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Nvidia card downlocking in game

D

dorky82

Senior member
I went through 3 gtx460 and right now 465@470.
all 4 cards are downclocking to 405Mhz in the game.
I tried setting nvidia 3d/power to maximum performance and getting same downclocking.

Is this driver problem?
I went through new power supply, new board, new memory , and 4 different vga cards.

Fresh install of windows 7 64bit and latest driver(also tried new beta driver)
 
Return it. I had the same problem, i had to RMA my EVGA SC GTX 460 because of a similar issue. It was hardlocking in games. I ran MSI afterburner software on my G15 keyboard LCD display to show clock speed in real time and was constantly down clocking in games.

I'm in middle of RMA, should get new one next week sometime.
 
what game is it and how do you know its downclocking? can you take a screenshot of a GPUz graph showing the downclock?

try running Furmark in window mode and place GPUz next to it and watch the graphs.
 
What drivers (version number) have you tried? I was having the same problem with the betas listed on Nvidia's site, but then I tried 259.32 and things have become more stable. Haven't had the downclocking issue since.

Also, are you overclocking? That may be causing it.
 
I'm using 259.32 driver and playing starcraft2.
Temp is at 40 idle 65 load.
Im watching msi afterburner to see core clock drop.
Also I can feel my fps drop to half when clock drops.

Dont think its hardware problem because all 4 vga cards did same thing.
tried swapping board, power, memory but didnt fix.

maybe multiple monitor bug in driver?
I'm running 3 monitors right now.
1 with igp, 2 with 465@470.
 
Last edited:
imaheadcase said:
Return it. I had the same problem, i had to RMA my EVGA SC GTX 460 because of a similar issue. It was hardlocking in games. I ran MSI afterburner software on my G15 keyboard LCD display to show clock speed in real time and was constantly down clocking in games.

I'm in middle of RMA, should get new one next week sometime.
Click to expand...

The op's english is pretty bad but I believe he said he went through three cards already and that they're all doing the same thing.
 
Went through 2 gigabytes gtx460 1 msi gtx 460 and now 465@470

I had 700w rockfish power supply and now I have coolermaster 750w(60a single rail)

I think I spent over 6-700 trying to fix this problem.
 
Wow..you have replaced everything. I would check a few different drivers first of all. But I think the 460 only has 1 or 2 driver sets. Try turning off vsync if the game has it. Put a bunch of stress on the card like antialiasing. I had a game downclock on me but forcing maximum performance fixed it. Did you set maximum performance in global settings and the game settings?
 
Did you try Manually selecting the Starcraft2.exe file to customer Power Management Setting to "Prefer Maximum performance" as opposed to doing it globally?

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=304979&page=12

Have you tried 258.96 drivers instead?

If this doesn't work, try forcing Power levels through RivaTuner instead as shown here:
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?p=3450493

Finally, try running GPU-Z and track your GPU speed there as well. Maybe it's a software issue with your G15 keyboard.
 
This is definitely a problem with the GTX460 and Starcraft 2. For some reason the adaptive setting (on by default in the drivers) decides that the gpu isn't being stressed right in the middle of a game and clocks the card down to idle clocks. Lost quite a few games to this before I stumbled in the fix, which obviously isn't working for the OP.

Cross your fingers for the next driver revision to fix the issue.
 
Actually I had this same problem and I had to do the full driver uninstall/reinstall method that comes up with graphics drivers, especially borked nVidia drivers. Go to safemode and remove all nVidia drivers, run driversweeper then boot into normal mode and reinstall drivers.

For a six month or so period every other driver update was causing my card to get stuck in low power 3D mode (415MHz or so).
 
Have you tried on just a single monitor? Does the same thing occur with only one monitor?

Also try disabling the IGP adapter and use just the discrete card.

I know nVidia Surround Gaming (Eyefinitiy equivalent) or whatever they call it didn't work at first and I'm not sure its even been enabled yet with GTX 400 series cards.
 
I wish they would just remove that downclocking "feature". Or give option to enable or disable it. I don't personally have a need/want for it.
 
That is weird, it might be a heat issue. Try taking the fan up to 100 percent with riva ,, and let us know what happens.. Thanks and gg and gl,
 
There are currently many users with issues with several games and the GTX 460, as well as isolated issues with the 470/480

http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=170238&st=320

Low gpu usage, stuttering, lockups. Some of the affected games are Starcraft 2, BFBC2, Crysis. There are quite a few issues noted in that thread with 460 SLI as well as 460 single card.

There was supposed to be a beta driver released last Friday to try and fix the issues but it was delayed until this week but nothing has been released yet, so maybe next week.
 
I am currently testing a new driver that seems to have corrected this issue. Nvidia plans to release this shortly. My GTX480 sometimes downclocked while testing Mafia II. I didn't realize it at first and didn't think to check this until this thread came up. Using the new driver, the only downclocked areas were the menus. While in game, the 480 ran full speeds.

Keys
 
3DVagabond said:
Interesting? So, it's not just a 460 issue? Thanks for the update.
Click to expand...

And it only manifests in certain games which is strange. Must be some sort of command call that triggers this response in the driver. Not a programmer, and lack all the technical jargon associated with it. But it seems to happen in SC2 and Mafia II. I don't have SC2 so I can't test, but it happened in Mafia II for me.
New driver seems to have addressed the issue.
 
Just wanted to check - when the videocard downclocks, are you able to set clocks back up to previous levels manually without restarting? Mine downclocks and I can't reset clocks to higher levels until I restart the PC.

If this is the same problem you experienced, I'm glad to know it's driver-related and also fixed!
 
Just an fyi on my condition may or may not help you.

But when I have a program that uses low power 3d (like youtube) open, then the card will stay on low power 3d clocks.
 
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