Hi Team
So I've got an HD7970 which, a year ago could run Farcry 3 absolutely fine without any frame issues. I've died off gaming over the past year, and so haven't gamed much at all. But I've just gone to load up Farcry 3 again (all the same hardware), and I'm getting some really strange performance drops after about 15-30 minutes of gameplay.
I run 3 monitors, but only game on the middle one (direct HDMI), and I've had Open Hardware Monitor open on the other screens and noticed temperatures getting to 97 degrees Celsius. During this time however, the game plays fine without any performance issue.
What's weird is after ~30 minutes I experience frame loss, but still reasonably playable, and the temperature falls to 65 degrees, as if the graphics card has just given up pumping out power and reduced my frames in order to perhaps "save itself"?
I know 97 is getting towards the threshold, so I'm picking it's a cooling issue, but not certain whether the card giving up is a fault, or an intelligent anti-cook feature. Your feedback?