I recently got a refurbed GTX 970 FTW from EVGA's B-Stock and have had some issues, wondering if problem is within the card or software. Basically all the games I have tried so far have had variable levels of screen tears and some games stutter slightly even if the framerate is high and/or stable.
- Dying Light, which I had capped at 80 fps stays at that framerate constantly. Minor/no screen tear, some stutter (is it called microstuttering?)
- MGS5: Phantom Pain, which I did most of the testing with, works quite well if I run it in borderless windowed mode and vsync off, although I have a feeling it could look slightly smoother. It runs at 60 fps constant. In fullscreen mode I had major screen tear, be it from Nvidia's CP off/on/adaptive or ingame vsync on/off, triple buffering didn't seem to matter either. Tearing is especially noticeable around light sources. Strangely, from what I read, others seemed to get tearing when in borderless mode.
- Witcher 3 seems to run fine with very minor screen tear present.
- Worst of the lot is Rocket League. Major screen tear and some stutter on vsync on/off ingame/nvidia cp.
- Reflex runs well but there is still some screen tear, especially around light sources. This is a game that I would expect to run flawlessly.
- Portal 2 runs fine but there is screen tear at 120 fps / 120 Hz. Raising fps cap to 300 alleviates it.
- The Vanishing of Ethan Carter runs at good framerate, but I had to choose between having microstutter and microstutter and screen tearing.
- Counter-Strike: GO. Works well, but some tearing present. I had this with the old card too.
I'm posting because Rocket League's performance got me wondering if there's something wrong with the card. I was able to run it smoothly with no tearing nor stuttering present on two other cards with vsync OFF, Radeon 7970 GHz(which I switched from) and 7950(which I had as a temporary card). I'd highly prefer to play multiplayer games without vsync if possible, but not even vsync seems to help in this case.
I remember screen tear being something that couldn't really be helped with my old card too, but these things could usually be helped with external programs. This doesn't seem to be the case here.
What I have tried:
- Tested two different monitors and a TV(120Hz, 60Hz, 60Hz), no change and problems seem to be the same.
- Have re-installed the drivers multiple times, used Display Driver Uninstaller and Rapr between installs. Tried a couple of the latest Nvidia drivers available.
- I originally had Windows 10 when I started using the GTX. I thought the OS was the main culprit for these problems, but today I did a clean install of Windows 7 and these issues are still present.
- Used HD Tune/Diskfresh to make sure the SSD operates normally.
- Tried another PCI-E slot.
- Tried various different framerate caps, 59, 60, 61, 119, 121. Ingame(if available) and in RTSS.
- Monitoring temps yielded no alarming results. Temperatures seemed fine for both CPU and GPU.
My other specs:
i5 3570K
G.Skill DDR3 16GB @ 1333MHz
Samsung 250GB EVO 840 SSD
Screen: Samsung SA700, 120Hz
Motherboard: Asrock Z77 Extreme4 (latest available BIOS)
EDIT: Forgot to mention the PSU. It's a 650W Flowerpower one(80 Plus Gold).
Would updating the GPU's BIOS be necessary or help with this? I had a hard time finding any files, are they downloadable somewhere? Could the card be faulty? What could I test?
post edited by Hammonde - 2015/10/06 12:09:20