Hi all,
I'll just start with a list of my specs to get it out of the way.
CPU: Intel Core i7-4790K @ 4.00GHz
MOBO: ASUS Z97-PRO (Wi-Fi ac)
RAM: Corsair Vengeance LP DDR3 1600 C10 2x8GB (16GB total)
GPU: GTX 1080Ti Gaming X
SSD (C: Drive, Windows install drive): Samsung 840 Evo 120GB
HDD #1: Seagate Barracude 7200.14 2TB
HDD #2: WD Black 2TB (2013)
Ok so I recently bought a new MSi GTX 1080Ti Gaming X to replace my Gigabyte GTX 980 Windforce, along with an AOC AG271QG 1440p 144Hz G-sync monitor to increase the load on my new GPU after hearing about how bottlenecks can occur when running games at 1080p.
Also, in case it matters, my current monitor setup is the AOC as my main monitor, connected via the DP cable that came with the monitor, and an LG 24GM77 as my secondary monitor, connected via a DVI-D cable that came with it. Both are running at 144Hz. This is the monitor setup I was using throughout the experiences I am about to describe.
So obviously, I return home and replace the card in the top PCI-e slot on my mobo. I boot the PC back up, everything establishes itself and all seems fine. I then decide to run a GTA V benchmark with settings that emulate those used by the likes of LinusTechTips and HardwareCanucks in their 1080Ti videos, so that I could compare results and ensure everything was running OK. The initial benchmark underwhelmed me. My scores were quite a bit lower than theirs running in 1440p, 144Hz with max settings, as you can see:
Frames Per Second (Higher is better) Min, Max, Avg
Pass 0, 38.417179, 74.583374, 53.685452
Pass 1, 30.226015, 63.458904, 47.422840
Pass 2, 35.967899, 89.904015, 60.698608
Pass 3, 39.620358, 99.249832, 70.373337
Pass 4, 32.536247, 81.755569, 54.391289
Mind you I did have the settings under "advanced graphics" turned pretty much all the way up, but other than that my settings were identical to those used in the benchmarks by the aforementioned Youtubers.
After much deliberation, I decided to use DDU to clean out my NVIDIA drivers, despite the fact that I had already installed my new GPU. I ran this twice in safe mode w/o networking. The first time I didn't clean out my C:/NVIDIA folder and the second time I did. Following a reboot and a reinstall of the most recent NVIDIA drivers via their website (not GeForce Experience), the first GTA V benchmark I ran encountered some weird texture loading/pop-in issues. In the jet scene/pass (military jet flying over the county), significant segments of the ground appeared a solid unrendered gray and later popped in after lingering for some time. Frame rate however, was improved. I believe these were the results:
Frames Per Second (Higher is better) Min, Max, Avg
Pass 0, 16.561893, 122.770706, 89.121422
Pass 1, 32.135010, 82.657280, 59.832600
Pass 2, 46.116966, 125.216042, 76.668427
Pass 3, 59.795460, 139.373306, 99.366112
Pass 4, 1.038992, 140.158890, 70.715996
Note that this time I believe I had the advanced graphics settings turned down to the default. Fortunately, subsequent benchmarks did not exhibit any of the weird texture issues encountered in this first one, but I still wasn't satisfied. I went into my BIOS and enabled XMP, as well as cranking the CPU preset up to the "ASUS Optimal" setting. I tried using the ASUS EZ tuning wizard also, to OC my CPU, but that resulted in CPU overheats and a BSOD, so I undid that.
Here's the results of a GTA V benchmark that I ran just before posting this:
Frames Per Second (Higher is better) Min, Max, Avg
Pass 0, 16.346289, 141.484894, 83.420540
Pass 1, 16.017979, 105.754562, 70.912910
Pass 2, 14.321851, 145.902817, 93.540298
Pass 3, 62.761185, 143.823868, 101.645432
Pass 4, 41.138405, 146.268860, 88.911301
This was at 1440p, 144Hz. Quality settings and sliders under "Graphics" were all at max, with reflection MSAA X4, NVIDIA PCSS, MSAA X4, FXAA On, TXAA On, VSync Off, and motion blur strength at 0. For "advanced graphics" settings, long shadows were On, High Res Shadows were On , High Detail Streaming while Flying was Off, Extended Distance Scaling was turned up a little bit, Extended Shadow Distance was at 0, and Frame Scaling Mode was Off.
Obviously, this is an improvement, but I simply thought that the 1080Ti would perform far better than this, attributed both to its price, and the fact that this is only 1440p and I was led to believe this was a card that could run even the most demanding games at max settings in 4K @ near 60FPS with no issues.
Here are the results of a recent Unigine Heaven 4.0 benchmark. This was done with XMP enabled, in ASUS Optimal mode, and with no OC on the GPU side of things.
