Weird drop of GPU perf

[Spakes]

Hi everyone.

So, here's the story first. When I tested cooling perf on my MSI GS63VR 6RF Stealth Pro (changed thermal compound to MX-4, works like a charm) by stresstesting CPU (which was undervolted by 140 mV offset via Intel XTU, usually it doesn't restart even in heaviest load possible) and GPU (was turbo'd by 200 MHz on chip and 350 MHz on memory, yes, I can overclock on Stealth after I reinstalled Windows) using AIDA64 and FurMark simultaneously, I did maybe a wrong thing: tried to start GPU Burn-In while AIDA64 was stresstesting CPU. It caused a system lock-off, after which I rebooted my laptop the hard way (long press of power button). Later I noticed that GTX 1060 wasn't detected neither by Furmark, nor system. GPU-Z showed it, but there were bunch of zeros. Ok, reinstalled a driver to a fresh one (w/o DDU, which was probably dumb, and I didn't look why driver wasn't working, so can't say now), from 385.69 to 390.65. Ok, GTX 1060 was detected, tested in Furmark+AIDA64, all good, launch Hellblade and see, what I didn't want to see - avg 25-30 fps on 1080p Very High... Launched Dirt Rally benchmark (I had xml file from before, all 60 on 1080p, 2xMSAA, Untra with VSync), saw a huge drop of perfomance (22 min, 48 avg, 60 max) on same settings, benchmarks wfom internet show 100+ fps on 1080p Ultra using GTX 1060. Started digging.

tl;dr: GTX 1060 gives half of fps it's capable of originally.

What i did so far: Checked my system with Dr. Web CureIt! (even with Dirt Rally running benchmark on loop, so CureIt! could check RAM) and Emsisoft Emergency Kit, they both found something, that I had for a while and that didn't and still doesn't do any harm to system. So miner is not a reason. Throttling is out of a list, too. In Dirt Rally with Turbo Mode enabled in Dragon Center MSI Afterburner showed 2050 MHz on a chip, 4353 on memory, 97-100% load, less than 75 degrees Celsius (which is below thermal throttling), CPU wasn't loading more than for 30%, no threads were loading for more that 40%. When nothing is loaded, there's no load on neither CPU nor GPU that wasn't caused by me.

Now, the big part of that problem is that on every driver from 385.69 (last used by me before) to 390.77 same sh!t (sorry, can't realize the root of a problem for 3 days) happens with perf drop. Dirt Rally on 720p Ultra Low ran perfectly fine, with nice fps bump (as it should've been, except with 2 times more fps).

The only thing I noticed that there was svchost.exe running from System32, but launched by User, not system. Virustotal didn't see a problem in it, killing those 3 processes do not do a thing, because they get back.

Right now I have: Windows 10 Pro N 15063 (1709), cleaned by DWS_lite, updates are banned, BIOS wasn't updated yet, so there's no updates from Meltdown and Spectre, GS63VR 6RF with 1060 6 GB, which gives half of its perfomance.

I don't want to reinstall a Windows (if possible, there's a lot of stuff to reinstall), and warranty isn't an option since laptop was ordered from USA, and I'm in Russia. Any suggestions? I guess, there's no mechanical damage that I could verify.

[Ace McPlane]

14 minutes ago, Spakes said:

Hi everyone.

So, here's the story first. When I tested cooling perf on my MSI GS63VR 6RF Stealth Pro (changed thermal compound to MX-4, works like a charm) by stresstesting CPU (which was undervolted by 140 mV offset via Intel XTU, usually it doesn't restart even in heaviest load possible) and GPU (was turbo'd by 200 MHz on chip and 350 MHz on memory, yes, I can overclock on Stealth after I reinstalled Windows) using AIDA64 and FurMark simultaneously, I did maybe a wrong thing: tried to start GPU Burn-In while AIDA64 was stresstesting CPU. It caused a system lock-off, after which I rebooted my laptop the hard way (long press of power button). Later I noticed that GTX 1060 wasn't detected neither by Furmark, nor system. GPU-Z showed it, but there were bunch of zeros. Ok, reinstalled a driver to a fresh one (w/o DDU, which was probably dumb, and I didn't look why driver wasn't working, so can't say now), from 385.69 to 390.65. Ok, GTX 1060 was detected, tested in Furmark+AIDA64, all good, launch Hellblade and see, what I didn't want to see - avg 25-30 fps on 1080p Very High... Launched Dirt Rally benchmark (I had xml file from before, all 60 on 1080p, 2xMSAA, Untra with VSync), saw a huge drop of perfomance (22 min, 48 avg, 60 max) on same settings. Started digging.

