Gaming performance has suddenly tanked

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brandon_c993

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Jan 18, 2012
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As the title says my desktop has suddenly started tanking in the performance department and I can't figure out why. My BIOS, GPU and MOBO drivers are all up to date and I just did a clean install of Windows 10 yesterday in the hopes it would alleviate my woes, but no such luck. I've started monitoring my CPU, GPU and RAM usage but everything looks normal from what I can tell. My specs are as follows:

i5-2300
XFX R9 290
8GB RAM
TZ68K+ Biostar Mobo
635W PSU

I've had the CPU, RAM and Mobo for around 4 years now. The GPU and PSU are both around a year old, give or take a couple months. Everything is stock, no overclocking or anything like that has ever been done. My system stability is fine for the most part; though I did have issues with my Windows 10 installation yesterday(BSOD error: CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT as well as the installation getting stuck on "Getting Devices Ready" a couple times).

The first game I noticed major performance issues with was Fallout 4 on the 15th of this month Then Rust and now Hurtworld. In both Rust(25-40 FPS) and Hurtworld(16-30 FPS) the settings seem to make very little difference in performance unless I'm standing still facing away from the playable areas and then my FPS skyrocket up to 70-100 FPS. Fallout 4 seems to suffer from similar issues because interiors run beautifully at 80-110 FPS but as soon as I go outside my FPS drops down to 30-45 FPS with drops into the 20's when it loads new cells and the like.

Initially I blamed the performance issues on Fallout 4, but considering my issues with other games since then, I'm starting to think there is something going wrong in my system, but I can't for the life of me figure out what.So, here I am asking you all for some ideas, insight or help in finding out just WTF is going on with my rig!

EDIT: I also should mention that one of my friends has a very similar setup to mine(difference being he has 16GB RAM and an i5-4590, but the same GPU) and is running these same games at much better framerates at the same resolution.
 
Solution
James Mason
If you have graphics or driver issues, one of the most common fixes is a clean uninstall and removal of your graphics drivers.

To uninstall your drivers, first download and run Display Driver Uninstaller, and follow it's recommendations of booting into safe mode and ect.
(This is a direct download link so you don't grab the wrong version)
http://www.guru3d.com/files-get/display-driver-uninstaller-download,20.html

You'll download a compressed file called "[Guru3D.com]-DDU.zip"
Right click and choose extract.
Go into the folder and run the DDU v##.##.exe
This will extract more files to this folder.
Run Display Driver Uninstaller.exe
Choose Yes when it asks you to boot into SafeMode.
After you've rebooted into safe mode.
When DDU comes...
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Check for dust. The R9 290 is a heat monster and a power sucka.

As for stability issue, Biostar is a bad brand for motherboards, so get another Z68. Or maybe even an i5-2500K.

And also, i5-4590 is much different from a Sandy Bridge i5... That's 32 nm against 22 nm. IPC on the Haswell one is much better.
 
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I checked for dust in the system last night when I pulled my sound card, it's pretty clear. Biostar was recommended to me for a budget build by a family member who has been building PCs for a long time(Initially I was gonna go ASrock, but his personal experience with Biostar impressed me when speaking of longevity); and it's served me beautifully for the past 4 years. The only issue I've ever really had with stability was during Windows installation last night.

Considering I've checked my temperatures, clocks, loads, etc. on my CPU, GPU and RAM and nothing seems out of the ordinary. Do you really think simply "upgrading" to a different brand Z68 mobo would do anything for me? Is there anyway for me to be able to truly identify if it is indeed my mobo that's causing these issues; without spending the money on a new mobo first?

I was planning on upgrading to a new mobo/CPU recently but decided to hold off until I saw what Zen is going to bring to the table later this year. I'd hate to have to spend the money on a new outdated mobo now unless it's absolutely necessary.
 
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ASRock is much better than Biostar. I've seen more of Biostar fail than AsROCK. I have yet to see anything AsROCK fail.

And still give me the temperatures.
Also, Zen? Hm... I guess you could wait. It looks more like Polaris than Zen, just saying.

And a different motherboard can improve performance in OC. Biostar stuff sucks, performance-wise and reliability-wise.
 
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Here you go, these temps are the average temp of all my hardware components while running Hurtworld, according to Open Hardware Monitor:

CPU Core #1 43-44 Celsius
CPU Core #2 46-48 Celsius
CPU Core #3 46-50 Celsius
CPU Core #4 44-47 Celsius
CPU Package 48-50 Celsius

GPU Core 61 Celsius

TZ68K+ ITE IT8728F
Temperature #1 49-50 Celsius
Temperature #3 28-29 Celsius

SSD 27 celsius
HDD 26 Celsius


Monitoring the GPU currently and it's temperature seems to pretty much peg at 61 Celsius and never drops down unless alt-tabbed out of the game.

