Gameplay improved with new GeForce GTX 1050 Ti OC 4GB, but load times slow...

[kbrining]

Hoping from some advice.

I recently upgraded from a GeForce GTX 650 Ti 1 GB video card to a Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1050 Ti OC 4 GB video card. Since then, games have been performing exceptionally well. They look great and frame rates are awesome even on pretty heavy games on ultra settings (No Man's Sky, Elite Dangerous, BattleTech, etc). No worries there.

However, game and app load times are considerably longer than they were before. Some games (even ones mentioned above) can take several minutes before they even act like they're loading up, plus another minute or two in splash screens that previously took only a few seconds. Additionally, Firefox seems to crash a lot now. Not sure if that's related or not.

Allow me fully admit that I did not install the included Aoros Graphics Utility software packaged with the graphics card. I saw some somewhat negative reviews of this software. Most people claimed it caused frequent crashes so they installed it to get their LED lights adjusted (which I'm not concerned about) then uninstalled it. The software also left a bad taste in my mouth when it was insisting that I install Google Chrome as my default browser. I instead went straight to installing the NVIDIA GeForce Experience and related drivers. If this is the probable cause of my issue, I suppose I will have to concede, but I'm hoping that's not the case.

As far as I know, all other drivers are up to date, though I could be missing some that are relevant.

The card is apparently capable of overclocking, but I don't have a lot of experience with that and put that on the back burner to test later on. I wanted to make sure the card worked before I started trying to trick it out.

Specs are as follows...
Windows 10 (all updates run)
Asus F2A85-M Pro Motherboard
AMD64 A10-6800K CPU
16 GB DDR3 RAM (Crucial Tech)
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1050 Ti OC 4 GB

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Please let me know if you need any additional info.

 

[camieabz]

Suggest you run a UserBench benchmark to see if anything is obviously below par, and post your storage drive(s) (the potentially slowest components).

Assuming you have no gfx instability issues, it doesn't sound like the card. I would be looking at running processes and services, or maybe running disk or OS file system checks first.

 

[DRagor]

The only thing that could possibly increase loading times with new GPU is problems with drivers. Make sure you removed all previous graphic drivers before installing new ones. You can use DDU for that. Also there is lot of negative feedback on Geforce Experience so you could try running without it.
Not using Gigabyte utilities is smart move, they are usually trash. I don't see a way that not installing it could be the cause of your problems.

 

[kbrining]

Suggest you run a UserBench benchmark to see if anything is obviously below par, and post your storage drive(s) (the potentially slowest components).

Assuming you have no gfx instability issues, it doesn't sound like the card. I would be looking at running processes and services, or maybe running disk or OS file system checks first.

Storage is a 1 TB Western Digital. Blue, I think?

 

[kbrining]

The only thing that could possibly increase loading times with new GPU is problems with drivers. Make sure you removed all previous graphic drivers before installing new ones. You can use DDU for that. Also there is lot of negative feedback on Geforce Experience so you could try running without it.
Not using Gigabyte utilities is smart move, they are usually trash. I don't see a way that not installing it could be the cause of your problems.

Can I just uninstall GeForce Experience altogether and simply run the drivers? I don't need some sort of management software?

 

[DRagor]

The only thing that could possibly increase loading times with new GPU is problems with drivers. Make sure you removed all previous graphic drivers before installing new ones. You can use DDU for that. Also there is lot of negative feedback on Geforce Experience so you could try running without it.
Not using Gigabyte utilities is smart move, they are usually trash. I don't see a way that not installing it could be the cause of your problems.

Can I just uninstall GeForce Experience altogether and simply run the drivers? I don't need some sort of management software?

The trick is, just running install of Nvidia drivers will not fully delete old ones. You don't have to use third party software, sure you can do it manually, but that's a bit of work and requires some knowledge. Furthermore if there are remnants of very old drivers stacked somewhere in system finding them all and removing may be a serious challenge. In fact, reinstalling whole Windows might be just faster in such case.

 

[kbrining]

The trick is, just running install of Nvidia drivers will not fully delete old ones. You don't have to use third party software, sure you can do it manually, but that's a bit of work and requires some knowledge. Furthermore if there are remnants of very old drivers stacked somewhere in system finding them all and removing may be a serious challenge. In fact, reinstalling whole Windows might be just faster in such case.

Right, I'm downloading DDU now to nuke the drivers (per your suggestion), but I mean once that's done can I just not reinstall GeForce Experience and just run with the drivers? I just assumed I needed some sort of management software. I mean, I'm glad if I don't. Fewer resources gobbled up. Just wasn't sure if that was advisable or not.

 

[DRagor]

Once DDU does its job you can install new drivers in whatever way you want, using GF experience or manually or just letting Windows do that automatically (if you didn't disabled that). Does not matter.

 

[kbrining]

The only thing that could possibly increase loading times with new GPU is problems with drivers. Make sure you removed all previous graphic drivers before installing new ones. You can use DDU for that. Also there is lot of negative feedback on Geforce Experience so you could try running without it.
Not using Gigabyte utilities is smart move, they are usually trash. I don't see a way that not installing it could be the cause of your problems.

Well, I hope I'm not jinxing it, but this process resulted in a marked improvement! Thank you!!