What i did so far: *coming, published too soon*

Right now I have: Windows 10 Pro N 15063 (1709), cleaned by DWS_lite, updates are banned, BIOS wasn't updated yet, so there's no updates from Meltdown and Spectre, GS63VR 6RF with 1060 6 GB, which gives half of its perfomance.

Try doing a 3dmark firestrike test instead and compare it to others with the button. 

 

I'm not sure what happened here.

Maybe when you installed the new driver your refresh rate got changed.

I guess you could check your Nvidia control panel for that.

 

I've never seen this happen before like what you described though, so hopefully more people comment.

[Cyracus]

Jay just made a video where coconutmonkeys card was borked, flashing the cards bios fixed it. Could be that your cards bios got corrupted when you tried having aida64 and the burn-in test. You could try using ddu and reinstalling drivers to see if that helps, and there's always trying a clean install, or if it's under warranty that might be preffered to reflashing the gpu bios yourself

 

[Ace McPlane]

Just now, Cyracus said:

Jay just made a video where coconutmonkeys card was borked, flashing the cards bios fixed it. Could be that your cards bios got corrupted when you tried having aida64 and the burn-in test. You could try using ddu and reinstalling drivers to see if that helps, and there's always trying a clean install, or if it's under warranty that might be preffered to reflashing the gpu bios yourself

 

Yea, don't flash the GPU's bios unless it's your last resort. I've heard some horror stories about people borking their cards that way.

[Spakes]

2 minutes ago, Cyracus said:

Jay just made a video where coconutmonkeys card was borked, flashing the cards bios fixed it. Could be that your cards bios got corrupted when you tried having aida64 and the burn-in test. You could try using ddu and reinstalling drivers to see if that helps, and there's always trying a clean install, or if it's under warranty that might be preffered to reflashing the gpu bios yourself

 

Spoiler: DDU didn't help. More on that in a moment, I'm still editing a post.

[Cyracus]

1 minute ago, stateofpsychosis said:

Yea, don't flash the GPU's bios unless it's your last resort. I've heard some horror stories about people borking their cards that way.

sorry, guess I should've listed the preferred order of doing things, 1.ddu & reinstall drivers 2.check for physical damage/issues 3.clean install os 4.warranty? 5.flash bios

I don't think there's any other steps to throw in there but I don't claim to be a pro either so... best of luck OP

[Ace McPlane]

1 minute ago, Cyracus said:

sorry, guess I should've listed the preferred order of doing things, 1.ddu & reinstall drivers 2.check for physical damage/issues 3.clean install os 4.warranty? 5.flash bios

I don't think there's any other steps to throw in there but I don't claim to be a pro either so... best of luck OP

Honestly, I think the real reason why people bork their cards this way is because they aren't careful enough about getting the right bios. They just look up evga 970 or whatever and don't realize that there's always more than one type.

So, OP,

if you do resort to flashing the bios

be one of the smart ones and use the model number to get the exact support page for the card.

Installing the wrong driver doesn't kill anything. Installing the wrong bios would be a disaster.

[Spakes]

3 minutes ago, Cyracus said:

sorry, guess I should've listed the preferred order of doing things, 1.ddu & reinstall drivers 2.check for physical damage/issues 3.clean install os 4.warranty? 5.flash bios

I don't think there's any other steps to throw in there but I don't claim to be a pro either so... best of luck OP

Also, it's a laptop... So there's no bios for that available, I suppose.

[Ace McPlane]

2 minutes ago, Spakes said:

Also, it's a laptop...

Well, that makes troubleshooting a little harder sadly. Hopefully this issue is on the software end.

If not, don't go poking around in there. Laptops are really hard to get back together these days.

Use your warranty if we can't figure it out with basic software level troubleshooting steps.

 

Oh and don't tell them what you did with the overclock so they don't just blame you for the issue and refuse to replace it.

Greasy advice, but seriously don't tell them that.

[Spakes]

Just now, stateofpsychosis said:

Well, that makes troubleshooting a little harder sadly. Hopefully this issue is on the software end.

If not, don't go poking around in there. Laptops are really hard to get back together these days.

Use your warranty if we can't figure it out with basic software level troubleshooting steps.

Read the post again, please, I added some info (published too early, sorry).

[Spakes]

I'll try FireStrike now, though.

[Ace McPlane]

Just now, Spakes said:

I'll try FireStrike now, though.

