Getting terrible framerate all of the sudden - (high-end PC)

[CPUzX]

Out of nowhere, I decided to boot up my PC one day, and the framerate was terrible. Previously, it managed 60fps stable with every graphical setting turned up to Very High on Metal Gear Solid V. This issue is happening in every game now. It's even happened on Valley Benchmark. I don't know what could've caused this... Hopefully I won't have to take apart my PC again, but I don't really want to reinstall Windows yet again; however, I believe a fresh reinstall may actually fix this issue, but I'm not too sure. Here are the results:

Before

After

CPU: i7 6700K
GPU x1 GTX 980 Ti reference
RAM: Hyper X Black Fury DDR4 2666MHz
MOBO: MSI Z170A Gaming Pro
Windows 10

The overclock settings seen above are in place currently, and I've also tried on default, and reinstalling the Nvidia driver. What could the problem be? This happened out of nowhere. I suspect it's only a GPU issue, as everything else seems to be working fine that don't depend on it. Thanks

 

[ko888]

What does GPU-Z report as the PerfCap Reason on its Sensors tab page?

 

[CPUzX]

I've just removed everything to do with Nvidia, but I'll get back to you on that when I've reinstalled it, as nothing is showing on GPU-Z right now.
What would I be looking for on PerfCap?

The 980 Ti is relatively new, and my whole system isn't even 3 months old, I'm sure the GPU is secure to the motherboard PCIE slot, but what value in PerfCap is important?

Could it be overheating damage, or overclock damage? Maybe a corrupt configuration somewhere? Thanks for the help

 

[CPUzX]

What does GPU-Z report as the PerfCap Reason on its Sensors tab page?

It shows: "Util"

Utility? Is this a bad sign?

 

[ko888]

There are five possible reasons why the graphics card's performance may be limited:

You should be running GPU-Z as a background task while gaming so that you'll know why the graphics card is being limited during gaming when you switch to GPU-Z to check on it (i.e. hold the mouse cursor over any part of the graph for the PerfCap Reason).

 

[CPUzX]

There are five possible reasons why the graphics card's performance may be limited:

You should be running GPU-Z as a background task while gaming so that you'll know why the graphics card is being limited during gaming when you switch to GPU-Z to check on it (i.e. hold the mouse cursor over any part of the graph for the PerfCap Reason).

I have no idea why it wasn't running at full performance, and I'll never know now, unless it happens again, because I completely removed the Nvidia drivers and reinstalled them fresh, and now it's working just fine again. Guess it was a configuration/corruption issue.

I'll keep the PerfCap idea in mind for if this just so happens to occur again. Thanks!