Issues w/ VSync, Stuttering, GPU Usage (GTX 970)

[epicsunset02]

Hi Tom's Hardware,

This will be about the 3rd time I've posted on here, but I think this is in the right section.

History:

So I think it would be best to start from the beginning. (TL;DR: Bought 760 a while ago, started giving me issues after a few months, waited until now to buy a new GPU, issues still remain.)

Back in March of 2014, I had gotten a Gigabyte GTX 760 4GB, and it was an amazing card! It never gave me issues, and I was able to play Skyrim with mods again (it was a breath of fresh air coming from an older card).

Fast forward to around July or August of 2014, and the GPU was starting to act up. It wasn't giving me that consistent performance or smooth gameplay at 60FPS that I was used to. It would stutter quite a bit and utilize very little of its power. This resulted in lower FPS and stuttering with VSync on, and it still refused to go above 60FPS with VSync off.

So I basically put up with my card acting weird for a long time until I decided to RMA it in January 2015. It still has not arrived back, but Gigabyte seems to have concluded there is indeed something wrong with it. Since the GTX 760 doesn't quite suit my needs anymore, I decided to go ahead and buy an attractively-priced MSI GTX 970 Gaming 4G.

I installed the GPU on Friday, and booted up my computer, cleaned out my old drivers with DDU, and installed the latest GPU drivers. The first game I booted up was World of Tanks, because I was dying to play it at that point (being deprived of a PC for 2+ weeks is very irritating)! The first thing I noticed was the game looked absolutely awful. My ingame settings at the time were at Maximum, as my GTX 760 seemed to be able to handle it. But with my GTX 970, the settings were terrible! The thing is, I never actually edited any sort of quality or performance options in my Nvidia Control Panel, so I don't know why it looked so bad. I turned up the Anti-aliasing through the Control Panel and it seems to have helped the quality substantially, but it still doesn't look like it did before. A little sidenote, and this I find to be really strange: In World of Tanks, I'd queue up for a battle and I'd load in fine, and my FPS would vary depending on the map. If I move my camera to a position where its picking up a lot of scenery and things to render, my GPU usage drops. If I move my camera to a position where there isn't a lot of scenery, my FPS skyrockets to over 100 (this is of course with VSync off to see how many frames I'm capable of getting) and my GPU usage manages to go up to 80-99%.

The second game I booted up was EVE Online. The game isn't too demanding, only when you get into bigger fights. First thing I noticed is my FPS stuttering like it used to on my old card. VSync is enabled on EVE, and I still get these little stutters ranging from 1-2FPS all the way to the really bad like 10-20FPS stutters that are really visually irritating and don't make much sense. My card should be able to handle this game 60FPS all the time. What gives?

What I've done so far:

So I did a little bit of research and found that the GPU usage issue doesn't seem to just apply to me, as other GTX 970 owners have experiencing it. Now before you mention the "3.5GB issue", I never have gotten even close to using up 3.5GB of VRAM, so I highly doubt that's an issue.

In terms of what I have done, here's a little list:

•Monitored CPU and GPU temperatures, and they are both fine
•Turning VSync off (this gives me better FPS in some cases, but the screen tearing is too unbearable), in addition, I simply disabled VSync and tried to use MSI Afterburner to limit my FPS to 60, and that seems to have helped a tiny bit (the FPS doesn't hitch from 60 to 59 or 58 as often, and doesn't do those little annoying 59.9FPS stutters as often either)
•Leaving VSync on (the benefits of VSync are quite nice, but I still get 1-2FPS stutters. Even when I enter highly crowded areas the FPS likes to drop and struggles to maintain even though my machine is more than capable of handling it)

This is where I need some help:

I really don't know what to do now. I'm completely lost. Pretty much every component in my PC should be fine, other than my hard drive which is extremely old and extremely slow. So I'm not entirely sure.

PC Specs: http://i.imgur.com/qxTsCSV.png (Also a Corsair TX850 850W Power Supply)

Is this whole VSync issue normal?
Is it normal to be capped at 60FPS and then suddenly the game drops a few frames and returns to 60FPS?
Did I just get bad luck and get a defective card?

Not really sure what to think! I'd love to hear your opinions, and I hope some of you can help. I really do appreciate if you read my massive wall of text, and hopefully there aren't any grammatical or spelling errors. If there is any more information needed from me, just let me know!

Thanks,

-Sun

 

[RobCrezz]

My advice would be to do a complete wipe and reinstall of windows, instal the minimum programs needed to try the games again. This will rule out some software/driver issue.