Firestrike ignores your monitor refresh rate and all of that so if the problem doesn't occur again with that benchmark, I'd say we can fix this.

Did you check your Nvidia control panel under resolutions I believe..

on the resolution you're using, there's a refresh rate option to the right in hertz.

Sometimes this gets set to 30 for some reason.

That would explain the sudden drop in FPS.

If that's the case, change it back to 60 or whatever your monitor can handle.

[Cyracus]

5 minutes ago, Spakes said:

Also, it's a laptop... So there's no bios for that available, I suppose.

Speccy might be able to help you identify the gpu so you could find the proper bios for it, if you can't figure something else out https://www.ccleaner.com/speccy 

[Ace McPlane]

3 minutes ago, Spakes said:

I'll try FireStrike now, though.

Oh, and leave svchost.exe  alone. That's supposed to be running.

[Spakes]

Just now, stateofpsychosis said:

Firestrike ignores your monitor refresh rate and all of that so if the problem doesn't occur again with that benchmark, I'd say we can fix this.

Did you check your Nvidia control panel under resolutions I believe..

on the resolution you're using, there's a refresh rate option to the right in hertz.

Sometimes this gets set to 30 for some reason.

That would explain the sudden drop in FPS.

If that's the case, change it back to 60 or whatever your monitor can handle.

This is not a case since I'm on internal display that is run by Intel HD 530. Still outputs 1080p60, as it should. And VSync doesn't do anything to perf in games, too.

 

[Spakes]

1 minute ago, stateofpsychosis said:

Oh, and leave svchost.exe  alone. That's supposed to be running.

Not when launched by User profile, isn't it?

[Ace McPlane]

Just now, Spakes said:

This is not a case since I'm on internal display that is run by Intel HD 530. Still outputs 1080p60, as it should. And VSync doesn't do anything to perf in games, too.

 

Okay, that's not it then.

Sorry, yea I meant screen not monitor. It can still happen with laptops too.

 

[Ace McPlane]

Just now, Spakes said:

Not when launched by User profile, isn't it?

Yea, I've seen that before. It's fine.

[DildorTheDecent]

So you updated the GPU driver and now everything sucks?

 

Well then just go back to 385.69.

 

DDU + install 385.69 and give that a shot. Shouldn't have to delve into BIOS flashing.

[Spakes]

Just now, DildorTheDecent said:

So you updated the GPU driver and now everything sucks?

 

Well then just go back to 385.69.

 

DDU + install 385.69 and give that a shot. Shouldn't have to delve into BIOS flashing.

You didn't read a post, did you? That didn't help, otherwise I wouldn't ask here.

[Ace McPlane]

1 minute ago, DildorTheDecent said:

So you updated the GPU driver and now everything sucks?

 

Well then just go back to 385.69.

 

DDU + install 385.69 and give that a shot. Shouldn't have to delve into BIOS flashing.

The problem started to occur after running furmark and aida64 at the same time apparently.

[Ace McPlane]

3 minutes ago, Spakes said:

You didn't read a post, did you? That didn't help, otherwise I wouldn't ask here.

OP,

Did you reset all of your overclocks back to factory defaults including your CPU overclock?

[Spakes]

Just now, stateofpsychosis said:

OP,

Did you reset all of your overclocks back to factory defaults including your CPU overclock?

CPU was only undervolted, it's a GPU that was overclocked. But resetting CPU VCore and GPU Overclocking didn't do anything, too. 

[DildorTheDecent]

2 minutes ago, Spakes said:

You didn't read a post, did you? That didn't help, otherwise I wouldn't ask here.

With that sentence structure? Hell no. Learn to paragraph please. Unless that's not taught in Russian schools?

 

If new driver sucks, use old one, ez.

Just now, stateofpsychosis said:

The problem started to occur after running furmark and aida64 at the same time apparently.

I'm not surprised. Driver probably called it quits and disconnected GPU to prevent damage.

 

That or laptop itself locked/freezes to prevent power overdraw. Wouldn't say laptops are built for very heavy power usage.

 

Nobody actually uses Furmark anymore for proper stress tests. Easier to use something more realistic, like TimeSpy stress test.

[Ace McPlane]

Just now, Spakes said:

CPU was only undervolted, it's a GPU that was overclocked. But resetting CPU VCore and GPU Overclocking didn't do anything, too. 

Shit, honestly,

start up that warranty process now.

They'll give you some better troubleshooting steps than we can before they agree to replace it.

 

Again, don't tell them what you did to it with the overclock.

These guys look for any reason to blame the user for the problem so that they don't have to replace the thing. Don't give them one.