Random drops in performance?

[Asherim]

So over the course of the past 2-3 weeks I've replaced 2 components of my computer and added 1 SSD. I started with a GTX 660 card on a Gigabyte GA-970A-UD3P board with a AMD FX 6300 CPU w/ stock fan, first I replaced the card with a MSI GTX 970 (which I obviously only had to disconnect the old card to install), and after doing that I was getting really good performance and really smooth framerates in my games, the problem was that the stock CPU fan got unreasonably loud for some reason (even when the temps weren't that high) so I ordered a CoolerMaster Hyper 612 Ver2 cooling rig. I continued the play games and whatever else for like a week till the new cooler arrived and I was getting consistently good performance. Then after the cooler came I disconnected everything from my mobo and took it out to install it, but after getting it installed and reconnecting everything I'm suddenly getting outright terrible performance in some games, massive drops in others, and just all around not the same performance I was getting before installing the new cooler. For example playing Black Ops 3 before I could get 60 fps with 0 drops on the max settings, now every match starts out at ~1-20fps for the first few minutes before it seems to calm down and hover closer to 60 (though still not the solid framerate I was getting before). GTA V I could play even on the 660 and I never noticed any stutters, but now they seem much more common. If anybody has any suggestions or ideas for what it could be, I'd really appreciate it. None of my temps exceed 60 according to SpeedFan even while playing the games.

 

[Stysner]

Install new drivers for your graphics card (I know they are in the same range and use the same drivers, but you should still do a clean install of the drivers) and scan for malware / virusses. Also check the usage of your GPU/CPU with monitoring software to see which one of the 2 is the culprit.

Also, try to type with line breaks (like above ^), that wall of text is unpleasant to read.

 

[Asherim]

Install new drivers for your graphics card (I know they are in the same range and use the same drivers, but you should still do a clean install of the drivers) and scan for malware / virusses. Also check the usage of your GPU/CPU with monitoring software to see which one of the 2 is the culprit.

Also, try to type with line breaks (like above ^), that wall of text is unpleasant to read.

Sorry 'bout that, was just kind of making it up as I thought of it so there wasn't much formatting. Anyway, I did install new drivers when I installed the card, and like I said the performance dropped only after installing the new cooler, so I can't imagine that it's any kind of software issue considering it didn't even come with any.

I'm not really sure what you want me to check from my CPU/GPU, but from what I've read most articles make my issue sound like temp throttling (random bursts of dropped performance for X period of time) since it otherwise plays smoothly in between bursts or after it's settled down in most games, but then nothing goes above 60 at the worst, and it rarely even gets that high.

 

[Stysner]

You're right, but if you find out if it's the CPU or GPU you can troubleshoot from there instead of guessing. So check which one of the two runs at 100% or what it does?

 

[Asherim]

You're right, but if you find out if it's the CPU or GPU you can troubleshoot from there instead of guessing. So check which one of the two runs at 100% or what it does?

Alright, how would you suggest I check that then? (I'm still fairly new to the technical side)

 

[Stysner]

You're right, but if you find out if it's the CPU or GPU you can troubleshoot from there instead of guessing. So check which one of the two runs at 100% or what it does?

Alright, how would you suggest I check that then? (I'm still fairly new to the technical side)

Do you have dual monitors? You need to read the usage and temperature while playing the game and see what changes when (you could also run a game windowed).

Downlaod CPUID HW Monitor LINK

It will show you a lot of things from voltages to temperatures, processing usage for CPU and GPU, and more. Start up a game, and when the issue occurs, check for this:

CPU:
Clockspeed? (Max vs when the issue occurs -> should be the same)
Temperature?
Usage (utilization, in percentage)?

GPU:
Clockspeed? (Max vs when the issue occurs -> should be the same)
Temperature?
Usage (utilization, in percentage)?

 

[Asherim]

You're right, but if you find out if it's the CPU or GPU you can troubleshoot from there instead of guessing. So check which one of the two runs at 100% or what it does?

Alright, how would you suggest I check that then? (I'm still fairly new to the technical side)

Do you have dual monitors? You need to read the usage and temperature while playing the game and see what changes when (you could also run a game windowed).

Downlaod CPUID HW Monitor LINK

It will show you a lot of things from voltages to temperatures, processing usage for CPU and GPU, and more. Start up a game, and when the issue occurs, check for this:

CPU:
Clockspeed? (Max vs when the issue occurs -> should be the same)
Temperature?
Usage (utilization, in percentage)?

GPU:
Clockspeed? (Max vs when the issue occurs -> should be the same)
Temperature?
Usage (utilization, in percentage)?

