FPS Very Low in games. Have good specs though? Help!

[MrBiggan]

I load into a game like GTA 5 or ARK: Survival Evolved. The FPS is below 40 and can stay sometimes at 10 - 20. I don't understand because I have decent specs in my PC.

CPU: Intel Core i5-4690 CPU @ 3.50GHz
GPU: GeForce GTX 970
Memory: 16GB
OS: Windows 10

Can anyone help me out with what is wrong because I now this is not right?

 

[BadActor]

Check your CPU and GPU temps first. Thermal throttling is a common cause. Did this occur suddenly or since you built the PC?

 

[MrBiggan]

Check your CPU and GPU temps first. Thermal throttling is a common cause. Did this occur suddenly or since you built the PC?

I have checked the temps and they are below 70 degrees celsius on both? This is when running a demanding game though. When doing nothing the temps are 30-40.
Also, this did start suddenly it was fine when I first built the PC.

 

[BadActor]

Check the basic things first. Have a look in task manager and and see what your CPU, memory and disk usages are. Look for processes that may be eating up your resources. Make sure you have the latest Bios and all your drivers are up to date. Run a couple different virus scans including Malwarebytes, Did you do a clean install of Windows when you built your PC or just swap in a drive with it already installed?

 

[MrBiggan]

Check the basic things first. Have a look in task manager and and see what your CPU, memory and disk usages are. Look for processes that may be eating up your resources. Make sure you have the latest Bios and all your drivers are up to date. Run a couple different virus scans including Malwarebytes, Did you do a clean install of Windows when you built your PC or just swap in a drive with it already installed?

I did a clean version of windows when built the PC.
I have checked Task manager nothing is dramatically eating my CPU processors whilst gaming or my memory.
The game when running is using about 16-20% of CPU and for memory it is only using 1.8GB and I have 16GB.

 

[Kreignitz]

Check if your monitor is plugged in the video card and not the motherboard (E.g. iGPU)

 

[tsnor]

Run benchmarks starting with CPU benchmarks and compare them to published results for your PC. Try to isolate the part that is running slow.

Try three different video drivers from the nvidia site, the current driver then two older ones. If only one game is slow then guess that the driver and the game are interacting badly

Check to see if you are running anything strange in your video quality. Sometimes the tools that automatically set video properties choose parameters that kill frame rates.

Set your video to the worst possible (all eye candy turned off, low res) and see if the frame rates jump up to 100+. With that CPU and that Card running at 720P should be really fast. If it's not that also tells you something.

Reseat your video card or try a different slot if your MB has another x16 or x8 slot. I've seen PCs running at x4 because of dirt in the x16 slot or defective slot.

GL

 

[MrBiggan]

[

Run benchmarks starting with CPU benchmarks and compare them to published results for your PC. Try to isolate the part that is running slow.

Try three different video drivers from the nvidia site, the current driver then two older ones. If only one game is slow then guess that the driver and the game are interacting badly

Check to see if you are running anything strange in your video quality. Sometimes the tools that automatically set video properties choose parameters that kill frame rates.

Set your video to the worst possible (all eye candy turned off, low res) and see if the frame rates jump up to 100+. With that CPU and that Card running at 720P should be really fast. If it's not that also tells you something.

Reseat your video card or try a different slot if your MB has another x16 or x8 slot. I've seen PCs running at x4 because of dirt in the x16 slot or defective slot.

GL

Is this alright for the CPU benching.

Single Core: 3344
Multi Core: 10363

 

[tsnor]

[

Run benchmarks starting with CPU benchmarks and compare them to published results for your PC. Try to isolate the part that is running slow.

Try three different video drivers from the nvidia site, the current driver then two older ones. If only one game is slow then guess that the driver and the game are interacting badly

Check to see if you are running anything strange in your video quality. Sometimes the tools that automatically set video properties choose parameters that kill frame rates.

Set your video to the worst possible (all eye candy turned off, low res) and see if the frame rates jump up to 100+. With that CPU and that Card running at 720P should be really fast. If it's not that also tells you something.

Reseat your video card or try a different slot if your MB has another x16 or x8 slot. I've seen PCs running at x4 because of dirt in the x16 slot or defective slot.

GL

Is this alright for the CPU benching.

Single Core: 3344
Multi Core: 10363

not knowing which benchmark you ran it's hard to say. Google your cpu, the i5, and the name of the benchmark. You'll see many people's results. if your cpu and the cpus reported on the web get roughly the same results then your cpu is fine. benchmark your video. if your cpu is 2x slower then we need to find out why.

 

[MrBiggan]

[

Run benchmarks starting with CPU benchmarks and compare them to published results for your PC. Try to isolate the part that is running slow.

Try three different video drivers from the nvidia site, the current driver then two older ones. If only one game is slow then guess that the driver and the game are interacting badly

Check to see if you are running anything strange in your video quality. Sometimes the tools that automatically set video properties choose parameters that kill frame rates.

Set your video to the worst possible (all eye candy turned off, low res) and see if the frame rates jump up to 100+. With that CPU and that Card running at 720P should be really fast. If it's not that also tells you something.

Reseat your video card or try a different slot if your MB has another x16 or x8 slot. I've seen PCs running at x4 because of dirt in the x16 slot or defective slot.

GL

Is this alright for the CPU benching.

