

Some quick notes:

• Windows Update is disabled, so there haven't been any automatic system updates.
• I had not updated my graphics drivers (although I have now, to no apparent improvement)
• It has been somewhat warmer than usual, with highs in the 80s, but I don't THINK it's a temperature issue - it persists even pretty late at night (it's currently 1 AM, it's 60 degrees outside and I have a laptop fan base thinger going; still having trouble). Probably more importantly, I'm not seeing my GPU temperature getting too high; I don't think I've seen it go higher than ~55C, and I see people online talking about like 67 as a safe operating temperature
• I don't think I've installed or uninstalled any software that might have caused this. No major system changes or anything.
• I've run a virus scan (MalewareBytes; didn't find anything).

I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to be looking for, but I downloaded a hardware monitor tool. This is a screenshot showing my framerate and the monitor. Two things stand out to me: GPU core is at 100%, meaning that is presumably the limiting factor, and GPU memory usage is pretty high (88.5%; I don't know if it's supposed to be that high). I see similar results in other games.

So... any idea what's going on, what other diagnostic steps I could take, or possible fixes? My laptop is pretty old (4 years... oof), so hardware failure seems like a legitimate possibility, but I don't know how I would determine if that is indeed what's going on. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Submitted July 30, 2017 at 01:44PM by Jhaza http://ift.tt/2tNNreT