These are the readings I'm getting at the start of matches when the FPS is unplayable: http://oi67.tinypic.com/33m1lqg.jpg Usually after that it ramps up back to normal but still suffers quite a few random drops.

 

[Stysner]

Look at the GPU, it's running at 135MHz / 324MHz, when it should be running at 1114MHz / 3506MHz, and the max GPU usage is 62%. That's not right.

The weird thing is that it does eventually work (right?)... Because your temperatures are fine, so it's not thermal throttling. For some reason your GPU remains at idle speeds when it needs to ramp up because the game is running.

It could also be a power limit, but if that were the case it wouldn't be able to fix itself later on... Interesting (and frustrating).

Have you tried doing a clean install of drivers for your GPU, meaning uninstalling the drivers yourself, rebooting, and then installing new drivers? If not, try that first.

 

[Asherim]

Look at the GPU, it's running at 135MHz / 324MHz, when it should be running at 1114MHz / 3506MHz, and the max GPU usage is 62%. That's not right.

The weird thing is that it does eventually work (right?)... Because your temperatures are fine, so it's not thermal throttling. For some reason your GPU remains at idle speeds when it needs to ramp up because the game is running.

It could also be a power limit, but if that were the case it wouldn't be able to fix itself later on... Interesting (and frustrating).

Have you tried doing a clean install of drivers for your GPU, meaning uninstalling the drivers yourself, rebooting, and then installing new drivers? If not, try that first.

I'll try running a clean install and see how it works, but just thought I'd also mention I never actually saw the readings hit 62% and it said that was the max before I even got in the match, so idk what part that's from.

 

[Stysner]

Ah that can be just a little spike, from anything. Doesn't mean much and isn't wrong, it could be just a millisecond.

It does seem like a driver issue though.

 

[Asherim]

Ah that can be just a little spike, from anything. Doesn't mean much and isn't wrong, it could be just a millisecond.

It does seem like a driver issue though.

I tried the clean install but sadly it had no real change, I still had terrible framerate to start with and it had to even out like usual, still with random drops and spikes. These are the readings I get after it's even'd out if you can gain anything from it: http://oi68.tinypic.com/1565tsm.jpg

 

[Stysner]

Hmmm thats very weird... :S

 

[Asherim]

Hmmm thats very weird... :S

Yeah, the part that bothers me is that I HAD perfect performance, but something apparently got fucked up while installing the cooler or something.

 

[Stysner]

It's not a hardware problem though. The driver isn't telling the card to speed up. If it was a hardware problem it wouldn't "fix" itself after a while consistently. There's something weird with the driver, either some timeout or something.

What you could try is there "well at least I'm trying something" fixes... Like taking the card out and putting it back in again, same for the RAM, resetting BIOS settings...

It's a shot in the dark but it might be better than doing nothing. Maybe try overclocking the card with MSI Afterburner, even just a little (like 10MHz), it might "wake the card up". I don't know at this point...

 

[Asherim]

It's not a hardware problem though. The driver isn't telling the card to speed up. If it was a hardware problem it wouldn't "fix" itself after a while consistently. There's something weird with the driver, either some timeout or something.

What you could try is there "well at least I'm trying something" fixes... Like taking the card out and putting it back in again, same for the RAM, resetting BIOS settings...

It's a shot in the dark but it might be better than doing nothing. Maybe try overclocking the card with MSI Afterburner, even just a little (like 10MHz), it might "wake the card up". I don't know at this point...

I'll look into those options today and tomorrow and let you know if there's any changes. Thanks for all the help either way

 

[Asherim]

It's not a hardware problem though. The driver isn't telling the card to speed up. If it was a hardware problem it wouldn't "fix" itself after a while consistently. There's something weird with the driver, either some timeout or something.

What you could try is there "well at least I'm trying something" fixes... Like taking the card out and putting it back in again, same for the RAM, resetting BIOS settings...

It's a shot in the dark but it might be better than doing nothing. Maybe try overclocking the card with MSI Afterburner, even just a little (like 10MHz), it might "wake the card up". I don't know at this point...

I tried the overclocking method and it didn't change anything sadly, but having the application open did make it easier to monitor my clock speeds and I noticed that they fluctuate really rapidly both in gameplay and in the menus if anything happens, IE: I can sit at the menu screen at 60 fps all I want, but once I choose an option or something changes my speeds drop from ~1100/3500 down to ~150/300 or so. And during gameplay it happens basically any time anybody does anything within my line of sight, so every time an enemy or something shows up, it drops me down and locks up the game till it ramps back up again. Like I said, these drops get progressively less and less frequent as the match goes on which I think has something to do with my computer basically just saying "Okay, I've been processing this long enough or I've processed this once already, I don't have as much trouble with it now" even though it repeats the process again once a new match starts.