Settings
API: DirectX 11
Quality: Ultra
Tessellation: Extreme
Stereo 3D, Multi-monitor: Off
AA: x4
Fullscreen: On
Res: 1440p
Results
FPS: 113.7
Score: 2864
Min FPS: 32.6
Max FPS: 240.5
Funny thing is, upon using UserBenchmark's benchmark tool, my RAM was shown to be the most underperforming component in my PC, despite it apparently ranking in the 86th percentile, which is way above expectations. Most notably, HDD #1 performed below expectations in the 38th percentile, and my GPU perfomed as expected, in the 58th percentile. Here are the results:
UserBenchmarks: Game 126%, Desk 96%, Work 75%
CPU: Intel Core i7-4790K - 95%
GPU: Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti - 165.2%
SSD: Samsung 840 Evo 120GB - 89%
HDD: Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 2TB - 86.5%
HDD: WD Black 2TB (2013) - 97%
RAM: Corsair Vengeance LP DDR3 1600 C10 2x8GB - 59.7%
MBD: Asus Z97-PRO (Wi-Fi ac)
Note that I apparently had sub-optimal background CPU usage (17%).
In regards to other troubleshooting methods/fixes I have tried, I have also selected the "High performance" Windows power plan, and turning off Windows' "game mode" feature. These haven't yielded anything. I was going to try using a different PCI-e slot on my mobo but decided to come here for possible solutions first.
Another worrying issue I encountered occurred like so. I had left my PC on overnight to DL something with displays off. I hopped back on in the morning and went to play a game and my screen kept going black, intermittently losing signal before returning back to the way it was. This was fixed with a simple restart of the PC.
I have also at times experienced brief windows of mouse pointer input lag when alt-tabbing out of games, or moving certain windows between my two monitors. These problems do not occur all of the time though, and by memory only occurred early on in this troubleshooting timeline. I have not experienced these issues in the past couple of days. I believe changing my mouse's polling rate to 500 from 1000 fixed these issues.
Now to the point of all this
Put quite simply, what I want to ask is if this kind of performance is normal for a system with my specs. In my troubleshooting, did I do anything wrong that may have done more harm than good?Am I tripping when it comes to my performance expectations? Feel free to bring me back to reality in any way you see fit. If there is something wrong, and my PC should be performing better than this, could someone suggest a solution or improvement that preferrably won't run the risk of screwing up my PC?
Thanks in advance.
I'll just start with a list of my specs to get it out of the way.
CPU: Intel Core i7-4790K @ 4.00GHz
MOBO: ASUS Z97-PRO (Wi-Fi ac)
RAM: Corsair Vengeance LP DDR3 1600 C10 2x8GB (16GB total)
GPU: GTX 1080Ti Gaming X
SSD (C: Drive, Windows install drive): Samsung 840 Evo 120GB
HDD #1: Seagate Barracude 7200.14 2TB
HDD #2: WD Black 2TB (2013)
Ok so I recently bought a new MSi GTX 1080Ti Gaming X to replace my Gigabyte GTX 980 Windforce, along with an AOC AG271QG 1440p 144Hz G-sync monitor to increase the load on my new GPU after hearing about how bottlenecks can occur when running games at 1080p.
Also, in case it matters, my current monitor setup is the AOC as my main monitor, connected via the DP cable that came with the monitor, and an LG 24GM77 as my secondary monitor, connected via a DVI-D cable that came with it. Both are running at 144Hz. This is the monitor setup I was using throughout the experiences I am about to describe.
So obviously, I return home and replace the card in the top PCI-e slot on my mobo. I boot the PC back up, everything establishes itself and all seems fine. I then decide to run a GTA V benchmark with settings that emulate those used by the likes of LinusTechTips and HardwareCanucks in their 1080Ti videos, so that I could compare results and ensure everything was running OK. The initial benchmark underwhelmed me. My scores were quite a bit lower than theirs running in 1440p, 144Hz with max settings, as you can see:
Frames Per Second (Higher is better) Min, Max, Avg
Pass 0, 38.417179, 74.583374, 53.685452
Pass 1, 30.226015, 63.458904, 47.422840
Pass 2, 35.967899, 89.904015, 60.698608
Pass 3, 39.620358, 99.249832, 70.373337
Pass 4, 32.536247, 81.755569, 54.391289
Mind you I did have the settings under "advanced graphics" turned pretty much all the way up, but other than that my settings were identical to those used in the benchmarks by the aforementioned Youtubers.
