Radeon 5850 FPS problem

[ThatBandit]

My friend is having serious issues with her graphics card. A while back, her motherboard died on her, and she ended up having to replace it with a new one. Prior to this she had no issues with her 5850. It ran all of her games fine. Now, she is getting low FPS in Guild Wars 2. She also got low FPS in Final Fantasy XIV 1.0 and the alpha version.

She's tried completely uninstalling and re-installing her drivers and that does work. But whenever she puts her computer to sleep or turns it off, the problem comes back when she turns the computer back on. FPS numbers are sporadic and all over the place for a while, and then they drop down to less than 10 FPS in GW2. So now she has to either keep re-installing her drivers or leave her computer on all the time. Any hints as to a solution to this?

Her current setup is:

i7-3770K cpu
ASUS Sabertooth Z77 motherboard
ATI 5850 HD graphics card
16 gb RAM

I want to reiterate that we've completely cleaned the system of drivers used driver sweeper and re-installed the latest ones. Each time it fixes the problem UNTIL the computer is turned off or goes into sleep mode. Then her FPS drops hard and stays that way until drivers are re-installed again. The card was working fine until we replaced the CPU and motherboard. She had been playing GW2 ever since August 2012 with no problems with excellent FPS.

 

[Tweak155]

I've heard of this more than once. I should have paid attention as to if there was a solution. Did you try older drivers?

 

[Termie]

My guess is that the card is getting stuck at idle clocks. Run MSI Afterburner in the background to monitor the clocks when the drop in fps occurs. That could then be fixed by setting a profile is Afterburner.

It could be that there's a compatibility issue with the new motherboard or that the chipset drivers haven't been installed. Might also see what the PCIe bus speed is in GPUz when gaming.

 

[Maximilian]

MSI afterburner can cause this so if she is already using it, ditch it.

 

[KingFatty]

Agreed, and as with any troubleshoot approach, you should also use a tool to check out what the card is doing.

Maybe use a tool like GPU-Z or whatever, to display the GPU load, temperature, frequency, etc., along with the video card's RAM information.

Then watch for the issue to crop up, and look at the displayed info. Does the problem occur then the GPU load is 100%? Does the problem not happen unless the temperature reaches X degrees? It's good to just watch the video card information to see if it correlates with the problem - look for any kind of pattern.

Maybe the card's cooling was somehow disturbed, so the GPU temp gets too high and the card starts throttling itself to prevent overheating? You'd see that by watching the GPU frequency chart and temp chart, and watching frequency dip when temp reached a threshold.