Question Weird FPS drop/spike on semi-new PC that never had this issue before ?

nabbate

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Mar 1, 2018
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Hello,

I'm dealing with some weird issues with my PC and I can't seem to figure out what is going on. I've done a few benchmarks and my PC scores just above average on these tests which is completely throwing me off. I only truly noticed this issue about 3-4 weeks ago when I downloaded Total War:Rome II and tried to siege down a city that included a army. When I selected my army and moused over the city my FPS went from 144 (I limit my FPS to this) all the way down to 10-15 FPS. I thought it was weird, so I reinstalled Total War:Warhammer III to play as the new DLC for the chaos dwarfs was coming out (Which is now out). And what do you know I get a few turns in and the same issue happens when I go to siege down a city with an army in it my FPS plummets to 10-15. I now knew something was up because it was two separate games and one was a very recent game.

I began to do trial and error. I de-selected the army and moused over the city with the army and it was completely fine. I started a new campaign and instantly selected my army and moused over other armies that I could already see, and it was always random but some armies I moused over would cause this issue even outside of cities. Now I am hyper focused on this weird FPS issue, and I decide to turn on my framerate graph and notice it's smooth with random small spikes, that now I can see on the graph I can feel when I play. I did something I shouldn't have done but I immediately went scorched earth and DDU my graphics driver and installed the most recent one and now it became worse and every game I played or installed had these just ungodly stutters or FPS drops that were just an immediate spike on the graph.

Now, I made an even worse decision and reinstalled windows and now all the games I once played decently smooth or smooth have these stuttering and FPS spikes. When doing my trial and error for each game I notice most of these spikes happen when it's something like the UI pops something up like a prompt or something of the sort. Sometimes I can be walking around in an area and get them but that might just be specific games I need to retune again. I noticed when I hoover my mouse over options and select something or move the mouse fast over options or menus it kills performance. I even went as far as the download Star Wars: Galactic battleground (Age of Empires but star wars) and was getting these weird FPS issues including when I had a builder selected and moused over the options it would cause these issues. I've never had an issue with this PC before and I am beginning to wonder if a recent windows update did this?

Some things I noticed for the Total War FPS drop that was constant my CPU and GPU usage would also go down to almost nothing. Though when I have the spikes nothing seems to be affected. Though it might happen to fast I just can't tell. There just no noticeable change on the graphs.

I feel like I tried a bunch of things (I'll list below) and nothing worked. And now all my games are basically unplayable due to the fact it's just a constant spike-fest when dealing with the UI in some games or when something specific happens on the screen. Like when moving the mouse simply over options sometimes it just freezes as well, and you can feel it.

I tried:
  • DDU graphics drivers
  • Reinstalling windows
  • Turning on and off game mode
  • Turning on and off Hardware acceleration
  • Disabling dynamic tick
  • Removing my second monitor (Main is 144 while second is 60)
  • When windows reinstalled only installed steam and game and still had the issues.
  • Disabled steam overlay
  • disabled hardware acceleration on Edge
  • disabling Fullscreen optimization
  • reinstalling/updating drivers for everything.
  • Tried playing with wifi disabled
  • changed polling rate on mouse
  • Checked temps GPU never breaks 60c underload, CPU varied by game 50-60c max underload as well
  • Turning XMP on and off

PC Specs:
MSI Gaming Geforce 3070TI 8GB
G.SKILL Ripjaws V Series 32GB(2 X 16GB) F4-3600C16D-32GVKC (Found that this wasn't under the compatible rams for the mother board. The 16GB version was. Could this be an issue?)
WD Black SN750 NVMe m.2 2280 1TB
MSI MPG Z490 Gaming Edge WiFi
Intel i9-10850k
Seasonic Focus GX-850, 850W 80+ Gold
Corsair iCUE H100i RGB Pro XT

Any Tips on what I might be able to try next would be greatly appreciated. I think something hardware is up? I just can't tell, and it doesn't seem like anyone else is having this issue but me. As of right now I am on another fresh install of windows, fully updated drivers, steam, games, and MSI Afterburner installed. I turned on Hardware Acceleration as well but open to try anything else at this point.

