Lower Performance in All Games

[Hiebly]

Hi. I've had lower performance in presumably all of my games (I've only thoroughly tested Battlefield 4 and GTA V prior to having these issues and they're the most demanding titles I have, but I'm assuming other games are affected too).

 

I've tried:

 

- Disabling Windows defender

- Fiddling around with settings in Nvidia control panel (single vs multi display performance mode, prefer max performance, etc.)

- Completely clean install of multiple versions of GeForce drivers

- Ensuring everything is connected properly (power cables, etc.)

- Ran Windows Memory Diagnostic

 

I have no idea why my performance is lower. My avg fps is still decent but my min fps have dropped significantly. In Battlefield 4 my minimum FPS is around 70-80 now, whereas previously I could maintain a constant 110+ FPS. In GTA V my min fps is around 55 whereas previously it was around 75 at the lowest.

 

It resembles a CPU bottleneck, but my CPU is actually higher clocked than before (and this started around 2 weeks ago, I only OC'd my CPU like 4 days ago so it's unrelated).

 

I've monitored CPU clock speeds, CPU temps, GPU clocks, GPU temps while gaming and while FPS is dipping and everything appears in working order. CPU is topping out at about 72C. GPU is between 65-75C. GPU usage is not boosting but that's because it's nowhere close to being 100% used when these low fps occur (like 50-60% GPU usage). I'm even testing at ultra-low-resolution (25% res scale) and still getting the same minimum framerates.

 

It seems like it should be a driver issue - suddenly having what seems to be CPU bottlenecks where there previously wasn't one (while CPU is still operating as it was previously)... but I fully uninstalled previous drivers, manually deleted Nvidia appdata and registry keys, etc. and tried multiple driver versions.

 

I'm probably doing a clean install of Windows tonight (might just take this opportunity to go to Windows 10) but if anyone has any ideas in the meantime to try out, I'm all ears. Thanks.

 

SPECS:

 

i5-4690K @ 4.2GHz, 1.2V (although this occured even in its previous stock configuration)

Gigabyte Z97X-SLI

G.Skill Ripjaws 2x4GB 1600MHz CAS 9

MSI GeForce GTX 980 Ti Gaming LE @ 1000MHz (boost 1240MHz)

A-Data 128GB XPG SX900 SSD

Toshiba 1TB 7200RPM HDD

Corsair RM650 (650W Gold)

Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit

[jcw150]

What is your CPU usage?

[Hiebly]

What is your CPU usage?

 

Varies too much to comfortably estimate an average. Cores are anywhere from 60-100%. They're not abnormally high or maxed out during the low FPS periods however. While just at desktop and on Chrome and such CPU usage is max 10%. There don't appear to be any background tasks eating up resources.