All games start to hitch & drop frames after 2 - 3 hours

MrH

MrH

MrH

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This thread is my last hope before I RMA my card and hope nothing goes wrong (MSI...), unless Overclockers wants to send me a direct replacement ;)

Basically I will be able to play perfectly for hours, no hitching and no frame loss and then in a blink of an eye whatever game I'm playing will start to jolt constantly, and constant frame loss comes with it. I made a video showing this issue, please watch it in 60fps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eo7sEukl6E

When this problem kicks in I can for example close the Witcher and open something less demanding like Counter Strike and the hitching will still be present, restarting the PC usually fixes this.

I'm really hoping someone has some idea what is causing this, maybe from experience, as I really don't want to RMA my card unless I have to.

I've been troubleshooting for 5 days now, I have formatted and installed both Win8.1 and Wn10, reset BIOS, removed overclock, ran all benchmarks (no crashing or errors), memtest, HD Tune and I'm no closer to knowing the problem. I've ordered Digiflex PSU Tester which should arrive tomorrow so I can test the power supply as well.
 
are you watercooling or air? What are the temperatures you are getting?

download cpuid hwmonitor and see what temps you get, could be throttling?

Or maybe one of your hard disks is starting to fail?

Have you tried running the gpu in another computer?
 
Antech Kuhler 620, both CPU and GPU stay around 60c so it's definitely not throttling.

HD Tune showed no issues on my SSD.

I don't have another computer.
 
When the problem surfaces again, check total VRAM (aka GPU memory) usage with a monitoring program such as HWiNFO64, GPU-Z or Afterburner.
 
I don't want to jinx it, but I think I've figured it out. I was wondering what I did differently today, than every other day and the only thing is today I'm using single display mode, whereas every other time I play duplicate monitor mode and play on my TV. I have been playing Witcher III for 8 hours now with no issue, but I'm completely bored now so I'm just going to leave it running overnight as well.
 
Can be a symptom of a memory leak (driver level if it carries over to other games) as well as overheating.

It might be worth trying with anything to do with shadowplay/geforce experience disabled or removed - saw a system the other day where similar would happen but within half an hour of it starting various geforce experience components would throw up error messages and crash out.
 
GFE isn't installed. And I'm not crashing at all, the game just starts to hitch and drop frames. It was fine for 10 hours today, but I just came back to check on it and it was hitching like crazy. I really, really thought it was fixed this time but nope.

By memory leak you meant the game right? I don't think I've ever had this issue without playing Witcher 3 first. If I knew it was the game I could stop stressing over it and just wait for a patch, but I don't know if it's them or my system.
 
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Sometimes a bug within the drivers can prevent memory being freed correctly which may be triggered by a specific game or build up over time... usually as danny mentioned you can see it as increasing VRAM use in GPU-z.

If rebooting fixes it until several hours have past again it suggests a software issue as hardware issues like overheating would normally start happening again fairly soon after the reboot.
 
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I totally forgot to check the vRAM just now, it's 4am and I'm half asleep, I just came over to the PC to check if it was still working OK.

Rebooting does fix it for a time it seems. As for software, I have clean formatted both Win8.1 and Win10 multiple times, the only constants are the Nvidia drivers and the game itself. I'm going to leave Counter Strike or something else running over night to see if it happens, if not it could well be the Witcher causing all this problems for me, the only reason I thought it wasn't was because other games have the same issue, but only after playing the Witcher before them come to think of it.
 
What I'm doing now is leaving other games running all day without playing the Witcher beforehand, I can't remember this issue ever arising without playing the Witcher, or playing the Witcher before another game. Counter Strike has been running for 9 hours thus far, so we'll see how it goes by the end of the day.
 
Have you tried different versions of the nVidia drivers? also are you running anything like MSI Afterburner, EVGA Precision, Samsung Magician (it has somewhat poor use of the dx api that can sometimes cause issues) or something with an ingame overlay as these could all possibly interact with the GPU driver.
 
I've tried the latest two driver versions, and I'm currently using MSI Afterburner but I tried without and the symptoms still appeared. And I use Steam's standard overlay.

Counter Strike went for 16 hours without issue, but Dying Light started hitching after less than 3 hours. It seems to be the more intense games that bring it on.
 
After Dying Light becoming problematic after 2 hours or less twice, it has now been running overnight without issue. I changed my page file from system managed (1.9GB) to min 8GB, max 16GB. Why would the game need so much page file, and why isn't it using my RAM when it's only using 4 out of my 8GB? Has anyone else had hitching/poor performance due to system managed page file?
 
MrH said:
After Dying Light becoming problematic after 2 hours or less twice, it has now been running overnight without issue. I changed my page file from system managed (1.9GB) to min 8GB, max 16GB. Why would the game need so much page file, and why isn't it using my RAM when it's only using 4 out of my 8GB? Has anyone else had hitching/poor performance due to system managed page file?
Click to expand...

Couple of times this past year my system's Paging File got borked and I deleted it and re-created it which fixed it. One of the times was actually due to making a change with Samsung Magician, which Rroff mentions in one of his posts. Never got to play games while that was going on, as I realized something was off when doing a restart and quickly got round to sorting it. But the symptoms did include pretty massive system slowdown. I wonder if that was it. Please keep us updated.

I had a look at your HWiNFO readings - only thing which is a bit suspect to me is that the GPU Core Load only reached a maximum of 71%. Now I haven't tried Dying Light or Witcher 3 yet but by all accounts they do strain hardware. On GTA 5, I often see max GPU core load of 99%. Of course it will depend on settings and whether or not Vsync or a frame limit is on, etc.

By the way, what PSU are you using? Also, what version of Windows?
 
The GPU most likely isn't hitting 100% because I'm a complete frame rate freak, I can't handle dips at all so I tweak settings until I maintain 60fps 99.9% of the time. I'm sure if I turned hairworks on it would jump up.

I use VSync in most games, apart from shooters.

Corsair TX750 v2 / Windows 10

Dying Light is still symptom free after 9 hours, if it makes it to 15 hours I will reboot and do the same with Witcher. I'm really hoping it was the pagefile, I'm so ready to put this issue to bed.
 
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