It is late here so I definitely might have missed something I tried or some details pertaining to the issues, but this is the gist of it.

Thank you if you read all of that!
 

nabbate

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Mar 1, 2018
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10,520
Have you tried updating the bios?
My bios is on what I think is 1A and there is now 1C I will go out and get a new flash drive as I have lost mine during moving. I also had enhanced mouse pointer on as well, so I just turned that off. I will report once I update the bios.

EDIT: Sadly, the bios update did not help and same for removing enhanced mouse pointer. Does anyone know of any decent driver versions for the 3070ti? Or is it possible to roll back windows to other versions?

EDIT 2: I downloaded Latencymon to see if there was anything going on with drivers and noticed even with opening web pages on edge my nvlddmkm.sys shot up to 1038.191111 causing the top to pop out the message my system seems to be basically instable. This might be part of the issue?
 
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Have you tried just using the cpu graphics too see if the slowness continues? I know you can't play the same games with the cpu graphics but it could give you an idea if it may be your gpu or your system that is the problem.
 

nabbate

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Mar 1, 2018
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Have you tried just using the cpu graphics too see if the slowness continues? I know you can't play the same games with the cpu graphics but it could give you an idea if it may be your gpu or your system that is the problem.
After trying a few more things last night I think it is actually an issue with the GPU itself or a driver related to it. I turned on maximum performance for power in Nvidia control panel under global settings, instead of game by game which I normally do. This resolved some of my issues with performance hits from hoovering over UI menus/tabs and the latency issues with Nvidia drivers themselves.

Though I am still getting what I would consider FPS spikes or stutter spikes that freeze everything from time to time depending on areas that I am in or simply opening a menu causes it to happen. I assume now my remaining issue is something to do with shaders? But if my 3070ti is having issues with shaders is that a problem with the card itself because I've tried multiple different drivers and still have this issue.

I also ran a userbenchmark yesterday and everything once again was still above average for each part of the PC.
 
After trying a few more things last night I think it is actually an issue with the GPU itself or a driver related to it. I turned on maximum performance for power in Nvidia control panel under global settings, instead of game by game which I normally do. This resolved some of my issues with performance hits from hoovering over UI menus/tabs and the latency issues with Nvidia drivers themselves.

Though I am still getting what I would consider FPS spikes or stutter spikes that freeze everything from time to time depending on areas that I am in or simply opening a menu causes it to happen. I assume now my remaining issue is something to do with shaders? But if my 3070ti is having issues with shaders is that a problem with the card itself because I've tried multiple different drivers and still have this issue.

I also ran a userbenchmark yesterday and everything once again was still above average for each part of the PC.
What makes you point out a shader problem? Have you double checked your memory is running at 3600mhz? Use gpuz to check for any anomalies and that it is running at 16x.
 

nabbate

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Mar 1, 2018
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What makes you point out a shader problem? Have you double checked your memory is running at 3600mhz? Use gpuz to check for any anomalies and that it is running at 16x.
Just some posts that I've seen online. I might need to do a little more digging on other posts but there was a few that seemed to resonate with me and my current issue. All of those posts indicated a shader cache issue and recommended deleting Nvidia's cache folder and basically resetting it. Though I thought it would've been reset any time I did a clean windows install unless the driver that windows initially downloads causes the actual issue?

Yes I checked them yesterday and both the ram was at 3600 and my pcie was at 16x from what I could see at least.

I will download GPUz and double check from that app itself. Will update in 30ish minutes.

EDIT: Ran gpuz and didn't see anything out of the ordinary from what I personally could tell. If there is a specific log or something, you want me to do let me know and I will do them and post them here.
 
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See if it helps if you use two seperate pcie power cables instead of one cable two connectors and use the first of each cable if you don't already do that.

How are the cpu clocks when the drops occur?
He said the cpu and gpu will go down to almost zero when the fps drops. With his setup he should not be having any problems playing those games.