Massive drop in frames in GTA V and BF5 gpu failure?

[mopardude87]

I usually resort to my own troubleshooting but this issue has been banging my head against a wall. Despite full gpu usage and a full core clock of 1886 both titles currently with adjusted settings have went from a typical 70+ minimum in BF5 to 31 fps and from 60+ in GTA V to upper 40s. I did driver roll backs and eventually managed to get W7 working with my i7 8700 cause i simply wanted to cross out W10 and any possible issues. The issues actually followed! In my insanity state i figured heck lets see if a fresh W10 install will help so maybe this will?

Never seen a issue like this in my entire 13 years of pc building and gaming. Usually a low frame rate like that indicates a bottleneck or something but this one has me stumped. Gonna launch BF5 in a second and report if the issue has persisted or not. Rest of my system consists of a Asrock Z370M PRO4/i7 8700 non k/16gb Gskill 2666mhz memory. Running it all on a Samsung 860 pro 500gb ssd.

 

[darkswordsman17]

Did you happen to install Intel Spectre/Meltdown patches recently (as in like updated BIOS which finally really fully activated some of them even though you might've had the Windows patches for them for some time)?

Any other software you've added? Have you moved slots on the board, or checked your BIOS to make sure somehow its not running PCIe at not the right spec? Any other errors? Stress testing? Made sure that memory is reported properly (maybe a channel became loose and you're actually running half the memory or something)?

Could you somehow maybe have enabled some recording thing (as in its trying to record and encode your gameplay while the games are running?

Did your SSD fill up (I believe that the fuller an SSD is, especially over time, performance can degrade a lot until you free space back up again)?

 

[mopardude87]

Did you happen to install Intel Spectre/Meltdown patches recently (as in like updated BIOS which finally really fully activated some of them even though you might've had the Windows patches for them for some time)?

Any other software you've added? Have you moved slots on the board, or checked your BIOS to make sure somehow its not running PCIe at not the right spec? Any other errors? Stress testing? Made sure that memory is reported properly (maybe a channel became loose and you're actually running half the memory or something)?

Could you somehow maybe have enabled some recording thing (as in its trying to record and encode your gameplay while the games are running?

Did your SSD fill up (I believe that the fuller an SSD is, especially over time, performance can degrade a lot until you free space back up again)?

I run a pretty standard set up of just MSI AB and whatever client the game requires to play. I'm never recording or doing anything major multi tasking wise or running usually anything at all besides the game. SSD is beyond free with plenty of space. I did run Unigine valley and pulled a 3600 or so score which is about right for the 1070 ti. Anything practical i have done it besides maybe move the card to another slot. I did some prime prime95 and furmark and ran some BF5 which is still having low fps and besides that no instabilities to report. System is beyond cool and overall besides the low fps in BF5 and GTA V the system runs perfectly fine.

This is why i am stumped. It seems like a hidden issue that maybe a select few have dealt with or its a hardware issue i never ran into.

 

[Guru]

I run a pretty standard set up of just MSI AB and whatever client the game requires to play. I'm never recording or doing anything major multi tasking wise or running usually anything at all besides the game. SSD is beyond free with plenty of space. I did run Unigine valley and pulled a 3600 or so score which is about right for the 1070 ti. Anything practical i have done it besides maybe move the card to another slot. I did some prime prime95 and furmark and ran some BF5 which is still having low fps and besides that no instabilities to report. System is beyond cool and overall besides the low fps in BF5 and GTA V the system runs perfectly fine.

This is why i am stumped. It seems like a hidden issue that maybe a select few have dealt with or its a hardware issue i never ran into.

The latest Nvidia driver seems to be really bad for GTA 5 and BF5, you need to install an older driver. 419.67 is the current suggested driver by Rodgo here.

You need to actually do a clean uninstall in safe mode to fully remove the current driver, so that there is no issues. Use DDU.

 

[coercitiv]

The best thing you could do, considering the amount of effort you already put into it, would be to "sanitize" your system as much as possible and afterwards start considering component swaps - a video card swap should help the most in terms of debugging this - either borrow a similar card in terms of performance, or bring your own card to another test system. Even if the issue persists with another card, you still get valuable info.

By "sanitizing" I mean removing everything that is not required for testing and interacts with the system via a data interface (sata, usb, any ports). Alternative or complementary method would be to use software tools such as Process Explorer and LatencyMon to look for high levels of hardware interrupts and latency spikes.

