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

 

[epicsunset02]

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.

Intel did mention that too. They suggested that I should contact my board manufacturer to see if I can do anything.

I haven't changed my board, it's one of three original components left in my computer (PSU and CPU being the other two).

I mean, anything is possible. It's completely viable that the board is somehow damaged or becoming defective. It is going to be about 4 years old in July. I don't know the average lifespan of a board, but this one seems to have some age.

 

[epicsunset02]

I'll contact ASUS tomorrow on my break. Maybe they have some way to test if something is wrong.

 

[epicsunset02]

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.

Alright, so I booted up Far Cry 3 on my SSD install and everything actually seemed quite enjoyable. I only really noticed minor stutters whenever a cutscene would come or something new would load. The game did seem kinda buggy though, but I think that probably has to do with me just playing the game for the first time, perhaps I needed a restart to fix a few bugs after Steam performed first time setup.

I'm sitting on my slow hard drive install, and on this particular install I have no DPC Latency issues. Like, it does spike whenever I open a game, and it only spikes to 1300us, and I that's only if I'm opening and closing a game. When I open Firefox, the latency spikes to 123us, completely unnoticable. So I think it might not be the motherboard, perhaps somewhere along the line I installed newer drivers on my hard drive install. I don't know if it will necessarily be worth it to sit through and look at what driver versions I have installed on my hard drive, but I am going to assume until proven otherwise that there is no real difference between my SSD and hard drive install besides driver versions, and the fact that my hard drive is extremely slow.

 

[epicsunset02]

Alright so you probably expected to see me post again. I know this is what is considered "necroing" but I have some additional observations to add.

I started to mess around with my SSD install some more and I solved the DPC latency issues by updating the USB 3.0 drivers and I don't notice any spikes. It does sometimes spike to like 3000 but I haven't noticed them and it only does it every so often and my latency sticks around 10-30 which I'm very happy about.

I think I've also solved my sluggish browser performance by switching to Chrome which seems less stuttery and signicantly faster than Firefox.

What I still don't understand is the gaming performance. So Dark Age of Camelot likes to stutter still and Eve also loves to stutter. Now, I am going to try and explain as accurately as possible of what I mean by "stutter".

So, when I get stuttering in Dark Age of Camelot it's very specific and it only really seems to happen when there is a lot of players parked in one area or there is overwhelming chat spam. It's really odd because there can be a million effects on screen but the only thing that really makes the game lose a few frames at a time is the chat box. I think this is a strictly game related issue. The stutters like to hitch the game significantly. For example, if I were to see any sort of chat box spam or lots of players in an area my game would start to hitch. The frame rate does not stay consistent and drops to 10 and then goes back up in a cycle.

Eve is different. It's really damn irritating whenever I open my ship fitting or market browser because the game literally freezes or drops to like 5 FPS for a minute and then continues on. Stuttering of the lesser degree (1-2 frames) occur generally when I click buttons or hover over things. The big FPS drops seem to only occur when I open a whole new window. I also did a little test: I spam clicked my assets tab (where it shows you where your items are), and the bloody game decides to slow down so much it was unbearable. I knew this would be the consequence so I tabbed out to look at Afterburner and sure enough the GPU graph looked like a polygraph test gone horribly wrong. The usage had been pretty consistent at 40% with a few hitches here and there, but once I started to spam it went up and down and up and down... It was 0 and then 30, 0 and them 25 to give a rough example.

I haven't played Far Cry in a while but I remember running it raw (no monitoring or settings changed in control panel), and it seemed pretty damn smooth on ultra. I didn't notice any stutters.

So what do you think? I feel like it's game related. I will have to ask around on various forums dedicated to the games in question to make my judgment; perhaps see if anyone has a similar problem with a relatively high end new machine.

Thanks again to everyone. Especially Radikal who has been with me from the start. You're awesome man.

Well, hopefully no problems with spelling or grammar typing from my phone,

-Sun

 

[RaDiKaL_]

Sounds game related indeed, your specific issue with Dark Age of Camelot is something I had in another game as well, Path of Exile. The game would drop FPS when chat was spammed, eventually the game was patched and the problem disappeared.

As for EVE I guess it's the same deal, they might have used some old API for their browsing windows or something like that, the fact that affects the GPU usage leads me to think that it's trying to apply Antialiasing or something similar to an object that shouldn't, if you want try different graphics settings and see if the GPU usage when opening those windows gets less affected. But overall seems game related.

Glad to see your DPC latency issues have been solved.

 

[epicsunset02]

Sounds game related indeed, your specific issue with Dark Age of Camelot is something I had in another game as well, Path of Exile. The game would drop FPS when chat was spammed, eventually the game was patched and the problem disappeared.

As for EVE I guess it's the same deal, they might have used some old API for their browsing windows or something like that, the fact that affects the GPU usage leads me to think that it's trying to apply Antialiasing or something similar to an object that shouldn't, if you want try different graphics settings and see if the GPU usage when opening those windows gets less affected. But overall seems game related.

Glad to see your DPC latency issues have been solved.

Well I did some research on lag in Dark Age and it turns out that some of the newer fonts for chat boxes are anti aliased. Well, looks like I'm not the only one! It sucks in particular with this game because there isn't much documentation on it because it's very old.

Still researching the Eve problem, but after watching a few streams every single one of them stuttered when they opened the market window but one case but the only difference was the guy who didn't seem to stutter had window transparency off. Very game related.

 

[epicsunset02]

Well, I think I figured it out and it seems to be a combination of the most... Let's just say "out there" issues and common sense.

I was doing some idle Googling on the stuttering issue and stumbled across a relatively small forum whose members seemed to be posting in a thread regarding their sound crackling and popping. Curious, I continued on and found out that all of the people who were playing games and having their sound crackle have the EXACT same headset as me.

Alright, no biggie. Can just be a coincidence. Not even close...

I disabled my onboard sound for a few minutes to see what would happen and that didn't help so it's not Realtek related. Then I forgot I had some gaming software from Logitech installed for their headset and other products so I worked with that for a bit.

I get major cracking in EVE and other games so I decided to try something different and turn off surround sound to see if that would help. What a world of difference! No crackling, and an added bonus: no stuttering. None. Eve plays nicely for the time being until something screws up. I also read some EVE players with my headset were having issues and to look into older versions of the software to alleviate the problem. After this revelation I think I will.

Dark Age and other games still have their own quirks but I know what's causing them so I can fix them later.

I am going to close the thread for now. You guys have been of great help to me from suggesting cooling solutions to helping out with little stuff. Special thanks to Radikal who helped me in my other thread as well. I really appreciate it.

Take care everyone, have fun playing whatever you guys play.

-Sun