 

[RaDiKaL_]

"If I move my camera to a position where its picking up a lot of scenery and things to render, my GPU usage drops. If I move my camera to a position where there isn't a lot of scenery [...] my GPU usage manages to go up to 80-99%."

Sounds like you're experiencing a bottleneck caused by your CPU, scenes with a lot of players/ characters involved in battle are more CPU bounded than to the GPU, whereas when looking to a place with not much going on the CPU doesn't get bottlenecked allowing the GPU to reach its maximum potential.

While your CPU is already old, it should be enough for WoT, perhaps is throttling down due to an overheating issue? monitor it's temps while on load.

As for eve, haven't played it but I've seen several posts where people points out its not properly optimized and has performance issues so not sure what can be done to fix it.

 

[RobCrezz]

"If I move my camera to a position where its picking up a lot of scenery and things to render, my GPU usage drops. If I move my camera to a position where there isn't a lot of scenery [...] my GPU usage manages to go up to 80-99%."

Sounds like you're experiencing a bottleneck caused by your CPU, scenes with a lot of players/ characters involved in battle are more CPU bounded than to the GPU, whereas when looking to a place with not much going on the CPU doesn't get bottlenecked allowing the GPU to reach its maximum potential.

While your CPU is already old, it should be enough for WoT, perhaps is throttling down due to an overheating issue? monitor it's temps while on load.

As for eve, haven't played it but I've seen several posts where people points out its not properly optimized and has performance issues so not sure what can be done to fix it.

His i7 is top tier, assuming its working correctly, its not bottlnecking.

 

[RaDiKaL_]

"If I move my camera to a position where its picking up a lot of scenery and things to render, my GPU usage drops. If I move my camera to a position where there isn't a lot of scenery [...] my GPU usage manages to go up to 80-99%."

Sounds like you're experiencing a bottleneck caused by your CPU, scenes with a lot of players/ characters involved in battle are more CPU bounded than to the GPU, whereas when looking to a place with not much going on the CPU doesn't get bottlenecked allowing the GPU to reach its maximum potential.

While your CPU is already old, it should be enough for WoT, perhaps is throttling down due to an overheating issue? monitor it's temps while on load.

As for eve, haven't played it but I've seen several posts where people points out its not properly optimized and has performance issues so not sure what can be done to fix it.

His i7 is top tier, assuming its working correctly, its not bottlnecking.

That's why I suspect an overheating issue

 

[epicsunset02]

"If I move my camera to a position where its picking up a lot of scenery and things to render, my GPU usage drops. If I move my camera to a position where there isn't a lot of scenery [...] my GPU usage manages to go up to 80-99%."

Sounds like you're experiencing a bottleneck caused by your CPU, scenes with a lot of players/ characters involved in battle are more CPU bounded than to the GPU, whereas when looking to a place with not much going on the CPU doesn't get bottlenecked allowing the GPU to reach its maximum potential.

While your CPU is already old, it should be enough for WoT, perhaps is throttling down due to an overheating issue? monitor it's temps while on load.

As for eve, haven't played it but I've seen several posts where people points out its not properly optimized and has performance issues so not sure what can be done to fix it.

I'm not entirely sure if it is overheating, but I will monitor it now.

What's a good, safe temperature? Is there a way I can stress test it for an errors?

 

[RaDiKaL_]

Your CPU shouldn't be going above 65ºC while on load, maybe near 70ºCs only with a stress test.

You can stress test it for error with Prime95: http://www.mersenne.org/download/

or with OCCT: http://www.ocbase.com/index.php/download

 

[epicsunset02]

Your CPU shouldn't be going above 65ºC while on load, maybe near 70ºCs only with a stress test.

You can stress test it for error with Prime95: http://www.mersenne.org/download/

or with OCCT: http://www.ocbase.com/index.php/download

Playing EVE right now and watching what MSI Afterburner is reporting, none of the cores on my CPU get above 60°C.

I tried the Prime95 thing earlier, and I freaked out when I watched my usage go instantly to 100% and my temperatures went up to around 80°C, and I stopped it in fear. I figure that would be around normal though, I mean it's a stress test after all.

Okay, so the temperatures are obviously not great when stress testing, but my CPU temps seem to hold up in EVE in a tightly packed area. I'm going to try World of Tanks, also going to try Dark Age of Camelot (older game, has still been giving me issues with FPS, not sure about optimization; game seems to hold up *alright*, but the FPS does love to hitch a lot, GPU usage is low, CPU usage on 1 core seems to max out around 90ish%).

Since my CPU is non-K, attempting any kind of overclocking seems to be out of the question. I could attempt to max the turbo frequency thing, but I'm afraid of temperatures. Any advice?

Thanks again.

