Windows 10: Low FPS with new GTX 980 graphics card

Hi,

In October I bought the MSI GTX 980 graphics card as an upgrade for my Radeon R9 280x. I presumed that I would be getting a lot better performance in games since the 980 is a much more powerful card, this was the case in some games like GTA 5 where I can run the game at much higher settings. However I have found that in a lot of other games my performance seems to have gone down, as an example I will use Borderlands 2 as I have been playing this a lot recently.

Using my old card I was getting pretty much a constant 90+FPS when playing Borderlands 2 but with my current card I am currently getting less than 60 at most times and during combat it can drop to 20's. This doesn't make any sense to me as I have not changed any other hardware other than the graphics card and somehow It is performing worse than my old card.

I am open to any suggestions and willing to try pretty much any solution. I understand that the CPU is one of the biggest FPS factors and know that an upgrade to that would be needed for a lot higher FPS but surely an upgrade shouldn't cause an FPS decrease.

My system specs are listed below.

:)

 

"DRIVER_OVERRAN_STACK_BUFFER" keeps popping up in Windows 10 when I try to game online!!!

I am getting this error with my Geforce GTX 980 TI when I try to enable Surround displays, Not sure if it has something to do with my graphics card driver with is the latest version as of the time of writing this. I am going to attempt to reinstall the
graphics card driver and see if it will help.

 

BSOD's on old & Clean install.

Thank you for your help,

I have taken your advice and performed a clean install of my Nvidia graphics driver.

The Graphics card is a Nvdiai 980 Ti

(Here for the full specs GeForce GTX 980 Ti | Specifications | GeForce)

Ill report back in a few days if this fix worked or not, Regardless I am very grateful for your time.

 

ok so i found this Borderlands 2 Pc MAXED OUT GTX 980 FPS Frame Rate Performance Test - YouTube

Taking your lesser cpu into account its still performing well below par , did you completly uninstall your amd drivers using a driver cleaner before you installed your nvidia drivers? or better still re install windows? have you used both power connectors on your gpu (sorry had to ask *Wink ) can you download and install msi afterburner so we can see exactly whats going on with your gpu while your ingame? thios will show us core and memory speed and most inportantly let us see if your cards overheating or throttling under load

My afterburner .....

 

one more thing . . . you do have it in the correct pcie slot for single gpu? *Wink according to your mobo it wants to be in the pcie2 slot the top blue one

 

I don't have Borderlands 2 nor a higher performing Maxwell card, but from what I read (links below) this game by design is a PhysX hog, so much so that in game there are graphic options to set it at low, medium, high, ultra, with significant FPS changes depending on the option selected.

I noticed that in the benchmark Archie provided, which shows great framerates, PhysX is set on high, not Ultra. What's yours set on? On that GeForce forum thread, some are saying make sure in the Nvidia control panel that PhysX is NOT set to CPU and if it's on auto try setting (forcing) it to GPU. Seemed to help a couple of gamers but I see others still complaining about the Borderlands 2 performance. Other than this, I got nada and will defer to Archie.

https://forums.geforce.com/default/t...onths-no-fix-/
Borderlands 2 Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel Tweak Guide | GeForce

 

My PhysX is set on low as I noticed significant frame drops when it was on high. I did wipe all of the AMD drivers off before I installed my new graphics card but it may be worth me doing it again to make sure. To be honest the 980 shouldn't be throttling considering I never see it reach above 65 degrees, even when gaming.

I'll play again tomorrow and I'll post some screenshots of MSI Afterburner *Smile

 

It could be throttling on power not temp it could have a faulty voltage regulator what if you turn the power limit and voltage limit to max and the prioritise temp? Have you run afterburner to see if it's throttling? And what it's boosting to? Afterburner will tell you if you have issues �� get afterburner to monitor your system.tam too so we can see how much of that it's using 8gb should be enough but if something else is hogging it too it could cause issues.aybe try a clean boot then run a game *Smile

 

Here is a screenshot of Afterburner that I was running whilst Borderlands 2 was playing. I never really saw the gpu usage go above 56% and stayed constant the entire time.

Also I reinstalled my drivers and noticed that I got a bit of an FPS boost (about 10) but it will still drop to 40fps in some areas.

 

Played with some friends and noticed that I was losing about 10fps in coop but It was still only reaching about 60% GPU usage

 

Your gpu usage is suggesting a cpu bottleneck that said sone games an be buggy and utilise gpus poorly I don't think however borderlands is one of those games . Could do with seeing your core and memory clocks while ingame too (just scroll down the graph till you find them ) also use task manager too monitor cpu usage if it's up at 100% it's bottleneck ing your gpu. I'm not really up on amd processors maybe look up some benchmarks with comparable systems. I'm not sayin 100% it's a bottleneck but it's worth ruling out amd the core and memory speeds will tell us it your card is throttling *Smile

 

I've been monitoring temps and usage. Whilst in games my CPU usage was around 40%. The temps are all low and in games I am getting a max of 50c on my CPU and a max of about 45c on my GPU.

Also now randomly on Borderlands I will get a huge FPS drop for about 10 seconds where my fps will drop to like 10. I have had the temps and usage up on my other monitor as this is happening and there doesn't seem to be any rational cause for it as the temps dont get higher and the usage doesn't increase.

 

Sadly, Borderlands 2 physx is extremely unoptimized on high end Nvidia GPU's even when set to low. The game causes the physx calculations to be under utilized by the GPU causing big fps drops especially in combat.
I got some great fps increases however following this guide Steam Community :: Guide :: Performance/Optimization tweaks for Borderlands 2. Particularly in turning off Dynamic Shadows, Distortion, and the Black Outlines and Cel Shaders. Hopefully Gearbox will fix these fps issues one of these days but I wouldn't hold my breath.

 

Okay so the main cause of the lag I've found is to do with bullet decals and the amount of bodies in areas. For example, if I look in the direction of an area with a lot of bodies then my FPS will drop substantially but turning away from that area will instantly raise my FPS back to being high. Does anyone know anything about what is causing this and what I could do to fix it?

 

The AMDcpu is the bottle neck all FX chips unless overclocked like crazy will never compete on stock hence the 10 frames hit even with a overclcok you'll suffer atleast 3 to 5 frames and that would be running a 4.8 Ghz or higher oc so indeed 8350 holding you back