Poor gaming performance from a new gaming PC

[VonRobbo]

Hey guys,
I’m in dire need of some help please.
I’ve just bought a new system:
• Intel Core i7 7700K
• MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Sea Hawk X 11GB
• Corsair Vengeance LED CMU16GX4M2C3200C16 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4
• Intel 600P Series 512GB M.2 SSD
• ViewSonic XG2703-GS 27in G-Sync 165Hz IPS Gaming Monitor
• Corsair Hydro Series H100i 240mm Liquid CPU Cooler
• Western Digital WD Blue 2TB WD20EZRZ
• Microsoft Windows 10 Home 32bit/64bit USB Flash Drive
• Gigabyte Z270-Gaming K3 Motherboard
• Thermaltake 650W Toughpower Gold

Sound like a beast right? It’s actually performing really poorly in gaming situations and I can’t work out why or where the bottleneck is happening.
First up, here is the result of the Heaven 4.0 benchmark and how the CPU/GPU were performing. As expected the GPU was put under pressure, but the CPU was OK.

The GPU is maxing out, but I’m only averaging 82.4 FPS. Here is what happens when I play BF1 with DX11.

CPU sits around 70-80% and GPU is at about 45%. Why am I only getting 50-60 FPS when people with equal and lesser spec’d systems can get 90-100fps avg?

Things to know about BF1:
- G-Sync is on
- V-Sync is off
- All settings on ultra. I refuse to lower the settings when I paid a lot of money for a top of the line system that should be performing better. Also, it still didn’t make much difference to performance when I did.
- All other windows/programs closed when playing
- I initially thought it was a BF1 problem so made a user.cfg file. It has:
o render.drawscreeninfo 1
o Gametime.MaxVariablefps 146
o PerfOverlay.DrawFps 1
o renderdevice.renderaheadlimit 1
o Resolution scale- 100%
o DX12 disabled (I get similar results with it on anyway)
o GPU memory restriction off
- FPS is only slightly better in single player, maybe 5 fps.


I tried playing with an older title, Portal 2, to see how it would go:

As you can see, it was going over 800FPS!! And the GPU and CPU were hardly thinking about it. Hmm. OK, let’s play something newer. The Division….

Sill have a terrible FPS. First time I loaded in, I was having massive frame drops. Changed to DX11 and it smoothed out, but still only averaging around 60-70fps. CPU s maxing out and GPU isn’t working that hard.
I know, I know. Enough of this BS, you want to see the CPU-Z stats….

The only thing noteworthy in there for me is that when comparing with the 7600k in the bench test, is scores a bit lower in the Single Thread score.
Things I’ve done to try and faultfind/fix this:
- DDU and clean driver install (heaps of times)
- Ramtest. All ok.
- Power connectors to PSU (two cables for the GPU)
- Stress test the CPU (Prime95 and CPU-Z). No issues.
- PhysX on and off doesn’t change anything
- High performance is on in Windows Power Settings.
- Unparked cores

I hope you guys appreciate the effort I’ve gone to here and I’m coming to you as my last resort. I’ve used every tool in my toolbox. I’m hoping you guys might be able to give me some ideas about what this problem is.
I’d just love to get to a point where I’m getting the FPS I Deserve!

TL;DR- New gaming PC that is performing way below what is expected of it. FPS is low in BF1 while CPU and GPU usage are low.

 

[LucoTF]

Wall

of

Text

lol

Your cpu & gpu benches seem fine, its a litte hard to tell with unigine as you've used custom settings. Try passmark https://www.passmark.com/ for some easy comparisons

The only thing that stands out is your BIOS is several versions behind current - you're on F3 and the newest is F6 - download it here: http://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-Z270-Gaming-K3-rev-10#support-dl

 

[Supahos]

Have you checked your cpu temps? The only way a 4.5 GHz 7700k loses to a 3.8ghz 7600k is if it's thermal throttling, also makes the frame drops makes more sense

 

[VonRobbo]

Wall

of

Text

lol

Your cpu & gpu benches seem fine, its a litte hard to tell with unigine as you've used custom settings. Try passmark https://www.passmark.com/ for some easy comparisons

The only thing that stands out is your BIOS is several versions behind current - you're on F3 and the newest is F6 - download it here: http://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-Z270-Gaming-K3-rev-10#support-dl

Yeah, sorry about the wall of text, but I just wanted to give you guys as much info as possible.

Here is my passmark scores.

http://www.passmark.com/baselines/V9/display.php?id=82419631671

Seems good except I'd expect a better CPU score maybe?


I've also now updated the BIOS

 

[VonRobbo]

Have you checked your cpu temps? The only way a 4.5 GHz 7700k loses to a 3.8ghz 7600k is if it's thermal throttling, also makes the frame drops makes more sense

I just did a Prime95 stress test for 10 mins. The CPU temp was working at 100% the whole time and neer got over 63 degrees celcius.

Anything else I can try?

 

[LucoTF]

In task manager when you change the cpu graph to show by logical processors, it splits into 8 right?

Your GPU passmark is bang on the money, so that's good. When running Prime95 etc the cpu stays at 4.5ghz the whole time? And it stayed at 4.5ghz throughout the passmark cpu test?

 

[LucoTF]

One more thing - your stock voltage is too high at 1.344 volts. The recent bios update may have lowered it, but if if hasn't I would immediately drop it to 1.25 and I'm confident it will go lower than if you're keeping it at stock speeds

 

[VonRobbo]

In task manager when you change the cpu graph to show by logical processors, it splits into 8 right?

Your GPU passmark is bang on the money, so that's good. When running Prime95 etc the cpu stays at 4.5ghz the whole time? And it stayed at 4.5ghz throughout the passmark cpu test?

