Question PC Suddenly Losing Massive Frames after years of no issues

Mar 6, 2022
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Hey guys, I've had this computer for about 5-6 years, and never had any issues. I have played most major titles as well as VR and everything worked fine up until around the time Battlefield 2042 came out. I'm not sure that this is related in any way but this is just the timeframe where everything started performing poorly. There was an NVIDIA driver update shortly after release and a game patch then the game became unplayable. I thought it was just 2042 at first but I switched over to Fortnite (A game I ran flawlessly before on max settings) then all of a sudden I was getting tears/stutters/massive frames drops to around 30-40 on average. I thought maybe my GPU was giving out so I foolishly upgraded from a GTX 1070 to an RTX 3060ti thinking that would remedy my issues. There was VERY little improvement in frames and I still get the jerks/tears/stutters.
I've done the following:
Fresh clean install of drivers
Rolled back drivers
Fresh install of windows
Checked benchmarks (Came out flawless)
I'm not sure what's going on, I'm tempted to just buy a new PC and gut my current GPU/harddrives But I really want to figure out what the issue here is first and check and see if it's just one or two things I can replace

My rig:

Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4790K CPU @ 4.00GHz, 4001 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s)
16GB RAM Ripjaw
NVIDIA Geforce RTX 3060ti
ASRock Z97Killer Mobo BIOS Legacy
2 Samsung SSDs
Using a freesync 144hz monitor (Gsync compatible and active)

I'm not very pc savvy but I've also checked temps while gaming and everything seems normal. All my reccomended settings are ultra on most games but lowering them makes no difference whatsoever.
Any help is much appreciated, I'm completely stumped
 

Satan-IR

Splendid
Ambassador
What is make and model of PSU and how old is it?

That CPU is a major bottleneck for a graphics card like 3060Ti. Not sure about numbers.

But if you want to make sure run monitoring software to monitor CPU and GPU activity and if while gaming your CPU reaches 99-100% load/activity and the GPU load/activity does not exceed for example 60-70% and does not reach 99-100% that's a bottleneck.

EDIT: Just saw your PSU. It's actually not a band unit but if it's as old as the system (5-6 years?) It's time to change it for a better unit (maybe a good quality 750W) as 3000 cards are more demanding and have power spikes under heavy load, although a 3060/Ti has relatively smaller poikes than 3070 and above.
 
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Mar 6, 2022
23
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Nt bro you use a Intel gen 4 but can buy a rtx?
Sell your gpu and upgrade to gen 9 or gen 10

I've been thinking about just buying a new mobo/cpu but I didn't know how easy it was to just gut my current PC and install into a new rig but I'd like to figure out why it's running so poorly out of the blue, even before I upgraded to the 3060
 
Mar 6, 2022
23
0
10
What is make and model of PSU and how old is it?

That CPU is a major bottleneck for a graphics card like 3060Ti. Not sure about numbers.

But if you want to make sure run monitoring software to monitor CPU and CPU activity and if while gaming your CPU reaches 99-100% load/activity and the GPU load/activity does not exceed for example 60-70% and does not reach 99-100% that's a bottleneck.

I read there was a bottleneck between the two, but that wouldn't explain why it was running equally as bad on the 1070 would it?

PSU is about 5 years old I think: EVGA 650 GS
 
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Satan-IR

Splendid
Ambassador
I read there was a bottleneck between the two, but that wouldn't explain why it was running equally as bad on the 1070 would it?
No but that's somehow another issue. The PSU might not be able to provide under heavy load as good as old days. PSUs age and each year lose some of their nominal output capacity, also capacity to cope with transients (ebbs and flows in power) and spikes. Better units degrade less and not so good ones more.

The games are installed on the SSDs and run/load from there, right?

Also if you noticed the changes started after the Nvidia driver update maybe you can use DDU to remove and install and older driver verion (maybe the one you have before?) and see if that helps.

If you can borrow one test the system with another known-good at least 650W PSU and see if that changes things.
 
Mar 6, 2022
23
0
10
No but that's somehow another issue. The PSU might not be able to provide under heavy load as good as old days. PSUs age and each year lose some of their nominal output capacity, also capacity to cope with transients (ebbs and flows in power) and spikes. Better units degrade less and not so good ones more.

The games are installed on the SSDs and run/load from there, right?

Also if you noticed the changes started after the Nvidia driver update maybe you can use DDU to remove and install and older driver verion (maybe the one you have before?) and see if that helps.

If you can borrow one test the system with another known-good at least 650W PSU and see if that changes things.

Tried removing and installing older versions to no avail, yeah the games run/load from the SSD's (I have two one is a smaller SSD that has operating system/system files, the other is 1TB that I put all my games on)