Inconsistent Frame Rate problem

[Trace6xx]

GTX 970

i5 2500k

8gb 1600 ram

 

I'm having problems when playing a few games. Call of Juarez gunslinger (a game which I was initially impressed with after seeing I could get >100fps) seems to drop the frame rate up and down, I played a few missions with over 100fps but now it'll go very quickly from 40 - 80 and back again making playing a horrible stuttering mess (having the same problem with call of duty black ops 3) Although no problems in games like Killing floor 2 or counter striker go which is odd.

 

Anyway I've attached my gpu usage after loading up call of juarez. So far I've tried updating drivers (on the latest), swapping out my power supply with a higher wattage one which made no difference, and I've tried various different refresh rates, still having the same problem.

 

Maybe my 970 is faulty?

Help!

[jcw150]

What's your cpu usage, ram usage and vram usage?

[Trace6xx]

2 minutes ago, jcw150 said:

What's your cpu usage, ram usage and vram usage?

Hang on I'm just doing a fresh driver install, I'll run the game again and report back.

[Moonzy]

whats your cpu usage?
and power limit?

[Trace6xx]

14 minutes ago, jcw150 said:

What's your cpu usage, ram usage and vram usage?

 

8 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

whats your cpu usage?
and power limit?

Attached the cpu usage whilst playing. Fresh driver install seemed to work for about a minute but the framerate started dropping again.

 

7 minutes ago, huilun02 said:

Should make it obvious

That perhaps the games are badly optimized? Black ops 3 for sure but call of juarez ran brilliantly before this started happening.

[Moonzy]

1 minute ago, Trace6xx said:

-snip-

badly optimized is a possibility
since your gpu, cpu and ram is not hitting full 100%

[Trace6xx]

5 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

badly optimized is a possibility
since your gpu, cpu and ram is not hitting full 100%

It doesn't seem to make sense because I played the first few levels just fine with frame rates over 100. Black ops 3 is definitely poorly optimized but it should be at least playable.

[Monarch]

32 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

badly optimized is a possibility
since your gpu, cpu and ram is not hitting full 100%

That's not how optimization works. If something is unoptimized it uses too much resources for what it's doing.

 

26 minutes ago, Trace6xx said:

It doesn't seem to make sense because I played the first few levels just fine with frame rates over 100. Black ops 3 is definitely poorly optimized but it should be at least playable.

Not all levels are equally CPU demanding. Your CPU is obviously the bottleneck, and possibly ram since yours is only 1600 MHz.

 

Check these out:

 

 

http://wccftech.com/fallout-4-performance-heavily-influenced-by-ram-speed-according-to-report/

[Trace6xx]

19 minutes ago, Monarch said:

That's not how optimization works. If something is unoptimized it uses too much resources for what it's doing.

 

Not all levels are equally CPU demanding. Your CPU is obviously the bottleneck, and possibly ram since yours is only 1600 MHz.

 

Check these out:

 

 

http://wccftech.com/fallout-4-performance-heavily-influenced-by-ram-speed-according-to-report/

I did see that video and thought that could be the issue. But this is a recent problem, every game I've played up until just recently has never had this problem, I even overclocked my cpu just to see if it would make a difference but it didn't.

[Castdeath97]

2 minutes ago, Trace6xx said:

I did see that video and thought that could be the issue. But this is a recent problem, every game I've played up until just recently has never had this problem, I even overclocked my cpu just to see if it would make a difference but it didn't.

Black Ops 3 is once the worst if not the worst triple AAA port this year, so this doesn't surprise me.

[Monarch]

6 minutes ago, Trace6xx said:

I did see that video and thought that could be the issue. But this is a recent problem, every game I've played up until just recently has never had this problem, I even overclocked my cpu just to see if it would make a difference but it didn't.

I've never played Call of Juarez, but since it's an old game I'm assuming it uses high overhead DX10 or 9 and maxes out a single core, and the 2500k is far from having the best single core performance.

[Trace6xx]

24 minutes ago, Monarch said:

I've never played Call of Juarez, but since it's an old game I'm assuming it uses high overhead DX10 or 9 and maxes out a single core, and the 2500k is far from having the best single core performance.

Might be right, but I still can't understand it working fine for a while then suddenly stopped working properly? After I did the clean driver install the game ran just fine for about 2 minutes before dropping again.

[Monarch]

2 minutes ago, Trace6xx said:

Might be right, but I still can't understand it working fine for a while then suddenly stopped working properly? After I did the clean driver install the game ran just fine for about 2 minutes before dropping again.

If the performance is bad at the same exact part of the level it before performed good then you have another issue. But load on the CPU and GPU will differ on different levels and parts of levels, depending on what they're processing and what's going on in the game, and so will performance.

[ivan134]

53 minutes ago, Trace6xx said:

Might be right, but I still can't understand it working fine for a while then suddenly stopped working properly? After I did the clean driver install the game ran just fine for about 2 minutes before dropping again.

