NVIDIA driver weird issue: games lag and is on low FPS, but reinstalling driver fixes the problem until restart

[Mike Lynch 0]

As the title says, I am running into a very weirdly specific problem, in which I'll have lag across all games, it's like something feels corrupted or something. I was initially thinking it was cache shader, but further investigation seems to point to something FPS related.

Basically the strange thing here is, reinstalling NVIDIA driver through a quick reinstall fixes the problem, however, the problem will come back after I resume my laptop from a hibernation or restarting it (sleeping doesn't cause this problem to occur).

Since then, I have tried to do further investigation. Strangely enough, I found a much quicker workaround - from NVIDIA Control Panel, changing the GPU performance counter access in the developer setting and then back fixes the problem as well. Better than having to reinstall every time.

But now I am worried, because that could tell me it's something hardware or technical even. I have had the same issue in the past quite the several months ago, but then the issue went away on its own. Now it seems to be back. It happens with any games. Genshin, Tower of Fantasy, Zenless... it's not a single game. My laptop is Acer Nitro 5.

Here are my GPU specifications:

GPU 0

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop GPU

Versione driver: 32.0.15.7680
Data driver: 12/06/2025
Versione DirectX: 12 (FL 12.1)
Località fisica: Bus PCI 1, dispositivo 0, funzione 0

Some things I have tried:
1. I have tried to use DDU to kill everything NVIDIA related and try to do a clean install from NVIDIA website, to nothing. Often, my games will run on 20 FPS. I don't know whether it's an indicator or not but when I run into this weird glitch my GPU usage is also at 99%, however when I reset the FPS settings in developer configs, or when I reinstall the driver, it gets fixed and the GPU usage goes back to 50% give or take, more normal levels, while Genshin FPS become 60 (the max in the game), so back to how it was.
2. I do not think I've ever got an overclocking app like MSI Afterburner. People seem to point to it as the common cause for this specific bug but I don't have this app which is strange. I do have Nitrosense but I cannot seem to find anything that could point to it... and looking it up online it seems to be an useful app that's sort of necessary for Acer laptop to control fans, battery and the likes. Including lighting up the keyboard, too!