After much deliberation, I decided to use DDU to clean out my NVIDIA drivers, despite the fact that I had already installed my new GPU. I ran this twice in safe mode w/o networking. The first time I didn't clean out my C:/NVIDIA folder and the second time I did. Following a reboot and a reinstall of the most recent NVIDIA drivers via their website (not GeForce Experience), the first GTA V benchmark I ran encountered some weird texture loading/pop-in issues. In the jet scene/pass (military jet flying over the county), significant segments of the ground appeared a solid unrendered gray and later popped in after lingering for some time. Frame rate however, was improved. I believe these were the results:
Frames Per Second (Higher is better) Min, Max, Avg
Pass 0, 16.561893, 122.770706, 89.121422
Pass 1, 32.135010, 82.657280, 59.832600
Pass 2, 46.116966, 125.216042, 76.668427
Pass 3, 59.795460, 139.373306, 99.366112
Pass 4, 1.038992, 140.158890, 70.715996
Note that this time I believe I had the advanced graphics settings turned down to the default. Fortunately, subsequent benchmarks did not exhibit any of the weird texture issues encountered in this first one, but I still wasn't satisfied. I went into my BIOS and enabled XMP, as well as cranking the CPU preset up to the "ASUS Optimal" setting. I tried using the ASUS EZ tuning wizard also, to OC my CPU, but that resulted in CPU overheats and a BSOD, so I undid that.
Here's the results of a GTA V benchmark that I ran just before posting this:
Frames Per Second (Higher is better) Min, Max, Avg
Pass 0, 16.346289, 141.484894, 83.420540
Pass 1, 16.017979, 105.754562, 70.912910
Pass 2, 14.321851, 145.902817, 93.540298
Pass 3, 62.761185, 143.823868, 101.645432
Pass 4, 41.138405, 146.268860, 88.911301
This was at 1440p, 144Hz. Quality settings and sliders under "Graphics" were all at max, with reflection MSAA X4, NVIDIA PCSS, MSAA X4, FXAA On, TXAA On, VSync Off, and motion blur strength at 0. For "advanced graphics" settings, long shadows were On, High Res Shadows were On , High Detail Streaming while Flying was Off, Extended Distance Scaling was turned up a little bit, Extended Shadow Distance was at 0, and Frame Scaling Mode was Off.
Obviously, this is an improvement, but I simply thought that the 1080Ti would perform far better than this, attributed both to its price, and the fact that this is only 1440p and I was led to believe this was a card that could run even the most demanding games at max settings in 4K @ near 60FPS with no issues.
Here are the results of a recent Unigine Heaven 4.0 benchmark. This was done with XMP enabled, in ASUS Optimal mode, and with no OC on the GPU side of things.
Settings
API: DirectX 11
Quality: Ultra
Tessellation: Extreme
Stereo 3D, Multi-monitor: Off
AA: x4
Fullscreen: On
Res: 1440p
Results
FPS: 113.7
Score: 2864
Min FPS: 32.6
Max FPS: 240.5
Funny thing is, upon using UserBenchmark's benchmark tool, my RAM was shown to be the most underperforming component in my PC, despite it apparently ranking in the 86th percentile, which is way above expectations. Most notably, HDD #1 performed below expectations in the 38th percentile, and my GPU perfomed as expected, in the 58th percentile. Here are the results:
UserBenchmarks: Game 126%, Desk 96%, Work 75%
CPU: Intel Core i7-4790K - 95%
GPU: Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti - 165.2%
SSD: Samsung 840 Evo 120GB - 89%
HDD: Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 2TB - 86.5%
HDD: WD Black 2TB (2013) - 97%
RAM: Corsair Vengeance LP DDR3 1600 C10 2x8GB - 59.7%
MBD: Asus Z97-PRO (Wi-Fi ac)
Note that I apparently had sub-optimal background CPU usage (17%).
In regards to other troubleshooting methods/fixes I have tried, I have also selected the "High performance" Windows power plan, and turning off Windows' "game mode" feature. These haven't yielded anything. I was going to try using a different PCI-e slot on my mobo but decided to come here for possible solutions first.
Another worrying issue I encountered occurred like so. I had left my PC on overnight to DL something with displays off. I hopped back on in the morning and went to play a game and my screen kept going black, intermittently losing signal before returning back to the way it was. This was fixed with a simple restart of the PC.
I have also at times experienced brief windows of mouse pointer input lag when alt-tabbing out of games, or moving certain windows between my two monitors. These problems do not occur all of the time though, and by memory only occurred early on in this troubleshooting timeline. I have not experienced these issues in the past couple of days. I believe changing my mouse's polling rate to 500 from 1000 fixed these issues.
Now to the point of all this
Put quite simply, what I want to ask is if this kind of performance is normal for a system with my specs. In my troubleshooting, did I do anything wrong that may have done more harm than good?Am I tripping when it comes to my performance expectations? Feel free to bring me back to reality in any way you see fit. If there is something wrong, and my PC should be performing better than this, could someone suggest a solution or improvement that preferrably won't run the risk of screwing up my PC?
Thanks in advance.
).
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