Terrible FPS with 2 monitors.

[altrewin]

So since I've had my 980Ti I've been having some problems. First was GTAV where it would have low FPS ingame, that was fixed by turning off Vsync (no idea why that worked). Then I started playing ARK Survival and that had some problems with dual monitors anyway unless it was in borderless windowed. Last night I started up Dirt Rally to find that FPS even on menus was stuck at around 20 FPS on fullscreen 1440p. But when I made it windowed it was fine. To fix this I tried a variety of things, but what fixed it was swapping the ports my monitors were connected to on the GPU.

Now today when I loaded up ARK, I'm now having the exact same problem I had with Dirt Rally. 20FPS, and barely 20% GPU usage. But when I click on something on my second screen the FPS in ARK goes back up to 50-70 and GPU usage is back to 99%. Click back on the game again to play and it returns to 20FPS.

Everything in Nvidia Control Panel is stock, I've tried reinstalling drivers and plugging the displays in different combinations. I found one combination which nearly worked, FPS was normal but then I realised G-Sync was not working, and there was no option to turn it on in the control panel. Nothing seems to work properly. It's either fullscreen games work, or borderless window games work. (Or I just don't plug in the second monitor).

I'm running out of ideas, and really hoping that neither the monitor or GPU is faulty.

Things I've tried so far
Swapping ports monitors are connected to on GPU
Changing various settings in NVCP (including VSync, Power Management, Preferred Refresh Rate)
Various ingame settings (sadly not every game has borderless windowed)

Specs just incase
i7 4790K
Gigabyte Z97X-Gaming 7
24GB 2133MHz (2x4GB HyperX Red OcUK, 2x8GB HyperX Savage)
EVGA 980Ti SC+ ACX
EVGA Supernova NEX 650W
Asus PG279Q (Primary monitor)
Dell P2414H (Secondary monitor, in portrait)

Also this is how the monitors show up in NVCP for some reason:

 

[altrewin]

Well I think now I am even more confused. After searching around some more for problems similar to mine, I came upon someone who fixed their problem recently here.

I'd already tried a full clean install of the drivers with DDU and clicking the clean install option in the installer. So this time I decided to leave DDU be and just install the same drivers again over the current ones, making sure to tick the clean install option.

And it worked? I'm not going to go questioning logic too much as I'm just happy to have my lovely system being used to it's full potential again. But I thought I should post my solution here incase someone else ends up with a similar problem in the future

 

[P.B]

I have this with my titanx my only work around was disable the other screen and restart lol

 

[altrewin]

Little update on this, had the problem again yesterday and after some searching around saw there's a hotfix driver available here

https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3798

This appears to have fully fixed the problem, which was possibly not caused by having 2 monitors, but it was a problem with borderless windowed mode games.

 

[Rroff]

While it says "G-Sync Windowed mode & full-screen performance issue" I was getting the problem with just the G-SYNC fullscreen mode option and games using proper fullscreen - half the time I'd start a game and get massively reduced framerates. The hotfix is needed and so far fixes the issue 100% for me.

You might find with multi monitor setups you need to change the multi-monitor/mixed-GPU option to single performance mode as well for some setups.