It's because he doesn't know what he's talking. Recently, certain people on this forum have been going on a strange crusade against anything that isn't an OC'ed 6 or 8 core i7 and it seems to prevent them from using basic logic. You can tell he doesn't know what he's talking about when he says the reason you're having a hard time running a game as old as Call of Juarez is because you 2500k is "weak."

 

Use DDU whenever you uninstall drivers to make sure it gets rid of everything before installing a new one. If you have "Threaded Optimization" set to On or Auto in your Nvidia control panel, try setting it to off for this game, since a lot of old games don't play nice with this setting. Also, if you're on Windows 10, I suggest reverting to whatever OS you had before until Nvidia gets their drivers sorted out. The problems seem to affect people randomly, and manifest in different ways. If none of these work, you probably have a faulty card and should RMA.

[Trace6xx]

3 hours ago, ivan134 said:

It's because he doesn't know what he's talking. Recently, certain people on this forum have been going on a strange crusade against anything that isn't an OC'ed 6 or 8 core i7 and it seems to prevent them from using basic logic. You can tell he doesn't know what he's talking about when he says the reason you're having a hard time running a game as old as Call of Juarez is because you 2500k is "weak."

 

Use DDU whenever you uninstall drivers to make sure it gets rid of everything before installing a new one. If you have "Threaded Optimization" set to On or Auto in your Nvidia control panel, try setting it to off for this game, since a lot of old games don't play nice with this setting. Also, if you're on Windows 10, I suggest reverting to whatever OS you had before until Nvidia gets their drivers sorted out. The problems seem to affect people randomly, and manifest in different ways. If none of these work, you probably have a faulty card and should RMA.

I think it's from that video, I'm sure the 2500k is still more than capable.

Anyway I disabled thread optimization in the nvidia control panel and just played an hour's worth of call of juarez at a solid 144fps.

Problem still seems to be pretty bad in black ops 3 but I reckon that's because it's eating all 8 gigs of ram. Anyway I have no idea why that would suddenly make a difference, will report back if things go tits up again but thank you!

[Monarch]

3 hours ago, ivan134 said:

It's because he doesn't know what he's talking. Recently, certain people on this forum have been going on a strange crusade against anything that isn't an OC'ed 6 or 8 core i7 and it seems to prevent them from using basic logic. You can tell he doesn't know what he's talking about when he says the reason you're having a hard time running a game as old as Call of Juarez is because you 2500k is "weak."

 

Use DDU whenever you uninstall drivers to make sure it gets rid of everything before installing a new one. If you have "Threaded Optimization" set to On or Auto in your Nvidia control panel, try setting it to off for this game, since a lot of old games don't play nice with this setting. Also, if you're on Windows 10, I suggest reverting to whatever OS you had before until Nvidia gets their drivers sorted out. The problems seem to affect people randomly, and manifest in different ways. If none of these work, you probably have a faulty card and should RMA.

You either didn't read my post properly or you don't grasp what API overhead is and how it can cause a bottleneck along with a CPU with low single-thread performance. If you look at the Afterburner graphs OP posted, you'll see high CPU usage, which clearly shows the game using a lot of CPU resources despite the fact it's old and it shouldn't be too demanding.

[ivan134]

1 hour ago, Trace6xx said:

I think it's from that video, I'm sure the 2500k is still more than capable.

Anyway I disabled thread optimization in the nvidia control panel and just played an hour's worth of call of juarez at a solid 144fps.

Problem still seems to be pretty bad in black ops 3 but I reckon that's because it's eating all 8 gigs of ram. Anyway I have no idea why that would suddenly make a difference, will report back if things go tits up again but thank you!

That's because a lot of hold of games were made to run on only one core, or 2 cores at most, and turning on threaded optimization would make them act wonky. For me, Halo 1 wouldn't even launch if I had it on, and it has caused decreased performance is some other games for me too like TF2. Black Ops 3 is just unoptimized garbage.

[ivan134]

1 hour ago, Monarch said:

You either didn't read my post properly or you don't grasp what API overhead is and how it can cause a bottleneck along with a CPU with low single-thread performance. If you look at the Afterburner graphs OP posted, you'll see high CPU usage, which clearly shows the game using a lot of CPU resources despite the fact it's old and it shouldn't be too demanding.

I did read it and I grasp what it is. What you said was complete nonsense and had absolutely nothing to do with the issues he was having. Read his response to me where one of my solutions I suggested actually worked, because I actually used logic.

[Guest]

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[Guest]

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[Trace6xx]

13 hours ago, ivan134 said:

That's because a lot of hold of games were made to run on only one core, or 2 cores at most, and turning on threaded optimization would make them act wonky. For me, Halo 1 wouldn't even launch if I had it on, and it has caused decreased performance is some other games for me too like TF2. Black Ops 3 is just unoptimized garbage.

Really weird as it was just fine to start with, anyway I'm hoping it's sorted now

 

12 hours ago, sunnaryt said:

could be a driver issue, even uninstalling via conventional means doesn't work sometimes, try ddu and then reinstall

Cheers for the info, I might try a decent uninstaller and try reinstalling the drivers just in case

 

Thanks for the help guys much appreciated!