When performance looks bad but everything else looks good (temps, clocks, clean OS and driver install etc) I would definitely check for hardware malfunction that generates high levels of hw interrupts. As I recently got to see for myself, even a deranged secondary disk with no software dependency can bring a system to its knees.

 

[mopardude87]

The best thing you could do, considering the amount of effort you already put into it, would be to "sanitize" your system as much as possible and afterwards start considering component swaps - a video card swap should help the most in terms of debugging this - either borrow a similar card in terms of performance, or bring your own card to another test system. Even if the issue persists with another card, you still get valuable info.

Yeah this was a idea i thought of next but sadly my only other test gpu is a gtx660 but the platform has a i5 4460 and 8gb which may or may not bottleneck in both titles at 1440p.I did test BF4 and while it seemed i stayed above 60 in Operation metro i certainly noticed a major frame drop in that game too. My 1070ti usually on that map never drops under 100 and i was quickly finding drops into the 70s. I gave thought to a possible power supply issue maybe and thought of swapping that one into my tower too. Will be the first thing i do before i move my 1070ti to it. Maybe a friend of mine with his 7700k can let me put my 1070ti in his pc and see but that may be a last resort thing.

The latest Nvidia driver seems to be really bad for GTA 5 and BF5, you need to install an older driver. 419.67 is the current suggested driver by Rodgo here.

I ran 419.17 which for some time gave me no issues. When i mean no issues i had a flawless system then i played some GTA V after like a week of not even running the game then finding those frame drops. I may try 419.67 in the chances i get lucky but i usually never have issues with a nvidia driver. Except when i installed 425.31 and updated W10 to 1809 and ran the Star Wars DXR demo and lost signal to my monitor then had a reset as well every single time i ran that. Since then i had wiped the entire partition and done a install of both W7 and W10 to eliminate possible issues between the os and a possible driver. Same results on both oses its practically a mirrored experience.

 

[BoomerD]

I still wouldn't be surprised if this was caused by a software issue...Tons of people are having problems with the latest batch of Windows updates...including me.

https://www.techspot.com/amp/news/7...-reportedly-hanging-slowing-down-systems.html

 

[mopardude87]

In a interesting twist, i swapped out the psu and sure enough the performance went right up. The best part was when i decided to go back to my old psu confident my issues would come back confirming it was a psu issue. Somehow someway my performance is back where it should be. I swear everything certainly appeared seated correctly and plugged in. Unless just maybe the video card was sagging causing maybe some signaling issues? It does have a accelero 3 cooler on it. Maybe i should zip tie the cooler to something if this is the case idk. I had pulled the gpu as i thought i would test it in another system then i decided to put it back in making sure it was properly seated as well and just test the psu first in my system.

Been building computers since 2006 and i never seen anything like this. Kind of lost for words on what it may be.

Edit: Only tested BF5 so far will confirm with 100% certainty when GTA V is installed again.

 

[BoomerD]

Glad to hear whatever gremlin that caused the problems has moved on...

 

[mopardude87]

Glad to hear whatever gremlin that caused the problems has moved on...

Gremlin does sound about right its very strange for sure. Now on the top of my list for the what the hell is going on. Spots where GTA V were hitting 54 now hit 88 as normal so as you can imagine you can see why i was almost removing my own hair and eating it. I would love any theories from anyone on what it could have possibly been lol.

Either a possible bios glitch ? I did reset it a few times with the same results but when i reseated the gpu i wasn't getting a display till i reset the bios this time. Before the reseat the gpu did look fine so meh idk. All the power cables looked fine and connected before and after reconnecting them after the psu swap. No dust build up of any kind either so its a very strange one. I run a pretty straight forward build with no overclocking or tweaking and nothing major running in any of my games so there was little in the way of conflicting to be honest.

I rarely ask a community for help on something cause honestly any issue that needs resolving i troubleshoot it fairly quickly. This one was beyond me for sure.

 

[mopardude87]

Thank you everyone who participated and offered help and suggestions I would love theories on what it may have been from anyone.

 

[Markfw]

From reading everything (yes a lurker) it would seem to be that the cables, and/or the card were not quite seated right. I don't think that that the old PSU was not giving enough power, but I guess thats also a remote possibility. You will know once you put it back in another box.