Single Core: 3344
Multi Core: 10363

not knowing which benchmark you ran it's hard to say. Google your cpu, the i5, and the name of the benchmark. You'll see many people's results. if your cpu and the cpus reported on the web get roughly the same results then your cpu is fine. benchmark your video. if your cpu is 2x slower then we need to find out why.

I ran this benchmarking tool and the results are posted at this link.

http://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/1285789

There is definitely something wrong. Got any ideas to what I could be?

 

[PuperHacker]

Check if you are gaming in a biger resolution than you want. Also, make sure you have no malware, and the latest drivers. If you have the latest, try installing the driver you had before. Windows frequently automatically change the gpu drivers....

 

[MrBiggan]

I just ran a new benchmark on the whole PC.

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/12697387

I got a very disappointing score which definitely shows something is wrong with the PC.

 

[tsnor]

They gave you an excellent clue on that web page: "...High background CPU (23%). High background CPU reduces benchmark accuracy. Find active processes with windows task manager (CTRL+SHIFT+ESC)...."

They are saying that something other than your games are using a lot of CPU. The best way to find this is with resource monitor. Open task manager as above, then go to the performance tab (the one with the CPU graph). Look for the button that says "Open Resource Monitor". Then Goto the CPU tab in resource monitor and click 'CPU' to sort by CPU usage. Then google the process name for anything that is using more than a few percent.

Resource monitor is a little different in win10 vs. win7, but it's basically the same thing. (Win10 is better than Win7, Win7 is better than vista. They are all good tools). Here are some refs:
http://www.digitalcitizen.life/how-use-resource-monitor-windows-7
http://www.pcworld.com/article/241677/how_to_use_resource_monitor.html

 

[MrBiggan]

They gave you an excellent clue on that web page: "...High background CPU (23%). High background CPU reduces benchmark accuracy. Find active processes with windows task manager (CTRL+SHIFT+ESC)...."

They are saying that something other than your games are using a lot of CPU. The best way to find this is with resource monitor. Open task manager as above, then go to the performance tab (the one with the CPU graph). Look for the button that says "Open Resource Monitor". Then Goto the CPU tab in resource monitor and click 'CPU' to sort by CPU usage. Then google the process name for anything that is using more than a few percent.

Resource monitor is a little different in win10 vs. win7, but it's basically the same thing. (Win10 is better than Win7, Win7 is better than vista. They are all good tools). Here are some refs:
http://www.digitalcitizen.life/how-use-resource-monitor-windows-7
http://www.pcworld.com/article/241677/how_to_use_resource_monitor.html

I have gone through the background CPU usage and I have found that it is Chrome using a lot so I have changed browser to Microsoft edge.

I have another problem though.

The GPU is i think the main culprit of this because I looked at the what the GPU was doing and the Graphics clock seems to be stuck at 135mhz when it says the max value is 1228mhz around there anyway.
Do you have any idea at what this could be?

 

[tsnor]

They gave you an excellent clue on that web page: "...High background CPU (23%). High background CPU reduces benchmark accuracy. Find active processes with windows task manager (CTRL+SHIFT+ESC)...."

They are saying that something other than your games are using a lot of CPU. The best way to find this is with resource monitor. Open task manager as above, then go to the performance tab (the one with the CPU graph). Look for the button that says "Open Resource Monitor". Then Goto the CPU tab in resource monitor and click 'CPU' to sort by CPU usage. Then google the process name for anything that is using more than a few percent.

Resource monitor is a little different in win10 vs. win7, but it's basically the same thing. (Win10 is better than Win7, Win7 is better than vista. They are all good tools). Here are some refs:
http://www.digitalcitizen.life/how-use-resource-monitor-windows-7
http://www.pcworld.com/article/241677/how_to_use_resource_monitor.html

I have gone through the background CPU usage and I have found that it is Chrome using a lot so I have changed browser to Microsoft edge.

I have another problem though.

The GPU is i think the main culprit of this because I looked at the what the GPU was doing and the Graphics clock seems to be stuck at 135mhz when it says the max value is 1228mhz around there anyway.
Do you have any idea at what this could be?

Under LOAD the GPU spins up to 1228.
When it can the GPU loafs along at as low a cycle time as it can to save electricity and avoid heat.

If you use a tool that generates a graph like MSI Afterburner or EVGA PrecisionX you can see how fast the gpu is running in games. Start Afterburner. Get the grpah going. Start the Game. Run for a while. Use the windows key to get to desktop so you can see the graph. It will be right up there.

Alternatively, HWMONITOR (by cpuid, free, google it) show min and max for GPU clocks for most cards. Run HWMONITOR and you can see how high the card spun up.

For compare right now my 7850 is at 300 for gpu. Under load that goes immediately to 900 for gpu and stays there.

 

[tsnor]

Aside, if you were 40th percentile in the test you ran, that says there is nothing major wrong with your system. 40% of the similary systems were slower then you were. And there is no way that 40% of the similar systems had a major problem, so you likely don't have a major problem. (Or you have one the benchmark did not pick up).

Goto Youtube, search for " GTX 970 i5-4690K" and look at the framerates they are seeing in gameply. Then check their video setting which are usually in the video or in the write up below. See if they are roughly the same as you or much higher. Note that different sections of a game have different framerate and that video setting hugely change framerate.