 

[RaDiKaL_]

Since your temps while gaming are below 60ºC it shouldn't be a problem raising the max turbo frequency so you could give it a try if you want, however since it gets on and off automatically it really won't help to stabilize your FPS, your GPU should stay at a certain point of usage, whether 99%-100% when all graphic settings are cranked up or like 65-67% (as an example) when the game is not that graphic demanding...

Lets test your GPU, run Furmark for around 30min and see if the GPU usage stays at 100% non-stop, obviously monitor temps while at it.

 

[epicsunset02]

Since your temps while gaming are below 60ºC it shouldn't be a problem raising the max turbo frequency so you could give it a try if you want, however since it gets on and off automatically it really won't help to stabilize your FPS, your GPU should stay at a certain point of usage, whether 99%-100% when all graphic settings are cranked up or like 65-67% (as an example) when the game is not that graphic demanding...

Lets test your GPU, run Furmark for around 30min and see if the GPU usage stays at 100% non-stop, obviously monitor temps while at it.

Just tested Dark Age of Camelot (by the way, this game and EVE are both multiplayer, so that may have something to do with CPU), and the CPU usage was all over the place, and my temperatures got to a maximum of 66°C. Oh, and something else to note: I was just finishing posting here about EVE, and tabbed back in where I left it, and started to go through a few menus. The game started to hitch suddenly, and my GPU would jump from 35% usage down to 0%. Funny thing is, it only happened after I finished posting here about not overheating. I checked my DPC Latency, and it was fine. It only jumped whenever I tabbed in and out of something, and the maximum it got was around 1000. So I'm glad that DPC Latency thing is not an issue.

I'll give Furmark a test. By the way, the GPU keeps very cool during loads, so that's always good (Twin Frozr design seems to be nicely modeled and engineered).

Perhaps I should invest in a better aftermarket cooler? It does look like my CPU likes to jump temperatures quite a bit. I couldn't imagine the thermal paste already becoming irrelevant after around 2 months.

 

[RaDiKaL_]

An aftermarket cooler is always a good investment to do, however lets first find out what's exactly going on, the cooler might not be the solution (still, highly recommended).

 

[RobCrezz]

An aftermarket cooler is always a good investment to do, however lets first find out what's exactly going on, the cooler might not be the solution (still, highly recommended).

+1

I assumed from your OP that your temps were fine (but they clearly are not).

Get a better cooler. Your CPU very good if not throttling due to temp. Even though its a non-k, you can actually overclock the multiplyer by x4 (400mhz) (all Sandybridge and Ivybridge i5/i7 have this ability), if your motherboard lets you.

 

[epicsunset02]

An aftermarket cooler is always a good investment to do, however lets first find out what's exactly going on, the cooler might not be the solution (still, highly recommended).

+1

I assumed from your OP that your temps were fine (but they clearly are not).

Get a better cooler. Your CPU very good if not throttling due to temp. Even though its a non-k, you can actually overclock the multiplyer by x4 (400mhz) (all Sandybridge and Ivybridge i5/i7 have this ability), if your motherboard lets you.

Yeah, looking at it now, I think I might need to invest a little bit more into cooling.

I figured the temps were fine as well, as RaDiKaL_ had helped me a few months ago and suggested an aftermarket cooler. I had bought a cheaper one that was a bit beefier than stock and reapplied thermal paste and that seemed to help for a bit.

I could invest into another more expensive air cooler, since i hear water cooling is expensive. You guys have any suggestions?

Thanks again for the help.

 

[RobCrezz]

Something cheap like the CM hyper 212 evo will be more than enough.

 

[epicsunset02]

Something cheap like the CM hyper 212 evo will be more than enough.

So I have some good news.

Back when I originally bought my PC, I had purchased a Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus. I never mounted it because it looked really big and awkward. I was cleaning out some boxes and found it.

Is there a noticeable difference between the EVO and the Plus?

If not, I'll install it right away.

 

[RaDiKaL_]

I think the Plus is slightly less powerful not sure, still it should be more than enough to keep your CPU cooled down so go ahead and use it.

 

[epicsunset02]

I think the Plus is slightly less powerful not sure, still it should be more than enough to keep your CPU cooled down so go ahead and use it.

I will go ahead and do that. It should be better than my cheaper aftermarket cooler.

I was thinking about reinstalling my OS on my SSD. It's really been sitting here doing nothing. In fact, the amount of writes on it is less than 100GB according to a few programs. I'd like to make use of it, and probably rule out some incompatibility issues in the process.

...However, I did have a problem when I tried to install Windows on it the first time. The install seemed to go fine, so I proceeded to load up my motherboard CD and install the necessary drivers just to be able to get onto the internet. I installed my anti-virus, Mozilla Firefox (my preferred browser), and my video card drivers.