 

[Stysner]

You could try setting power management (in Windows) from balanced to performance, maybe that'll help.

Windows 10:

Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Power Options

Click on "show additional plans"

Select High Performance.

It's similar for 7 and 8.

 

[Asherim]

You could try setting power management (in Windows) from balanced to performance, maybe that'll help.

[EDIT] :

Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Power Options

Click on "show additional plans"

Select High Performance.

Already tried, didn't work 🙁

 

[Asherim]

No clue if this is accurate or just a glitch, but my clock speed now reads a constant 1114 across all monitoring softwares even after reboot, whether I'm running anything or not and while it no longer shows any fluctuation, performance dips still hit the same as they did when the software showed them.

 

[Stysner]

No clue if this is accurate or just a glitch, but my clock speed now reads a constant 1114 across all monitoring softwares even after reboot, whether I'm running anything or not and while it no longer shows any fluctuation, performance dips still hit the same as they did when the software showed them.

That's actually stupid, I have no clue what's going on then... If it's not too big of a deal to make a backup I would re-install Windows if I were you, check if it fixes it... If not, I hope you're still under warranty....

If you still have that 660, what happens if you pop that one in?

 

[Asherim]

No clue if this is accurate or just a glitch, but my clock speed now reads a constant 1114 across all monitoring softwares even after reboot, whether I'm running anything or not and while it no longer shows any fluctuation, performance dips still hit the same as they did when the software showed them.

That's actually stupid, I have no clue what's going on then... If it's not too big of a deal to make a backup I would re-install Windows if I were you, check if it fixes it... If not, I hope you're still under warranty....

If you still have that 660, what happens if you pop that one in?

Yeah, no, the 660 just does the same stuff with worse overall performance, still starts out terrible and just kinda slowly improves. The 660 was stuck too I noticed, stayed at 550/3000 the whole time, idle or not. And I already did a reinstall of Windows just the other day.

--UPDATE-- I did manage to unfreeze my clock by uninstalling the MSI utilities and stuff, so that's good... I guess

 

[Stysner]

No clue if this is accurate or just a glitch, but my clock speed now reads a constant 1114 across all monitoring softwares even after reboot, whether I'm running anything or not and while it no longer shows any fluctuation, performance dips still hit the same as they did when the software showed them.

That's actually stupid, I have no clue what's going on then... If it's not too big of a deal to make a backup I would re-install Windows if I were you, check if it fixes it... If not, I hope you're still under warranty....

If you still have that 660, what happens if you pop that one in?

Yeah, no, the 660 just does the same stuff with worse overall performance, still starts out terrible and just kinda slowly improves. The 660 was stuck too I noticed, stayed at 550/3000 the whole time, idle or not. And I already did a reinstall of Windows just the other day.

--UPDATE-- I did manage to unfreeze my clock by uninstalling the MSI utilities and stuff, so that's good... I guess

Do you have GeForce Experience installed? If so, remove that, reinstall (normal, without GeForce Experience) drivers.

 

[Asherim]

No clue if this is accurate or just a glitch, but my clock speed now reads a constant 1114 across all monitoring softwares even after reboot, whether I'm running anything or not and while it no longer shows any fluctuation, performance dips still hit the same as they did when the software showed them.

That's actually stupid, I have no clue what's going on then... If it's not too big of a deal to make a backup I would re-install Windows if I were you, check if it fixes it... If not, I hope you're still under warranty....

If you still have that 660, what happens if you pop that one in?

Yeah, no, the 660 just does the same stuff with worse overall performance, still starts out terrible and just kinda slowly improves. The 660 was stuck too I noticed, stayed at 550/3000 the whole time, idle or not. And I already did a reinstall of Windows just the other day.

--UPDATE-- I did manage to unfreeze my clock by uninstalling the MSI utilities and stuff, so that's good... I guess

Do you have GeForce Experience installed? If so, remove that, reinstall (normal, without GeForce Experience) drivers.

Did that already when I uninstalled MSI utilities and such. And I found out that the clock wasn't actually "stuck": So I can get the clock to stay at 1114 throughout gameplay if I set it to maximum performance in Nvidia control panel, but then EVERYTHING ramps it up to that, including simple stuff like Chrome which is why it was stuck at 1114 because I had the stuff open to monitor it and what-not, but if I set it to adaptive, then it fixes that issue but fluctuates during gameplay and fucks with things, either way I'm still getting all the same issues... and from what I played actually worse general performance.