GPU not being used properly. Driver? Game engine?

euniqe · April 14, 2015

Hey everyone,

So I recently bought a 144hz monitor (1080p). Looks awesome, great purchase. Everything's really smooth and awesome.

I have an EVGA GTX 970 ACX 2.0 FTW graphics card. It can run most games at 144fps@1080p if I lower the graphics somewhat, but i've noticed that in more strenuous games it acts very wierdly. It's hard to describe, so i'll try my best. FYI my cpu is an i7-3770 with a single-core turbo of 4.3ghz. I've never seen it reach 100% usage during any game so I don't think the following is a cpu-bottleneck, although I could be wrong.

What happens, is that the GPU seems to fluctuate core-usage and FPS completely randomly, almost irrespective of demand etc. I've found that if i go from an easy (as in easy to render) situation to a hard situation, the usage doesn't necessarily increase and the fps may just drops instead while the core-usage remains the same. Sometimes, the fps will drop to about 120fps from about 160gps and the core-usage rises only a little bit. The GPU usage and according framerates seem to be performing completely arbitrarily. I turned vsync on in GTA V, for exmaple and it would run at 73% and 110fps. It wasn't trying at all to stay at or even achieve 144fps. The framerate was in no way locked to the monitor's hz. This is the same in other games. It seems the graphics card just doesn't want to do what it's supposed to. I'm almost considering turning on half-vsync on the driver to lock everything to 72fps, at least this would stop the fps fluctuating for no reason.

I have checked at blur busters and the monitor is definitely running at 144hz. I can't tell if it's a problem with my graphics card, or if the games I'm playing just aren't optimised properly. If i max out the settings on the games that do this, more often than not they will peg the GPU to 100% (creating low fps, but 100% usage nonetheless). But I can't EVER get the fps to stay above 144. No matter what I do to the graphics settings, the gpu just does whatever it wants and more often than not goes below 144.

I should add that i have been using RivaTuner with HwInfo to monitor my usage statistics in real time along with the FPS - I haven't tried turning the overlay off to see if it fixes it but I doubt they are causing the problem because this problem never occurred before with my standard 60hz1080p monitor.

Do I have a bad card? is it the games i'm playing? Could it be the monitor driver? I just installed the latest GPU driver and it didn't change anything. Is 144hz such a boutiqe option that games and hardware aren't designed to run it properly? I have literally no idea how to address this situation, any advice would be appreciated.

AlwaysFSX · April 14, 2015

Running a game above 144fps isn't exactly easy. The fluctuating gpu usage could be caused by the game engine, driver, or DirectX. You can reinstall your driver but for the most card your card is working normally.

euniqe · April 14, 2015

But it should be easy if the game is set to reasonable - not high - graphics settings. In other/less graphically-intense games it runs well above 144fps (without vsync).

With vsync on, shouldnt the gpu be trying as hard as possible to attempt to maintain 144fps? In my case, it makes literally no difference to either the usage or fps. I still get about 70% usage with 70% of the monitor's refresh rate on average - which makes no sense to me.