I can't remember exactly what happened because this was a while ago, but I was actually having really bad DPC Latency issues. I tried to use this tutorial over at the Sysnative forums (apologies if I'm not allowed to link other forums), and I couldn't really get my window to the same sort of "view" as the screenshots, but I narrowed down the problem drivers to things like the USBPORT.sys driver and whatever the DirectX kernel driver is (despite me not having installed any DirectX programs at that point).

But uh, basically, if I wanted to go ahead and do this to rule out driver issues and start fresh, any tips or tricks? I mean, I know the obvious: install the OS, download any necessary updates to Windows, install basic drivers (video drivers, MB drivers, etc). Is there any kind of program that will find the drivers I need? It seems like there are just so many drivers! Again, I do know I shouldn't jump ship immediately and go ahead and reinstall my OS, but just some food for thought.

Sorry for my walls of text, I just want to make things as clear as possible. I will go ahead and install that heatsink in a few days, and let you guys know how the temps go and report back.

Thanks again.

 

[RobCrezz]

Something cheap like the CM hyper 212 evo will be more than enough.

So I have some good news.

Back when I originally bought my PC, I had purchased a Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus. I never mounted it because it looked really big and awkward. I was cleaning out some boxes and found it.

Is there a noticeable difference between the EVO and the Plus?

If not, I'll install it right away.

The plus will work just fine, go for it!

 

[RaDiKaL_]

Sounds like in that previous install you downloaded the wrong drivers indeed, check your mobo exact specs with CPU-Z, also verify which mobo revision you have, sometimes they change the controllers from one revision to another and that would certainly cause instability issues.

If CPU-Z doesn't report your mobo revision it should be printed in the mobo itself so take a look inside your case.

 

[epicsunset02]

Sounds like in that previous install you downloaded the wrong drivers indeed, check your mobo exact specs with CPU-Z, also verify which mobo revision you have, sometimes they change the controllers from one revision to another and that would certainly cause instability issues.

If CPU-Z doesn't report your mobo revision it should be printed in the mobo itself so take a look inside your case.

Yeah I think I may have downloaded the wrong drivers. I'll take care to make sure I download good drivers in this next install when I get around to it.

I was actually doing some monitoring with AIDA64, and the CPU temperatures are fine while playing Dark Age of Camelot. In fact, the majority of the time it was boosting to 3.9 or 4Ghz with turbo boost and maintaining a decent operating temperature of around 60°C (I'm assuming this is good, I haven't replaced my heatsink yet).

But the usage jumps around a lot too. In fact, I decided to get to a place where a lot of stuff was visible and my CPU usage decided to drop, along with my FPS. Even with the CPU usage on 99-100% on one thread (because I think DAoC is only single-threaded; Gamebryo Engine I believe), the FPS didn't change. It still jumped around all annoyingly. My GPU usage was also low.

Perhaps it's just the games I'm playing. They might not be very well optimized. Or, after monitoring my hardware on a specific game, it seems to be working alright for the time (maybe it really just is my OS, not having correct drivers, etc). I'll probably play a bit more and upload some logs.

Probably sometime on the weekend or this Friday I'll install that new heatsink. Heard good things about it so fingers crossed!

 

[epicsunset02]

Sounds like in that previous install you downloaded the wrong drivers indeed, check your mobo exact specs with CPU-Z, also verify which mobo revision you have, sometimes they change the controllers from one revision to another and that would certainly cause instability issues.

If CPU-Z doesn't report your mobo revision it should be printed in the mobo itself so take a look inside your case.

Hey guys,

It's been a really long time, and I hope this does not count as "necroing" but I have some really good news!

I finally got around to installing that new CPU heatsink (Cooler Master Hyper212+ (one I had laying around)), and holy f...

It took me a while to install because I had no bloody idea what the instructions were trying to tell me, but after a few minutes of fiddling I managed to mount it and screw it in properly. Booted up my PC, the fan on the heatsink turned on and viola, I was in my BIOS, and already the temperature had shown a significant decrease!

Went into Windows just fine, and brought up HWMonitor and was pleased to find the CPU was idling around 33°C (as opposed to 40°C on my old heatsink). It may not sound amazing now, but...

Booted up Dark Age of Camelot, and the usage spiked on one core to 90-100% as usual, the stutters was still there, but I noticed one crucial thing: The CPU was playing the game in a highly populated area at 40°C. Before on my cheap aftermarket solution, it was playing the game at around 55-60°C. I think that sounds like an improvement, I'd like to hear your opinions.

