Is my graphics card degrading?

[tom_zheng]

Hello all,

I had built a budget gaming PC in January this year, with the following specs:

i5-2400
Asrock h61-MS
MSI GTX 560 Ti Twin Frozr II
Elixir 8gb 1333mhz
500gb HDD@7200rpm
Gigabyte Superb 610w PSU
Antec 300

At the beginning, everything was very good; Minecraft fullscreen ran at 200-300fps, Battlefield 3 ran at 60-80fps on High settings. My resolution was 1366x768.

In April or March, I changed monitors to a 1680x1050 native one.

Now, minecraft only runs at 50fps, 90 max. In an attempt to regain the old 200fps, I have:

Forced Minecraft to us 4GB of RAM and Java 7 64 bit.
Rollbacked drivers to the ones I first had, with the help of CCleaner.
Changed resolution back to 1366x768
Underclocked the factory OC card.
Overclocked the factory OC card
Turned Vsync off (no use really, screen is only 60hz)
Defragged hard drive.


Other problems I have found as time went by was that my card seemed to be idle at 42 degrees Celsius now, whereas it used to idle at 27-35 degrees.

When I play Minecraft, my GPU load is at 10%, while core 0 of my CPU is at 60-80% under load.


Is it because my cpu is bottlenecking my video card (it never did before) or my graphics card is starting to show its age at 6 months? Please help!

 

[dudewitbow]

there isnt no bottlenecking involved unless the cpu is constantly at 100% though i don't know why you want 200fps, your computer monitor cannot even display 200 fps(monitors have a locked screen refresh rate, usually starting at 60 and going by multiples of 15)

 

[tom_zheng]

I'm worried as other people with even non Ti gtx 560s are achieving more than 100fps easily. It sucks to lose 75% theoretical performance in half a year.

 

[smorizio]

what happend was some of your gpu ram and gpu power has gone to render the higher rez of the new monitor. the higher the image size the more video ram and gpu power is needed.

 

[tom_zheng]

I decreased the resolution down to that of my old monitor, but still no change.

I just found out my game runs at 40fps now. what is happening???