Random FPS drops with gtx 260 216

[wicky woo]

I had been getting random fps drops with my gtx 260 216 only when i play games. Example being when I play Dawn of War 2 chaos rising, everything will at some point randomly freeze for a second or two, and then my fps will drop from 140+ to 30-20 fps. Its quite annoying, and its not only affecting the one game. If the random fps drop occurs , if effects all other games i start up until i restart my computer, after which my fps returns to normal. Example: I did a benchmark and had gotten 180 fps beforehand, and afterwards after this fps freeze/drop I ran the test again and got 40 fps. I have checked for new drivers and reinstalled drivers. But the problem still continues. I have checked my GPU temps and they are 45-47C idle, and 54-74C load.

Specs:
GTX 260 216 896mb
Windows 7 64 bit
4 GB DDR2 G.skill
Q9550
Asus p5q pro
600W gameXstream

 

[Liu kang baking a pie]

Try disabling vsync first

 

[wicky woo]

Try disabling vsync first

vsync doesn't have any effect on this problem, considering its like my video craps out or something and has the performance of a 9500gt when the problem occurs, but is fine after a restart.

 

[Liu kang baking a pie]

Did you disable it?

did you update your drivers to the latest possible?

Can you please tell me what resolution do you play at and what frequency your monitor runs on?

 

[wicky woo]

Did you disable it?

did you update your drivers to the latest possible?

Can you please tell me what resolution do you play at and what frequency your monitor runs on?

Yes disabled, Yes drivers are updated , even tried fresh reinstall, and I play at 1680x1050, 60Hz

 

[Liu kang baking a pie]

Yes disabled, Yes drivers are updated , even tried fresh reinstall, and I play at 1680x1050, 60Hz

now how did you get 180 fps when your monitor only throws out 60fps?
Did you use a driver cleaner when you updated your drivers? I notice with the new nvidia drivers there's a clean uninstall function. Either you should use that function or a driver cleaner. If you haven't done so I suggest you download driver sweeper from guru3d site and reinstall the drivers after the sweep.

What antivirus are you using?

 

[wicky woo]

now how did you get 180 fps when your monitor only throws out 60fps?
Did you use a driver cleaner when you updated your drivers? I notice with the new nvidia drivers there's a clean uninstall function. Either you should use that function or a driver cleaner. If you haven't done so I suggest you download driver sweeper from guru3d site and reinstall the drivers after the sweep.

What antivirus are you using?

By the way you can still register 180 fps with Fraps or EVGA precision fps monitor , but it displays only 60, still reads 180 fps.
Yes I used a driver cleaner from guru3d, it was the first thing I did.
I'm using norton internet security 2010

 

[Liu kang baking a pie]

By the way you can still register 180 fps with Fraps or EVGA precision fps monitor , but it displays only 60, still reads 180 fps.
Yes I used a driver cleaner from guru3d, it was the first thing I did.
I'm using norton internet security 2010

we are going to start nailing the possible problems and try to eliminate them.
First I need you to uninstall norton. use the norton removal tool from their site.
After you removed it then test the game again.

 

[iam2thecrowe]

yeah, i suspect something is happening in the background, like virus scan, updates or something. Check your HDD light when these low FPS moments are happening to see if its going nuts trying to load something. Removing /disabling some background processes or even adding more ram could be the key.

 

[wicky woo]

yeah, i suspect something is happening in the background, like virus scan, updates or something. Check your HDD light when these low FPS moments are happening to see if its going nuts trying to load something. Removing /disabling some background processes or even adding more ram could be the key.

I doubt it's my ram usage or hard drive due to the fact that the fps will stay low in call games almost no matter what until I restart my computer, to which my fps returns normal. I checked my ram and cpu usage and it's not above or below normal when this happens, although my video card does seem to run a little amount cooler when I get the hard fps drop until restart.

 

[iam2thecrowe]

well if its good on a clean boot then it must be something loading at a certain time or hard drive corruption/ram corruption regardless of what your cpu useage says. CPU useage doesnt have to be high for everything to slow down. Just another process running at higher priority or some data/hardware corruption/fault

 

[asteldian]

Ah good ol' Norton - the virus people pay to have. Before tearing your hair out I would definately disable it and see how things go. My PC took out a restraining Order on Norton years ago due to being a resource hog

 

[celpas]

^+1.norton has a dramatic effect on hard disk activity.I used to have norton and it actually started causing Hard disj errors on my PC.All I did was uninstall norton but the problem still persisted so I did a complete reformat and now everything is fine.Reformat your pc and your problem will be solved.

 

[simonyee04]

Hi,
How long have you not defrag your harddisk?

 

[Pc Guru_07]

i hope you disable antivirus and internet while playing SP games.

 

[Liu kang baking a pie]

I told him to uninstall it. Antivirus suites and gaming don't go down well together.

 

[wicky woo]

Alright well i've tried all the suggestions so far with antivirus disabling and uninstalling, and it doesn't seem to have an effect. I've looked around and it seems to me that my video card is behaving like its artifacting, except theres no color change or any visual change except for the fps drop until hard restart. Though my video card isn't overclocked I have tried overclocking it to see if the problem occurs at a faster rate, it doesn't. So i'm really at a loss of what to do at this point. I do defrag everyday and i've ran tests to see if there is any corrupt sectors or files in my ram and in my hard drive and there was none found.

 

[ShadeZE]

I have just (in the last few months) started having the exact same problem, and I'm running SLI'd GTX 260 SP 216's (one of them is the old 65nm and the other is a 45nm). I've tried 6 different sets of drivers ranging from most recent all the way back to last November's drivers. CPU and RAM usage stays nominal, as does the paging file, virtual memory, etc.

One thing I did notice is that if I'm running the 'Green vertical SLI indicator bar' while gaming, when whatever is breaking finally 'breaks' and the FPS drop occurs, the green bar gets pinned full (which Nvidia says is an indication that the GPU's are bottlenecking).

All I can figure is that somehow the GPU RAM is getting loaded up and not cleared, and I can't find any commands to flush GPU memory.