GTX 970 FPS Issue

[tmatthews94]

Hi guys,

 

I'm having some issues with my GTX 970's performance, and no it's not due to the whole VRAM issue, as my memory needs almost never go over 3500MB.

The issue I have is that I am getting FPS performance well below what it should be.

 

I built my PC in the middle of November last year (2014) and I used it to play games such as: BF4, Tomb Raider, AC Black Flag, Far Cry 4 and smaller titles like Kerbal Space Program, with no performance issues whatsoever. I could run all of those games on ultra settings with FPS performance in the correct range in which it should be - e.g. BF4 would run at 80+ FPS on ultra.

 

However, during December, BF4 suffered a FPS drop to around 30-40 FPS on ultra, making it unplayable (it's really hard to go from 80+ FPS to something as low as 40. I had to turn the graphics settings down to low for it to be played! The strange thing is that none of the other games had performance drops so I wrote it off as one of the countless BF4 issues.

 

Around the end of January, I updated my NVIDIA drivers to the latest ones and used GeForce Experience to apply optimal settings to BF4, which seemed to temporarily fix the FPS issue.

However, it is back now. I played some BF Hardline beta and my FPS was first around 65 on ultra, which is below what I've seen on youtube where people have gotten around 85+ FPS on ultra. Now my BF Hardline beta has gone down to 40 FPS rendering it unplayable on ultra settings.

I decided to run Heaven 4.0 on 1920x1080 on extreme, full-screen and extreme tessellation, and this gave me a competitive average FPS of 62.

However, later the same day I ran Heaven 4.0 on just the extreme preset, which gave me an average FPS of 50???

 

I'm a little worried here as to what the issue is.

In game my GPU temps never go above 70 and the same can be said for my CPU.

 

Here are my PC specs:

 

• CPU
  i5 4690K @ 4.40GHz
• Motherboard
  Gigabyte Z97-UD3H
• RAM
  Corsair Vengeance 2x4GB DDR3 1600MHz
• GPU
  Gigabyte GTX 970 Windforce 3X @ 1500Mhz
• Case
  Corsair Obsidian 450D
• Storage
  Corsair Force 120GB SSD, Seagate Barracuda 1TB HDD
• PSU
  Corsair RM650
• Display(s)
  23" LG LED IPS Display
• Cooling
  Corsair H100i
• Keyboard
  Cooler Master Quickfire XT
• Mouse
  Corsair M45

 

I've attached a screenshot of my FPS performance results on various applications

 

Please help me out, any assistance will be greatly appreciated

• Operating System
  Windows 8.1 Pro

[Majestic]

CPU + GPU load graphs during play. If you could log the CPU and GPU clockspeeds aswell... that'd be great.

[tmatthews94]

CPU + GPU load graphs during play. If you could log the CPU and GPU clockspeeds aswell... that'd be great.

So what exactly should I log? Can I do it with HWiNFO 64?

[Majestic]

So what exactly should I log? Can I do it with HWiNFO 64?

 

Use MSI Afterburner, detach the monitoring and enlarge it a bit, select the following (scrap the rest, it'll clutter too much);

 

-GPU Load

-GPU Coreclock

-GPU Temperature

-GPU Power

-CPU Temperature 1 (don't need all 4)

-CPU load 1+2+3+4. (maybe one core is maxing)

 

Use a polling rate of 200ms.

 

Open a CPU-Z window and also monitor the coreclock of your CPU. Make a screenshot of the graphs and post them.

[tmatthews94]

Use MSI Afterburner, detach the monitoring and enlarge it a bit, select the following (scrap the rest, it'll clutter too much);

 

-GPU Load

-GPU Coreclock

-GPU Temperature

-GPU Power

-CPU Temperature 1 (don't need all 4)

-CPU load 1+2+3+4. (maybe one core is maxing)

 

Use a polling rate of 200ms.

 

Open a CPU-Z window and also monitor the coreclock of your CPU. Make a screenshot of the graphs and post them.

 

So magically when I stopped using HWiNFO 64 and used MSI afterburner as a monitor instead, the FPS issue in BF4 was solved, it ran on ultra 1920x1080 at 98 FPS! I don't know if this can be solely attributed to closing HWiNFO 64 whilst gaming? (I do run an OSD with HWiNFO and RivaTuner, however I did not run it when playing BF4 just moments ago)

[Majestic]

Could be HWMonitor using excessive polling that eats up CPU time. Does seem to be some CPU bottlenecking going on there, but BF4 is quite CPU heavy.

[tmatthews94]

I'm going to try play again now with HWiNFO on and see what happens

[tmatthews94]

Okay so it's not HWiNFO because I've now run BF4 with HWiNFO on and it performed just fine. Any ideas as to what the issue was/is? I really don't want it to happen again

[tmatthews94]

Alright so I've figured out what the issue is. I closed nearly everything on my desktop, and found (using MSI afterburner stats) that GPU usage was still at 98%, whilst 'nothing' was happening. So I went into task manager and found the culprit, something called "Steam (32 bit)" not to be confused with the popular games platform with the same name. I know this for a fact because I don't use steam. I looked online and found that it has something to do with NVIDIA's auto-update process? can anyone confirm?

 

UPDATE: I found this: https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/791439/i-think-my-gtx-770-is-overheating/?offset=21

 

So apparently it is malware that has to do with bitcoin mining, how do I get rid of it?

 

UPDATE: I cleared my PC of the steam malware and managed to fix the FPS performance issue. Thanks for all the help