Do I need to RMA?

[TheEternal]

I got a Gigabyte G1 980 Ti about a month ago. Shortly after, this happened. Tons of artifacting in a level of AC: Unity, so I recorded the video, came here, and shrugged it off as just being the game.

I've been playing fine on it ever since, until about Saturday. This Saturday, I was playing the Star Wars: Battlefront beta, and started to notice really weird artifacting. I closed the game, restarted my computer, and started the game back up; it was gone.

Later Saturday night, I wanted to play some custom zombies mods from Call of Duty: World at War with a friend. I started it up, and any time I changed the resolution or opened the mod, it would crash. I found this extremely weird, since my friend has the exact same video card, was running the exact same drivers, and no crashing. I tried for about 2-3 hours to try to get it to work (running in different compatibility modes, running as admin, random tweaks I found online, different drivers) and nothing fixed it so I gave up.

THEN I started up Borderlands 2 to play with my friend, and noticed something else really weird: I was only using about 30-40% of my GPU and was sitting at 90-100 fps. This was strange, but I figured it may be a CPU bottleneck. I bumped the resolution up to 4k using DSR, my fps tanked to 30, and was still only sitting at ~40% GPU utilization.

Lastly, I wanted to confirm that these issues (WaW crashing, Borderlands 2 not utilizing my GPU properly) were GPU-related. I uninstalled the drivers using Display Driver Uninstaller, put in my older Radeon HD 7950, loaded up the latest drivers for it, and launched World at War. It ran without a hitch, able to launch mods and change the resolution without crashing, with no changes except the GPU and drivers. I then launched Borderlands 2, and was getting 130fps at the same graphics settings that my 980 Ti was sitting at, and it had no problem fully utilizing my GPU.

I now re-installed my 980 Ti, and tried two different drivers. Again, World at War crashes and Borderlands is acting up on both drivers.

Also, I should mention that temps on my GPU are fine; hottest I've ever seen it get is 74C.

Is this RMA-material, or am I completely missing something?

Thanks!

Specs:

Gigabyte G1 980 Ti - not OC'd
i5-4690k - not OC'd
16GB DDR3 RAM, OC'd to 2400 MHz

 

[Reaper_7799]

It looks like it's messin up...I'd rma it. You haven't overclocked it or anything right?

 

[TheEternal]

It looks like it's messin up...I'd rma it. You haven't overclocked it or anything right?

Nope, it's not overclocked.

 

[Reaper_7799]

It looks like things I've seen when a card is going dead but you could try to download gpuz and open the sensors tab before you play, leave it on and post a few screenshots so we can see what the power is doing after you've played for 10-15 min? What is your power supply? I don't think psu would do that, even with irregular voltage spikes or something but best to make sure. Make sure you take several screenshots that shows the entire upper portion with gpu load and clock speeds and all that and also the lower section scrolling down which shows the voltages. Otherwise, yeah it looks like it needs an rma.

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/

 

[TheEternal]

It looks like things I've seen when a card is going dead but you could try to download gpuz and open the sensors tab before you play, leave it on and post a few screenshots so we can see what the power is doing after you've played for 10-15 min? What is your power supply? I don't think psu would do that, even with irregular voltage spikes or something but best to make sure. Make sure you take several screenshots that shows the entire upper portion with gpu load and clock speeds and all that and also the lower section scrolling down which shows the voltages. Otherwise, yeah it looks like it needs an rma.

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/

Thanks, I appreciate the help. I'm not at home currently, so I'll do that as soon as I'm home and have time (hopefully this evening).

My PSU is a 750W from OCZ...I think this is it here.

Overall this GPU just seems very...inconsistent. Witcher 3 I can max out at 4k with around 30fps, or at 1080p with ~75fps (under full load either way). It just seems weird that in Borderlands 2 keeps its power around 30-40%. Is it typical to see these kinds of inconsistencies between games?

 

[Reaper_7799]

No problem, OCZ upper end is actually a good psu, so I'd probably rule that out. Yeah some of the older games just either don't run well or have cpu issues because of only using one or two cores that can lead to low gpu usage. I've seen a lot of people have issues with borderlands 2 and it has something to do with the physx in that game, world at war I'm not sure about but since it is older it could have something to do with that but I still am kind of leaning towards something being wrong with the card.

Is this artifacting doing it in every game or just ac and battlefront? And did it do the exact same kind in battlefront? Does it do it in witcher 3?

