CSRSS.EXE high GPU usage

vulgartrendkill

Reputable
Oct 14, 2014
8
0
4,510
Hi,

IVe been having this problem for over two months now.

I have a MSI AMD 7970 3 GB graphics card with catalyst 14.9 drivers.

When I start a game (all games are affected) and get to the main game screen, the framerate drops from 60+ to 5-10 fps.

This has happened on GRID Watchdogs and Shadow of mordor.

When I go into process explorer, it shows that CSRSS is taking 50 to 100 percent of GPU processing.

IVe completely removed the AMD drivers using the safe mode method and re installed, the same with driver sweeper, and although this works immediately, when I reboot the problem re occurs.

I've done several virus and malware scans, I only have one CSRSS process running and I'm running out of ideas.

Can any one offer some insight?
 


This is one of the essential services used within Windows. I suggest doing a virus scan to verify it isn't a virus, but most likely it is not. Here is a link that explains it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client/Server_Runtime_Subsystem
 
Thanks for the ideas, however I've scanned the file with malware bytes, kaspersky and another program I cant remember.

I have also sent the file to virustotal.com and I appear to have confirmed that it is the correct file.

I orginally thought it might be some kind of "disagreement" between the AMD driver and CSRSS, but now I have no idea.
 
I'm afraid that the re install did not solvthe problem.

which leads me to thinking that it might be related to a driver problem?

Csrss.exe is calling on cdd.dll a lot. I'm running the latest catalyst 14.9 driver, from scratch so very fresh.
 
I have and I havent.

I managed to find a virus which I removed. I went into safe mode and scanned using every free virus program I could think of This was after scanning with malwarebytes comodo kaspersky etc and finding nothing.

Now, Csrss doesnt even use the GPU whatsoever. Of course DWM.exe has now taken its place and uses 10-15 percent of gpu (the rest being fully taken by the game) It gets the opening screen of Shadow of Mordor down to a horrendous 5fps. When its running ok, its at a healthy 90-100fps.

Back to square 1
 
So,

After all the problems I switch off the Aero desktop graphical whizzbangs, and this seems to have worked. Csrss is down to .1 percent gpu usage.

Just to see if it is that, I switched back to Aero, and te problems returnted with up to 70% of my GPU being hogged by the Csrss and DWM orocesses.

This must be a bug with either the AMD drivers or the Microsoft files, I feel.

So, my Windows looks rubbish. But it works.

Yay!!!
 
Here I am again with an update.

The above did work but not for long.

I did some more digging and just for lolz I lightly overclocked my cpu (4770k) to about 3.8ghz, because I read that CPU can be a bottleneck.

That was Friday evening and I've not had the problem at all since.

So it appears it was actually my CPU that couldn't keep up with my graphics. Go figure.