Yes, task manager shows 4 cores, 8 logical processors.

Just ran Prime95 for a few minutes to monitor the clocks on all processors and they sat at 4533MHz the whole time.

Just did the same with the CPU passmark test, same result.

This is a real head scratcher. The CPU and GPU are both performing well independently of each other, but not when they need to work together. To me that sounds like drivers or software right? I guess I'll try and DDU again....

 

[Supahos]

I'd perhaps completely reinstall Windows and start from scratch. You can try ddu first if you wish. But something funky going on for sure.

 

[LucoTF]

The gpu is fine by those passmark scores, its cpu and memory that are below average

 

[VonRobbo]

I'd perhaps completely reinstall Windows and start from scratch. You can try ddu first if you wish. But something funky going on for sure.

Just finished a Windows reinstall. Still having the same issues. This is so frustratinng!

 

[VonRobbo]

The gpu is fine by those passmark scores, its cpu and memory that are below average

Is it possible that my Motherboard is faulty?

Isn't that more likely than my CPU and memory having issues?

 

[LucoTF]

Faulty motherboards are rare, but at this point you're running out of things to try. I assume at some point during all your fiddling youve tried resetting the bios to defaults?

It very very unlikely that your cpu is faulty.

 

[adiec]

Faulty motherboards are rare, but at this point you're running out of things to try. I assume at some point during all your fiddling youve tried resetting the bios to defaults?

It very very unlikely that your cpu is faulty.

is the OP running his ram in single channel or is that being reported wrong ?

 

[LucoTF]

Ooh well spotted, i missed that

OP make sure your memory is in slots 2 & 4

 

[adiec]

Ooh well spotted, i missed that

OP make sure your memory is in slots 2 & 4

sometimes too much information means fine details get lost in the midst of it all. i'm not saying this will solve the crisis but it's certainly not going to hurt to correct it 😛

 

[solidton]

Try renderdevice.renderaheadlimit 2 or more in BF1.

 

[VonRobbo]

Try renderdevice.renderaheadlimit 2 or more in BF1.

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried renderdevice.renderaheadlimit 2,3,4 and 5 with little difference to my FPS in game.

 

[VonRobbo]

Ooh well spotted, i missed that

OP make sure your memory is in slots 2 & 4

sometimes too much information means fine details get lost in the midst of it all. i'm not saying this will solve the crisis but it's certainly not going to hurt to correct it 😛

Good pickup. I don't know how I missed that either. I've fixed it and am now running dual channel. No change to FPS in games though :-(

 

[LucoTF]

It was unlikely to affect in game performance but would definitely affect benchmarking performance.

 

[VonRobbo]

It was unlikely to affect in game performance but would definitely affect benchmarking performance.

I'm downloading Fallout 4 to see how that runs as I've only tried Origin games (except for Portal 2 which had great FPS). I don't know how origin can possibly be limiting my FPS, but I'm running out of things to try.

 

[LucoTF]

If it was just origin then your passmark scores would have been normal. That said, there are known issues with running origin and msi afterburner at the same time, so you could try disabling the origin overlay to see if it helps (i think its called origin in game). Also try fully removing afterburner, you can always reinstall if it doesn't help

Did you reset bios to defaults?

 

[adiec]

might be useful to show a list of your processes .. perhaps something is hogging the system. just trying to think of things to help.

 

[VonRobbo]

If it was just origin then your passmark scores would have been normal. That said, there are known issues with running origin and msi afterburner at the same time, so you could try disabling the origin overlay to see if it helps (i think its called origin in game). Also try fully removing afterburner, you can always reinstall if it doesn't help

Did you reset bios to defaults?

Thanks heaps for helping me with this. Yes, BIOS has been rest to defaults since I rearranged the memory modules this morning. After all the tweaks I've done etc. I thought I'd run another Performance test....

http://www.passmark.com/baselines/V9/display.php?id=82807424698

This is obviously substantially better than the previous one. The only thing I can think of different is that this new one was done immediately after a system restart, the other not.

My analysis of the stats...

The CPU is below average for other i7-7700k CPUs. This looks like it's due to the prime numbers score of 27 and the physics score of 636. Both were on the low end of what an i7-7700k should be getting.

For the GPU, the thing that bought the score down was the DX11 and DX10 tests, although I'm not too concerned with GPU performance now.

With the RAM, the latency is kinda low, but it looks like it's working well now that its on dual channel.

Just confirmed that BF1 FPS is still shit, even with the improved benchmarks.

 

[adiec]

If it was just origin then your passmark scores would have been normal. That said, there are known issues with running origin and msi afterburner at the same time, so you could try disabling the origin overlay to see if it helps (i think its called origin in game). Also try fully removing afterburner, you can always reinstall if it doesn't help

Did you reset bios to defaults?

Thanks heaps for helping me with this. Yes, BIOS has been rest to defaults since I rearranged the memory modules this morning. After all the tweaks I've done etc. I thought I'd run another Performance test....

http://www.passmark.com/baselines/V9/display.php?id=82807424698

This is obviously substantially better than the previous one. The only thing I can think of different is that this new one was done immediately after a system restart, the other not.

My analysis of the stats...

The CPU is below average for other i7-7700k CPUs. This looks like it's due to the prime numbers score of 27 and the physics score of 636. Both were on the low end of what an i7-7700k should be getting.

For the GPU, the thing that bought the score down was the DX11 and DX10 tests, although I'm not too concerned with GPU performance now.

With the RAM, the latency is kinda low, but it looks like it's working well now that its on dual channel.

low latency is better than high