Hardware or driver problem??

[teejay73]

Hi all I am having a intermittent problem with my GTX 580 (Phantom 3gb, If it helps), It seems to very occasionally fail to run games such as BF3, Skyrim at good fps, By that I mean I am seeing 5 fps in BF3 and Skyrim was giving out something like 19 fps, I must stress that these were isolated incidents and for the most part the GPU has been fine, That said I had the same issue with heaven straight after the low fps with BF3.

The problem goes away as soon as I reboot windows and everything falls back to getting good fps, It is like the GTX580 fails to "wake up", I also checked the usage in afterburner and it showed a low vram use, Though Gpu usage was at 99% . Fyi I have a i5 2500k @ 4.1ghz, 8gb ram, 650w psu (corsair), The drivers that I am using are 301.42 WHQL.

I hope it is a software issue as opposed to a hardware fault as I dont fancy going without my fix for BF3 due to a RMA....Any help would be greatly appreciated..

 

[teejay73]

I did not use driver sweeper as this was on a fresh install of win7 and even before that I had my gtx460 so don't think driver sweeper would make any difference, Will give it a blast though to see what's possibly still on the system and in the registry. I also noted that I have the most current drivers that are available.

 

[teejay73]

Hmmm a quick search of issues with the 301.42 drivers seems to suggest that is where the problem lies or at least I hope. Taken from another gtx580 owner.

"Since the latest driver release, my GTX 580 has been very underwhelming in all games. It'll play them fine one time, then play at 8 fps the next... I've sourced it down to the GTX 580 not changing profiles from 2D/"3D Low" clock speeds (101/203 core and shader) to 3D high (772/1544). Anybody else noticed this or is my 580 dying?" I have to say that this is very much like the issue that my card has.

 

[teejay73]

Well simple really

use afterburner with its osd to monitor gpu speed + temps whilst running the games that have issues to see if its clocking up correctly.

Or use gpu-z and monitor the gpu clock speed/ram speed to see if its coming out of 2d mode.

Erm yeah I have checked via afterburner that it is indeed running at lower usage, Will install the earlier drivers as they seem the most stable.

 

[teejay73]

I'm having the same problem with my 560 ti; Clock keeps randomly dropping to 405MHz. I think the 304.48 beta driver was supposed to fix this but hasn't.

I have dropped down to 296.10 for now, Hopefully it should be ok, I am also wondering if it has anything to do with the adaptive v-sync, Could be far off mind but I was under the impression that was the only radical change in the 300 series drivers.

 

[teejay73]

Phantom 3gb owner here also and when I updated to the latest drivers had a massive performance drop in Diablo 3. I reverted back to a previous driver and all was fine.

Must be a bug with those drivers for the 500 series cards? Off topic what sort of temps are you getting with your card? I seem to idle about 36-38 and load is 73.

 

[teejay73]

I think you have problem with software, your Phantom 3gb need updated software that's why you unable to play few games on it. Other reason might be you having synchronization issue these games are not compatible with Phantom 3 GB. Just update your Phantom 3gb you will be able to load these games too.

Yes the software being the Nvida 301.42 driver, The games that I was unable to play were only temporary problems, Once I had re-booted windows they were fine and actually the "software" needed downgrading to earlier nvidia drivers not upgrading.

synchronization issue? Can`t see why the games I played (Namely BF3 & Heaven benchmark) would not be synchronized with a very popular Nvidia graphics card..Care to elaborate further

 

[teejay73]

im also getting probsd with my gtx 470 in wow i reinstalled wow thinking it was the game..still having problems with low fps drops

Is that a constant problem for you tigertank? My low fps was like it was stuck and in BF3 I got a total of 5-7fps.., Though as already stated, once i rebooted windows it was all fine. What drivers are you on?

 

[teejay73]

its usualy 60 or 58 now it goes to 45 then jumps all the way to 60..so i htought it was shadow so i turned that low still same problem..301.42

It could be adaptive v-sync that is used in the 300 series drivers try rolling back to the 296.10 drivers to see if that helps.