Problems with GTX 780 being underutilized. : Fallout: New Vegas

» Tue Feb 04, 2014 3:27 am

Specs:

CPU: Haswell 4770k (Stock)

MOBO: ASUS Maximus VI Hero

RAM: Corsair Vengeance Pro 1600mhz

GPU: ASUS DirectCUII GTX 780 3gb (Stock)

PSU: EVGA NEX750G 750w

Storage: 250gb Samsung EVO and 2TB WD Black

I have recently bought and built a desktop PC and have had a problem while playing a very heavily modded Fallout NV. My frame rate drops and stutters severely whenever I am near an area with a lot of textures and buildings making it at or just below 30 fps and have narrowed down the problem to a lack of use on the GPU side as my CPU is fine while the GPU sits at around 40% usage and drops even more to about 20-30% when I get closer to these more demanding areas. At first I noticed the core clock kept dropping so I went to the Nvidia control panel and changed the performance control to maximum which fixed that but had no affect on the GPU usage problem. The vram sits comfortably at 2.5gb giving me room as it is a 3gb card so I know that is not the issue and neither are temps as they sit around 27-30C. Power on the other hand is only at around 40-50% constant and never goes any higher. I know for a fact that my mods are stable and are the problem for the low fps.

What I noticed one time was that my card was working perfectly giving steady 60fps running at 70% power and 50-60% usage when I was below 2GB of VRAM with all mods active. Then I started to venture out and when my VRAM started to increase past 2GB I got lots of stutters from everything loaded which was expected but then the same thing happened as stated before where the card just slowly starts to power down into an idle state almost. Even before this problem was happening I had the 4GB enabler installed so I never thought my VRAM would be the issue but now I am thinking it isn't working properly for me or something along those lines. I have the DYNAMO ENB installed which I know is supposed to help manage the use of RAM and other components to maximize performance so I think that could also be a potential cause. Other than that I don't know what is causing it. I have the latest drivers and for games like Metro 2033 my card blows through it at max settings so I know it isn't the card malfunctioning. It has to be something with FNV specifically.

If you could tell why this is happening or link me to another topic that was having the same issues and was solved that would be great. Thank you for your time and I hope someone will be able to help.

» Mon Feb 03, 2014 10:56 pm

You can't compare the 2 like that. Graphic/texture mods can be the cause. ENB is a post processing effects mod. This utilizes your CPU ALOT more as the CPU needs to go over every frame with the extra effects before it

sends the frame off. That combined with lots of high texture mods can amplify the effect (depending on the effects your using). Im not sure what other graphic mods you're using.

What is the CPU usage at?

There are .ini tweaks for performce. Maybe someone can point you to a mod. There are plenty of performance guides as well. Google shouid point the way.

» Tue Feb 04, 2014 5:28 am

I have turned off my ENB as well and the same result occurs but I will now check how my CPU usage is to see if that is another potential issue.

Thank you so much for responding too. Good to know there are people willing to help.

» Tue Feb 04, 2014 1:55 am

Then I started to venture out and when my VRAM started to increase past 2GB I got lots of stutters from everything loaded

Different graphic / textures mod's, can cause this because the different GPU utilization of the each mod.

Probably some mod's make not good (proper) use of your GPU frame buffer, and therefore the stuttering.

Don't mix many mod's together without knowing how well they scaling with your GPU at least. !!!!!

» Mon Feb 03, 2014 2:47 pm

Can you elaborate? I personally don't see how a texture replacer does anything but replace textures that are already used by the vanilla game by increasing quality or changing what they look like. This would have no effect on how much the game utilizes my GPU except by putting a larger load on it since it is loading larger textures. In my case it does the exact opposite however by dialing back my GPU a lot so I don't know if there is something specific I can tweak in the ini files to fix this or to use nvidia control panel to change more settings on my GPU.