New GTX1060 6GB atrocious performance/stuttering?

[atermi]

Hey! After reading a lot about how 1060 is the "king" of 1080p 60 fps gaming, I finally decided to upgrade from my 670.

The result was... unimpressive. My 670 couldn't achieve high fps in modern games, but if it gained 25 or 30 fps in Wildlands, I could play silky smooth (understanding that I play at low fps).

The 1060 is a completely another story: I see that it is able to get high fps, I can set higher settings and see a decent framerate, but it is completely impossible to play any game like that: they stutter all the time, fps randomly drops to 1 any moment, and 60 fps don't really feel smooth; it goes like 5 seconds at 60 fps - 1 sec 22 fps - 1 sec 1 fps - 1 sec 11 fps - 5 seconds 60 fps.

I even tried to play Witcher 1; it stutters and drops from 150 fps to 70, and these 70 fps really feel like 5, because all the movement breaks. In Wildlands, driving a car is impossible because the game stutters until you unpress W to move forward.

I started searching and found that "1060 6 GB stuttering" is a very wide and common problem... So...

Did I spend all my money in vain and gained a faulty card which is faulty by design? Or I did smth wrong? Please halp!

Technical side: 1) I re-installed drivers clean, removing the older.
2) I have an i5 4690k and 16 GB RAM, my CPU, MOBO and RAM are new and good. I read a ton of Reddit and Tomshardware topics implying that 4690 is perfectly fine for any new gpx card.
3) My PSU is NOT a culprit: 1060 is much less hungry than my previous 670. I have a powerful and expensive 850W PSU.
4) Everything was great and amazing before I inserted the new card; no programs, background apps or settings changed since.
5) It is an Inno 3D GTX 1060 6 GB.

Please help me to fix this!

 

[Jwpanz]

Nvidia Control Panel > Manage 3D Settings > Power Management Mode > set to Prefer Maximum Performance.

And also turn off VSync.

 

[atermi]

@Jwpanz, I tried everything in the NCP, including setting Maximum Performance to On. I never turn Vsync on.

Plus, with my old 670 I never had any problems in any game, and never even had to touch the NCP settings.

 

[Jwpanz]

Ok. Then it would have to be either a driver issue, a ROM issue, or the card itself being defective. You could try rolling back to older drivers and testing your experience with them. If that doesn’t change anything, then you could resort to updating or rolling back the ROM file. This basically the BIOS of your card and working with it could cause permanent fixes or permanent damage. If you’re not comfortable doing this then I would say return the card for a replacement.

 

[atermi]

I would also imply that the card is defective, if not dozens of topics "1060 stutters" here on Toms and on Reddit and Steam; this makes me believe that we might do smth wrong, but I am really puzzled what exactly.

Thank you for trying to help, I will try to install older drivers (although the newest is supposed to improve performance in KC: Deliverance, which actually was a prime reason for my upgrade).

 

[Jwpanz]

Drivers are weird and depend on your hardware and OS. You could also try updating motherboard BIOS to see if that corrects anything.

 

[jr9]

If it's performing that badly then the possbilities are:

- Drivers not working right. DDU+safe mode to remove old drivers and download latest ones. Clean installation option in nVIDIA installer doesn't do anything but remove profiles. If you don't do this first you will waste a lot of time troubleshooting something that is most likely a graphics card driver issue.

- Faulty graphics card. Highly unlikely if you aren't seeing artifacts.

It clearly isn't any other part of your PC hardware. BIOS update can also help sometimes along with updating chipset drivers to accommodate newer hardware.

 

[atermi]

- Drivers not working right. DDU+safe mode to remove old drivers and download latest ones. Clean installation option in nVIDIA installer doesn't do anything but remove profiles. If you don't do this first you will waste a lot of time troubleshooting something that is most likely a graphics card driver issue.

Ah, this might be it, thanks for the insight!

Although in other threads ppl say that you don't even have to update your drivers at all and Experience does everything itself...

 

[Jwpanz]

In theory your system should detect the new card and Windows should automatically look for the most up to date drivers. GForce Experience should also do the same thing. This is why I think it has to be a driver issue as your hardware is just not agreeing with it. Try updating your motherboard BIOS and try clean installing drivers. If nothing works then return the card and grab one from a different board partner like Asus or EVGA.

 

[jr9]

For a USB thumb drive maybe but for a GPU that only happens if Windows downloads the GPU driver through Windows update. Windows 10 only has a default VGA driver "on hand". If you ran DDU then anything related to nVIDIA including Geforce Experience would have been removed.

Geforce Experience is garbage and causes more problems then it solves. Once you have a stable graphics card driver then there is no reason to update unless you are experiencing problems or performance issues with newer games. Automatically updating graphics card drivers is one of the easiest ways to end up with driver problems and/or complete system malfunctions like BSOD. Driver deployment should never be approached in this manner and it's caused system problems for many people. Unselect Geforce experience when you install the new drivers.