So I think this is a really good starting point into cracking down on bad habits (like buying terrible aftermarket coolers and expecting them to work better or as well as the stock), or maybe it's just a good starting point into restoring some life to my PC.

I'll run some tests tomorrow, but I really need to get to bed. Looking forward to your responses.

Thanks as always,

Sun

 

[RaDiKaL_]

Great improvement indeed in your temps, so the stutter issue prevails, did you make a fresh install? I hope not because I don't see what else could be the problem (if I'm remember correctly everything that's been tried already).

 

[epicsunset02]

Great improvement indeed in your temps, so the stutter issue prevails, did you make a fresh install? I hope not because I don't see what else could be the problem (if I'm remember correctly everything that's been tried already).

The install is not new, but I do believe it will ultimately help in the end.

In fact, most of everything on this current install feels really clunky and slow. Like the Windows UI feels all weird and sluggish. I do not recall this happening on my SSD install.

But yeah, it could most likely be some sort of driver issue. There's a lot of stuff installed here, and I wouldn't mind starting new on my SSD, I would probably need to find a way to isolate the problem first so I don't replicate it again.

I do appreciate you bearing with me by the way. I do know my ways around most aspects of a PC but just strange behaviour like this doesn't make much sense. I assume it's probably not normal for a game as old as Dark Age of Camelot to run slow on my machine, despite not being optimized that well.

I can't remember if I told you on my old video card what happened with Skyrim. Basically it was stuttery, and whenever I'd look a certain way or whatever my FPS drops exactly to 30 (I don't actually remember it stuttering when locked at 30), half of 60, which just magically happens to be the refresh rate of my monitor (60hz)? VSync is a strange animal.

Just some thoughts. I'll probably run a fresh install on my SSD and run through it slowly to make sure all updates and drivers are installed correctly.

 

[epicsunset02]

Alright, so it's been about a month now since I posted. I apologize if this is considered "necroing" but I want to update my thread with some new information.

I went ahead and installed a fresh Windows 7 on my SSD, and I didn't encounter any issues at first. I installed every Microsoft update it could find for me, and I installed only the basic drivers that came with my motherboard.

I then downloaded the latest GPU drivers, my preferred browser, Java, Flash, and a few other little things. I was able to get into the web. I loaded up a YouTube video to see if it was stuttery, and it was a lot better then before... Sort of. My flash player drops a lot of frames and has trouble maintaining FPS and it leads to the video looking like garbage. I'm not sure if it's just me or the video that has an FPS issue.

I panicked and I thought I remembered seeing somewhere that Flash player runs off the CPU and I remembered how much my CPU was running hot a few weeks ago. I really thought I damaged it at this point.

I went ahead and contacted Intel support, and after a few tests we concluded nothing was wrong with the CPU... I hope.

Then I decided to log back on my PC a few days after that and then the DPC Latency bombshell hit. Spikes everywhere! The horror! Ugh this is so infuriating!

I had a friend helping me out and I also used that guide I found on the Sysnative forums. I narrowed it down to a problem driver, which happened to be my USB3 driver. The other two were the infamous USBPORT.sys and my video card drivers (but it varies a lot; one time some networking adapter one was top). I found a newer driver and installed it and it seems to have helped a bit, as now the spikes seem to remain under 2000us in most circumstances. One time it spiked to around 6000us for no apparent reason, and I wasn't monitoring with Xperf at the time (I was browsing the web when it happened).

After a lot of this happened, I did a little bit more research and found that if you turn some Real Time Event Manager thingy off it improves DPC Latency; it worked because now when I'm idling the latency remains at around 10-20us. I don't know if that's good but that's better then 100-200us idle.

I'm basically stuck at these stupid DPC spikes and I don't know what to do about it. It likes to spike at unpredictable times, but fortunately I can usually expect a spike when booting up a game or loading Teamspeak or Firefox. I would really like to alleviate those errors.

Now this whole thread was to ask for help for stuttering in games, now I gotta deal with DPC Latency which sucks, because it feels like a whole new job. I am downloading Far Cry 3 as we speak so I'll test that over the weekend for consistency. I don't know if I've missed anything. If I have I will either edit or post again. Oh also I'll post some of my DPC results from Xperf tomorrow as well. Hopefully everything here is grammatically correct and makes sense; typing from an iPhone sucks!

Thank you for reading, and anyone who has helped me thus far.

-Sun

EDIT: fixed some spelling errors

 

[RaDiKaL_]

Well I can't remember if your mobo was changed at some point, but seeing those DPC issues with usbports and network etc on a fresh install with drivers that came in the mobo cd points to a faulty mobo, a fresh install shouldn't have any of those issues at all.