Well I'm Team Red at heart, so I'm hoping to see them make a major stride this year in the CPU market, that being said I have no problem going Intel if that doesn't happen.



 
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Well, GPU temp at 61 is a bit high. Is it stock cooler? Is it OC'ed?
Also, the AMD Radeon R9 Fury seems to be the top dog in terms of best performance/price/power consumption right now. And I'm proud of AMD for creating this solution. Now, if they keep up the work...
 
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Ya, when I had the rig opened last night I realized my air flow isn't the best for the GPU's placement; I should probably move some fans around and try to improve the airflow a bit. It's not OC'd and as far as cooling goes this
is the exact model I have, it says it's the "Double Dissipation Edition".

I just tried to run a diagnostic with Hot CPU Tester Pro and it forced a BSOD with the error "Thread_Stuck_In_Device_Driver" after a bit of googling it seems this error is due to either a bad GPU or bad display drivers; which got me thinking. The new Crimson drivers have an issue with Fallout 4 where the compass flickers; AMD released a hotfix for this which is the version of the Crimson drivers I'm currently running, maybe all of this is due to those drivers?

I'm going to use the guide here on Tom's for a clean driver installation and revert back my drivers to see if that's what my problem has been all along.
 
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Update: Unfortunately doing a clean install of my display drivers has done nothing for me. I even went as far as reseating my GPU and reverting to pre-crimson drivers; but neither seems to have helped my performance in Hurtworld; I'll update this post if I see an improvement in any other games.
 
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PSU isn't quite a year old yet, so I don't think that's it. I can test it in my other desktop I suppose. Currently I'm leaning towards it being either my GPU dying or the PCI-e slot on my mobo is going bad. I've got my old 7850 in my other desktop so I think I will test that theory out here soon.
 
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I've managed to pinpoint it being a software issue at this point. When I forced DirectX 9 in Hurtworld and Rust it completely alleviated my performance woes. I went from 11-22 FPS in Hurtworld to a consistent 55-60FPS. Now I just need to determine how I can go about fixing the issue. I'm pretty sure whatever the issue is it's not related to my drivers specifically since 3 different versions had the same issue. I'm convinced my DirectX installation is bad. I've tried the web installer but that hasn't done anything for me.

Any ideas or tips on how I can repair my DirectX installation?
 
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I reinstalled Windows 10 and let Windows update do it's thing. When it tried to install "Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. driver update for AMD Radeon R9 200 series" it simply said error under update details, with no further information, here's a screenshot:
TyKIO6o


EDIT: After rebooting Windows it seems to have installed CCC just fine and Windows update says everything is up to date. This time when I used the DirectX web installer it actually downloaded and installed a decent chunk of components; previously it just kept saying a more recent or equivalent version was already installed.

I'm still having issues with Hurtworld and Rust, even after a fresh install of Windows 10. The only games I seem to have issues with running d3d11 are games running the Unity Engine. At this point I'm at a loss on what to do. Should I just say f*ck it and make due forcing d3d9 in these games? Is there anything else I can do that's even worth trying at this point?
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
If you have graphics or driver issues, one of the most common fixes is a clean uninstall and removal of your graphics drivers.

To uninstall your drivers, first download and run Display Driver Uninstaller, and follow it's recommendations of booting into safe mode and ect.
(This is a direct download link so you don't grab the wrong version)
http://www.guru3d.com/files-get/display-driver-uninstaller-download,20.html

You'll download a compressed file called "[Guru3D.com]-DDU.zip"
Right click and choose extract.
Go into the folder and run the DDU v##.##.exe
This will extract more files to this folder.
Run Display Driver Uninstaller.exe
Choose Yes when it asks you to boot into SafeMode.
After you've rebooted into safe mode.
When DDU comes up, if it hasn't selected your GPU manufacturer (Nvidia/AMD/Intel) then choose it from the drop down list
Press the Clean and Restart option
If a window comes up asking to disable the Windows automatic installation of display drivers click yes.

After (or before removing the old drivers, just put the new ones on the desktop or somewhere handy) rebooting back into Windows, manually download the latest drivers from Nvidia or AMD, don't use auto detect, choose you GPU model and OS from the drop down lists.
Nvidia: http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us
AMD: http://support.amd.com/en-us/download
 
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Solution


Thanks but I've done this 3 seperate times with all different driver versions; no changes.

 
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