 

[darkswordsman17]

I run a pretty standard set up of just MSI AB and whatever client the game requires to play. I'm never recording or doing anything major multi tasking wise or running usually anything at all besides the game. SSD is beyond free with plenty of space. I did run Unigine valley and pulled a 3600 or so score which is about right for the 1070 ti. Anything practical i have done it besides maybe move the card to another slot. I did some prime prime95 and furmark and ran some BF5 which is still having low fps and besides that no instabilities to report. System is beyond cool and overall besides the low fps in BF5 and GTA V the system runs perfectly fine.

This is why i am stumped. It seems like a hidden issue that maybe a select few have dealt with or its a hardware issue i never ran into.

Weird. I think they built-in recording stuff to video drivers, and there's some hotkey that can enable it so thought maybe it was something like that as I recall some people seeing performance drops when recording and not being able to figure out why until they realized they'd been recording.

Good to hear it got resolved. Maybe something just got loosened somehow or maybe dust buildup (or kinda like how NES cartridges used to get buildup from like moisture, and when you changed cables it scraped things clean enough that it was getting better contact again). That's about the only thing I could think of.

 

[darkswordsman17]

Not sure what happened but double posted.

 

[mopardude87]

From reading everything (yes a lurker) it would seem to be that the cables, and/or the card were not quite seated right.

Gpu was certainly locked in the slot but just maybe there was a slight bit of sag and just maybe a few pins in the slot didn't make proper connection? As for the other cables the connections are locked in and i always double check when components are moved. My desk wobbles slightly so just maybe the wobble made the gpu shift a hair? The gpu with the Artic cooler is pretty heavy.

 

[Markfw]

Gpu was certainly locked in the slot but just maybe there was a slight bit of sag and just maybe a few pins in the slot didn't make proper connection? As for the other cables the connections are locked in and i always double check when components are moved. My desk wobbles slightly so just maybe the wobble made the gpu shift a hair? The gpu with the Artic cooler is pretty heavy.

I am just guessing, you asked for feedback, and thats the best I have. I won't argue at all, I have no idea what really happened.

 

[VirtualLarry]

You said in one of your posts, you "tried another slot" for the GPU. Not all slots are wired equivalently, the secondary slot often has less bandwidth than the primary slot, especially on mid-range AM4 boards. (I didn't catch what platform this was.)

 

[coercitiv]

Been building computers since 2006 and i never seen anything like this. Kind of lost for words on what it may be.

Been building computers since a bit longer than that and I can share a similarly baffling story.

The first system built using my own money was based on an Athlon 64 & DFI motherboard. After years of use it was retired to HTPC role, together with a Radeon HD 2000 series card (passively cooled, no separate power connector). After years of use as HTPC, one day the system failed - no video signal. Troubleshooting included a complete reassembly and wire check, including repeated GPU reseats over a couple of days: conclusion was GPU was possibly dead and since all components were old I decided to buy a new cheap card and take it from there. Turns out the new card was incompatible with the motherboard and since I had nothing better to do that night I sloted the old HD 2000 card back in one more time.

It worked. No idea why, no idea what made the system fail in the first place. It continued to work without any other issues for about one more year until I finally decided it was time for an upgrade.

Sometimes I think the gremlin had it's laugh, left for more victims after I bought the new card, and just like me never bothered to check for compatibility. "Lucky me" I guess

 

[DrMrLordX]

I would love theories on what it may have been from anyone.

I blame AMC. And no, not the theatre company . . .

In all seriousness though, I would like to have seen some power numbers taken from a watt meter during your periods of poor performance. Might've helped in diagnosing the problem.

 

[mopardude87]

You said in one of your posts, you "tried another slot" for the GPU. Not all slots are wired equivalently, the secondary slot often has less bandwidth than the primary slot, especially on mid-range AM4 boards. (I didn't catch what platform this was.)

Oh your prob remembering me mentioning i may try another slot. I never came around to that so its sitting in the primary slot. I did pull it out and gave thought to testing it in the i5 4460 computer but decided i will test out the i5s psu so i put the gpu back in. I know about the bandwidth issues on certain slots and its the main reason i didn't even bother swapping.Would have been possibly inconclusive.

Been building computers since a bit longer than that and I can share a similarly baffling story.

Yeah your story was very baffling for sure. Yeah your gremlin had his fun with me i think. I got absolutely nothing else to blame it on. Unless if a gpu shifts ever so slightly causing similar issues to yours or mine? I felt like Clark Griswold trying to get the christmas lights working and just knowing everything is plugged in yet still having issues getting anything to work.