My GTX 660 has been going from 100% usage to 60% usage and back every few seconds whilst playing games, resulting in stutterin

GeranS

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Apr 18, 2015
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This has been happening for two days, and I have no idea why. I started to notice frame drops every few seconds in City: Skylines, and later in Stardrive 2 and GTA5. Games like Armored Warfare and World of Tanks, which are more CPU dependent don't have this problem. I launched MSI afterburner to see what was happening, and the frame drops coincided with the usage drops. I have no idea what is causing this and I can't play some of my favorite games. I have an MSI GTX 660 2GB, an i5-4670k, and 8GB DDR3 RAM.
 

GeranS

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I am using the 350.12 WHQL driver that NVidia released for GTA5
 

Kitt Sue

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My friend is actually having kind of a similar issue... every couple of minutes his games will just freeze for like a quarter of a second, have bad framerate for a second and then go back up. He's done fresh drivers, overvolting, underclocking to no avail. He has an i5-4670K and GTX 760.
 

GeranS

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I've now checked a bunch of games: Fractured Space, War Thunder, GTA5, Cities: Skylines, and Stardrive 2, and they all have this problem. But with most of them the frame drops are too little to notice, going from 100 to 80 in War Thunder. But they all have usage drops every second or so.
 
Start with the basics, defrag your hard drive (not ssd), scan for virus, create a new user (and get rid of your old one completely), get rid of all start up programs by typing msconfig in "run" and then disable all of them and reboot. You really shouldn't have any problems with any of these games.

To defrag in the search bar type in defrag, if it won't open type in dfrgui.exe and it will.
 

Kitt Sue

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No... a GTX 660 is nowhere near close enough to run it at 1080P 60FPS on ultra. That's not what "recommended settings" means, that means for a comfortable, ideal experience. GTX 660 should do 1080P 60 FPS at normal settings with a few things like Shader quality on high.

You need something like a GTX 780 or R9 290 to play it on ultra 60 FPS at 1080P... or about a GTX 960 or R9 280/280X if you disable anti-aliasing. Also if you have a 2GB card you can't play with textures at high or very high unless you want to risk crashes or massive fps dips since it knocks on the door of 2GB of VRAM.
 
If you want all those sliders on “ultra”, here are the specs the developer has in mind.

Rockstar’s Kevin Hoare, 2 quotes

"Sure, at 1080p and 60fps, you can make do with a 2GB, mid-to-high range graphics card — either an AMD HD7870 or NVIDIA GTX 660. If you want to crank it up to 3840 x 2160 (like the screenshot above), you’re going to require something a little special:"

“To run the game on a 4K display at 30fps,” says Hoare, “you’ll need at minimum an AMD HD 7870 or NVIDIA GTX 760 with 2GB of VRAM.” As for the 4K at 60 frames-per-second, that’ll require a “high-end SLI or Crossfire setup.”

It's funny you say that because that just goes to show how poor optimisation has been for all these PC titles up to this day. :)

To clarify a bit, they based the Recommended specs on 1080 60 FPS Ultra, other companies should take notes.
 

Kitt Sue

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Except that the game doesn't run on ultra on a GTX 660, not even close. They didn't specify ultra in the quote you provided.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifS9QxWCYC0

GTX 770 and i7-4770K playing around 30 fps.

I don't really care what they said in the interview since real world performance results show that you need a hell of a lot more than a GTX 660 or HD 7870 if you want to max the game out. Those will play fine at 1080P 60 FPS with normal/high mix of settings, but not at ultra.