MSI GTX 770 not that good?

Full system specs?

Yeah, I have a pretty powerful computer surrounding a 770, and it would drop all of the time. PhysX would take it down in Borderlands 2 to less than 20 fps. Don't get me wrong, 90% of the time, games ran pretty smoothly. But it would definitely drop as fast as a sack of rocks.

That was with 32 GB ram, a fast SSD, and a 3930k at 4.2 Ghz, so it's not just you.

The 770 is considered an enthusiast card, even though it's not high end. Whatever you call it, the 770 is definitely not mid-range. That title's usually reserved for cards like the 650-660 ti.

Anyway, dinizap9, try to OC using Nvidia inspector. Overclocking doesn't really do that much, though. It's still the same card, though it will help a little. I think Nvidia Inspector is the most solid way to OC I've used, and I've tried all of the main programs, including EVGA's PrecisionX. You can go in to the Inspector, select "Overclocking" at the bottom right, and it will give you a warning. Accept it. Then you can mess with things. Doing the clock to +100 and the memory to +500 should not be a problem, but start lower and work your way up just to be safe.

I also found that another (nerdy) thing that helped slightly was to replace the thermal paste on the card with Arctic Silver 5. Go to Linus Tech Tips for how to apply that stuff if you aren't sure. People drone on forever online, when it's really simple. Just clean off the processor's metallic plate and the heatsink that touches it with 99% Isopropyl Alcohol. Do it first with a paper town or something - very rough. That just gets the big chunks off. Then do it a second time with a micro-fiber cloth. That will get rid of little particles. The goal is to have nothing between the heatsink's and processor's surface except for a thin, evenly-distributed layer of Arctic Silver 5. All you need to do is place a pea-sized dot in the middle, and then press the surfaces together. It'll smoosh and evenly distribute itself. Tighten the screws back, being careful to not slide around the surfaces, and then let it harden for about an hour. Boom!

That will help transfer heat from the GPU to the cooler as good as it can. But keep in mind, it won't work magic - just makes sure you get proper heat exchange in case you didn't already have it.

After doing those two things - ensuring proper paste application and OCing with Nvidia Inspector - you'll have the most you can get out of your card. Good luck!

I wouldn't call the 770 midrange, it's still pretty high end with only the GK110 cards and AMD's Hawaii based cards being faster. Part of the problem is Far Cry 3 and Assassin's Creed 4 are simply badly optimized, they don't run all that well regardless of what hardware you have. Ubisoft's stance on optimization is they don't have to do it because they can just tell their customers to buy better hardware so you can brute force your way through their crappy coding.

As for Titanfall, it's a game that has just come out, and probably doesn't have particularly good driver optimizations available for it yet, and knowing EA, was probably rushed to market in a not particularly finished state. Supposedly it is also a VRAM hog on maximum settings, so if you have a 2GB version of the 770 you may be running into issues with that.

Finally, if you are running at 2560x1600, or are gaming across say 3 1080p monitors, you're not going to get 60FPS solid regardless with a GTX 770, you'd need two of them in SLI at least to get 60 FPS max settings on that resolution.

Some people aren't entirely truthful on their system specs for youtube videos. For CPU bound games some of those people may have put a pretty big overclock onto their CPUs, which would help performance. For a lot of games AA can get pretty demanding, and can easily cut your framerates in half if you set it high enough, especially for titles that have Supersampling AA options like Witcher 2, or Crysis 3. As such, on really demanding games, most people won't crank the AA up to max, and really once you get up to 1080p resolution or higher you don't need that much AA anyway.

Anyway, dinizap9, try to OC using Nvidia inspector. Overclocking doesn't really do that much, though. It's still the same card, though it will help a little...

Hey, I thought back to this thread yesterday after firing up Titanfall on launch day after work. Maybe its your processor? I played with the settings as high as they'll go on 1080p with my 770 (the 780 ti is still in the mail). It's actually the only high-end game I have where the frames remained at a constant 60 fps with v-sync. The interesting thing was that 6 of my 12 logical processors were at 80%, for about 40% utilization of my 3930k. That same rate of throughput might be maxing out your 2600k's 4 processors. What is the CPU utilization during choppy parts of your game?

The best way to find that out is to use Task Manager. Open it before launching the game. Then you can switch over and see the last minute of CPU utilization on each logical processor in Windows. The annoying issue is that you have to switch over fast because it only shows the last minute. A useful shortcut I recently learned for pulling up Task Manager is "Ctrl+Shift+Esc." You can do that with just your left hand if you smash the ctrl+shift at the same time with your thumb and press esc with your pointer finger. It's fast!

What do you mean by "able to increase?" Like, Inspector just wouldn't let you go higher, or your temperature was getting too high, or the image did weird stuff, or what?

I've had 2 770s, and they both did 100 Mhz on clock and 500 Mhz on memory no problems at all. Do you have at least a 600w power supply? Perhaps the CPU is also playing a part in this -- not sure.

Hmm. That's strange. At least dropping to 30 every once and a while isn't that bad. I'm out of ideas unless there's something wrong with the card. Doesn't seem like it, though. You still run pretty well. If you really care about it, you can try to RMA because your card crashes during games and benchmarks. It would give you another shot a the silicon lottery