Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 G1 Gaming Concern

[Nickeragua]

Hello, I recently purchased the 970 from gigabyte. It seems to work perfectly fine with Unigine Valley (Screen shots below) however in most games I get terrible performance and extremely low gpu usage. There is no noticeable performance increase compared to my GTX 770 this card was supposed to replace. There is no issue with my cpu, or gpu overheating they both stay well below 50 at all times.

Based on my pc specs I'm sure this can somewhat relate to a bottleneck, but I didn't think the performance hit would be this severe. My 770 ran perfectly fine with this setup, so I figured the 970 would as well until I was able to upgrade my cpu.

Any help is greatly appreciated as I am about ready to return this card back to Amazon.

Thanks in advance

-Nick

PC Specs:
Power supply: Fatal1ty 750W 80Plus Bronze
CPU: AMD FX-6200 OC to 4ghz (plan on upgrading to intel i5 4690k soon.)
Mobo: BIOSTAR TA990FXE
RAM: G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 8GB
Boot drive: Kingston SSDNow V300 Series 120gb

 

[TechyInAZ]

Your cpu is the bottleneck, even at 4Ghz it still only has the performance of a 3.7ghz i3. once you get the i5 4690K then you will be good.

 

[Nickeragua]

I should have mentioned I managed to overclock to 4.6 while testing and still had poor performance. I know the cpu isn't good at all, but even in games where the cpu has low usage the GPU usage still stays low with poor performance. I will try to get some screenshots of MSI while running some games.

 

[spentshells]

Your cpu is the bottleneck, even at 4Ghz it still only has the performance of a 3.7ghz i3. once you get the i5 4690K then you will be good.

Yeah he's 100% right. What resolution are you playing at? What is the refresh rate of your monitor? If you continue to play at 1080P with full settings, this is something the 770 was already capable of.
If you have a high refresh monitor you can disable vsync in the games settings to see if you get additional fps. If your monitor is 60Hz You were either already hitting the full 60 (which I don't doubt)
or as mentioned above the cpu is a bottleneck and this is why no additional frames are being put to the screen. While I agree the cpu is a bottleneck, hell it was before when you were using the 770, I thought I might suggest something else to try.

 

[Nickeragua]

Your cpu is the bottleneck, even at 4Ghz it still only has the performance of a 3.7ghz i3. once you get the i5 4690K then you will be good.

Yeah he's 100% right. What resolution are you playing at? What is the refresh rate of your monitor? If you continue to play at 1080P with full settings, this is something the 770 was already capable of.
If you have a high refresh monitor you can disable vsync in the games settings to see if you get additional fps. If your monitor is 60Hz You were either already hitting the full 60 (which I don't doubt)
or as mentioned above the cpu is a bottleneck and this is why no additional frames are being put to the screen. While I agree the cpu is a bottleneck, hell it was before when you were using the 770, I thought I might suggest something else to try.

Currently playing at 1920x1080 with a 60hz monitor. I already have vsync in all games and eve the nvidia control panel disabled, however it doesn't seem to increase much. Most older games have no problem hitting 60fps or more. It's the newer titles and even some older ones having these issues and in some cases lower than 30 fps with this card.

I'll just hold onto the card for a week or two until I can get the new cpu and mobo to see if that will increase my performance at all.