Weird GPU performance issue

[Kappes Buur]

When I need to know how my system is doing, I usually run either

Speccy by Piriform (static) for a snapshot

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[imgur]https://i.imgur.com/WrA4pky[/imgur]

or HardwareMonitor by CPUID (dynamic) for a running account

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[imgur]https://i.imgur.com/ZXUCw2T[/imgur]

For example, running an OBLIGE map uses 58% of the GPU when there are lots of actors in view.

[Darkcrafter]

May I assume it's a problem caused by the motherboard? I would try to update BIOS but you know it's dangerous, make sure the updated version supports your CPU and chipset. You may also want to connect your computer to a UPS during update so it doesn't die if an electrical breakdown occurs. Also when your computer boots, press F8 and select "Disable digital signature on drivers" and see how it behaves.

[drfrag]

I don't know how radios work but the motherboard needs to send the power good signal for the PSU to start. Also both the CPU and GPU take power from the same (12V) rail. If the PSU is bad it would not start or boot or it would turn off again or be unstable and reboot/hang. You could run a system stability tester/memory test in that case. You can bypass the power good test using the wire trick to run the PSU with an external load and check voltages with a multimeter but you can't be completely sure anyway and it's better to just try with a different PSU. But this time it's not he PSU (that was the short version). I think it's a problem with the graphics card itself most likely software. No idea of what's going on. May be the driver was updated recently?

[Apeirogon]

It's a one year old graphics card in a 7 year old computer. The power supply should be fine, though - my old Geforce 550ti was drawing more power than the 1060 is doing.

So you just pick new videocard, insert it in pci slot on motherboard, turn it on, run game.exe and notice performance drop?
Or it work fine some time and only then turn to brick?

[Graf Zahl]

May be the driver was updated recently?

The problem has been persisting through multiple driver versions, so that's unlikely.

It's a one year old graphics card in a 7 year old computer. The power supply should be fine, though - my old Geforce 550ti was drawing more power than the 1060 is doing.

So you just pick new videocard, insert it in pci slot on motherboard, turn it on, run game.exe and notice performance drop?
Or it work fine some time and only then turn to brick?

I first noticed the problem last summer when running some benchmarks, but what triggered me to post about it was when GZDoom's Vulkan renderer was showing the same effect as OpenGL.

[Kappes Buur]

Guessing at what may be wrong is a bit of a time wasting pursuit.
It could be this or it could be that.

Running HDMonitor by CPUID at least will tell you just about everything what is going on with the physical system. If those numbers are within acceptable limits, then concentrate on the software side.

[drfrag]

I use HWInfo64. Now i don't think it's the GPU but the CPU and my guess is that the Spectre patch is hurting performance on your system since it has an older CPU and OS.
But it's just a guess and intuition, i could be completely wrong. I consider you've checked CPU usage by other processes in the background.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/micro ... 36293.html

[Graf Zahl]

That tool tells me it cannot really be the GPU either, it's running at 30% on Frozen Time and even when setting the scale factor to 2.0, effectively rendering the scene in 4K it doesn't break a sweat. Right now my only suspicion is some misbehaving background process using the GPU as well. CPU usage is 25%, meaning 2 cores on full load. That fits NVidia's CPU usage pattern.
That's going to be fun to find out...
The virus scanner came up empty.

And it's NOT the CPU. That one I can easily benchmark with GZDoom, None of the CPU related timers increases when this happens - the only one whose time goes up is the one which times glFinish, or on Vulkan the present call.

[Darkcrafter]

Indeed if it's not a virus then what is it? Are you really sure it's not a smartass miner? There are even such smart ones that reinstall themselves everytime you log in to the system, some will hide and stop operation if a task manager opened.

[Graf Zahl]

How can I be sure about it? I cannot find anything that may cause it. But this effect only kicks in when I run a fullscreen game for at least a minute and often goes away again when alt-tabbing out and back in, only to return after a short time span, but not always. Since I can only reliably observe it in fulllscreen mode it's nearly impossible to run diagnostics.

[Darkcrafter]

Try disabling the internet and see what happens.

[wrkq]

Huh.
Can you run furmark (https://geeks3d.com/furmark/) at high specs and full screen? It gives you GPU% load and GPU temperature in HUD overlay so you can monitor.
Both to see if it'll do the same FPS drop after a time, and to see if you can get it to warm up and put fans in high speed mode.