When you do that with gpuz, also download hw monitor and open the sensor tab same as gpuz and let it run in the background and then also take a screenshot of the cpu section in hw info that shows cpu clock speeds, usage and temps.

http://www.hwinfo.com/

 

[TheEternal]

No problem, OCZ upper end is actually a good psu, so I'd probably rule that out. Yeah some of the older games just either don't run well or have cpu issues because of only using one or two cores that can lead to low gpu usage. I've seen a lot of people have issues with borderlands 2 and it has something to do with the physx in that game, world at war I'm not sure about but since it is older it could have something to do with that but I still am kind of leaning towards something being wrong with the card.

Is this artifacting doing it in every game or just ac and battlefront? And did it do the exact same kind in battlefront? Does it do it in witcher 3?

When you do that with gpuz, also download hw monitor and open the sensor tab same as gpuz and let it run in the background and then also take a screenshot of the cpu section in hw info that shows cpu clock speeds, usage and temps.

http://www.hwinfo.com/

Well, so the whole story is that I had a 980 Ti originally, and it performed well, but I was getting pretty bad coil whine, so I RMA'd it. This was the replacement. I can tell the performance in Borderlands 2 isn't the same as it was before. I used PhysX on the previous card, and that destroyed framerates when in combat, so I turned it off and left it off for this card as well.

So when using my card this time with Borderlands 2, I assumed it may just be a CPU bottleneck or something in that area. However, after turning it up to 4k, I was pretty sure it wasn't because GPU utilization stayed the same while bringing my framerate way down. Then, like I said in the original post, I reinstalled my older AMD Radeon HD 7950 and was getting about 30-40 fps more than my 980 Ti. That right there told me it's probably a GPU issue because, with PhysX off in both cases, the 7950 was out-performing my 980 Ti, which shouldn't be happening.

I have no idea why World at War crashes on this card, but it worked fine on my 7950 and on my friend's 980 Ti (same manufacturer and drivers). I tried everything I could think of to get it to work and could not find any solution.

So far I have only noticed artifacting in AC: Unity, and the one time in Battlefront. I'm assuming you saw the AC: Unity video I posted, and that artifacting was significantly worse than Battlefront's. AC: Unity had artifacts and across the whole screen, where Battlefront's was more like green circles appeared, dispersed in different areas on the screen. I haven't noticed any artifacting in any other games, but, to be fair, I haven't pushed this card to 90+ % utilization very often yet.

I'll try to test and take screenshots now.

 

[TheEternal]

One thing I just noticed...the fps problems go away when I switch from fullscreen to windowed fullscreen. It goes from 112fps fullscreen to 260fps windowed fullscreen, which is obviously a huge jump. I'm using a g-sync monitor with g-sync enabled only in fullscreen mode...would that have anything to do with it?

Here is an album of different screenshots in Borderlands 2: http://imgur.com/a/GKTvx - the description of each screenshot is below.

It's not the most demanding game, so if something like AC: Unity or Witcher 3 would be better, let me know and I can get some more info (or anything else that may be of help).

Update:

I'm pretty sure G-sync is causing my Borderlands 2 issue...I uninstalled my video drivers, disconnected my g-sync monitor from my PC, and then reinstalled the drivers with only my second monitor connected (not sure if it was necessary to wipe drivers, but I did it anyway). I launched borderlands 2 and was getting nearly 300 fps while still in fullscreen mode... Unfortunately, this didn't solve my World at War issue.

Now this makes the issue more confusing. Is my g-sync monitor faulty? Is g-sync just not playing well with my card in this game? Is my card not working well in BL2 with g-sync BECAUSE it's dying?

 

[TheEternal]

Another update...I launched World at War without my g-sync monitor, and it actually let me change resolution to 4k without crashing this time, except this happened: https://vid.me/OUh1

 

[Reaper_7799]

Hmmm...I think it's your card, if that's on the other monitor...that shouldn't be happening either. Did you get the chance to play these games before you rmad the other card and did it ever do any artifacting like this? I see you played borderlands 2 with hte other card and performance was better but any of these issues too?

 

[TheEternal]

Yes, I played with the other card for a few weeks before I got sick of the coil whine and requested a replacement. I played Borderlands 2 without this issue and never noticed artifacting in any game. I can't remember with 100% certainty whether or not I played world at war, but I'm pretty sure I did and, if I did, had no issues there either.