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?
 

Raise the power limit slider all the way up in Precision X and see if it clears up any.  If it does, you're up against your power limits...welcome to FTW 1.0...

The FTW is version 1.0.  The FTW+ is version 2.0.  The FTW has power limits at 170 watts and 187 watts with the slider all the way up.  

It wouldn't hurt to run GPUz while you're playing one of the games that you're getting the screen tears on.  Run it with the sensors tab open, stretch it across the bottom of your screen, and after you see some of the issues pop up again, look to see what the "perf cap reason" is.  It's the graph 2nd to the bottom.  It may help to diagnose what's happening.

Hammonde
Right, thanks for the heads up. I'll take a look at PerfCap later today. Guess I didn't do my research well enough when choosing the card.

If it ends up being the power limits, let me know.  There are ways around it.

Could it be the power limits?  Yes...  Could it be something wrong with the card?  Yes...  GPUz would tell you if it's the power limits or not.  And yes, all the FTWs are the same.  The FTW+ was the revision card with the higher power limits and better power phase.

I should add though, that the screen tearing and stuttering that most of us saw, were when we were adding some overclock.  Mine wouldn't do it until I was overclocked to 1490 or so.  So, if you're getting these issues with the stock clocks, there could very well be something wrong with the card.  I know if I were seeing these issues at stock clocks, I'd RMA the card.  

Let us know how it turns out for you.
 

I think blue is VRel.  That's not a PWR limit problem.  GPU core looks pretty stable...voltage looks good. 

Yeah...I'd RMA it.

Don't mean to thread jack here, but I also own a FTW and experience stuttering in CSGO time and time, a lot of it went away when I got rid of CPU throttling.
 
Would the GPU indicating VRel be a contributing factor?

Good morning Hammonde,
 
I see you updated your ticket with our EU office and glad you were able to resolve your issue. If you need additional support please contact support@evga.com.
 
Regards,
Joey C
 

Like JoeyC posted, I canceled the RMA request after an extensive period of testing, swapping out RAM, trying out DVI-I, DVI-D, HDMI cables and so on. I put my radeon back in and it had these same issues with screen tear and stutter, so I decided to troubleshoot once again with the GTx installed. I'm not sure exactly what made certain games stutter, but as I swapped back to the GTX once again, games were working just fine - MGS worked flawlessly with vsync and triple buffering(nvidia control panel. Previously these also helped with the game, but certain 'heavy' parts in the game caused the game to feel sluggish, as if the framerate had gone down when it actually had not.) The game worked better than previously with vsync disabled too.
Ethan Carter worked flawlessly. Wolfenstein still had severe tearing, but nvidia CP's vsync and triple buffering helped with that, although it also affected mouse feel negatively, but I can live with that in a singleplayer.
All in all, I'm not sure what fixed the problem, it couldn't have just been driver sweeping or replugging the GPU as I had done that several times before.
 
One thing still remains a mystery, though - Rocket League still doesn't work like it used to, I still get small stutters here and there and the picture seems somewhat teary, but playable. Several people were saying that a patch made things bad for them, but I also tried a 3 month old version of the game and the issue persisted. This was also with the radeon, so it doesn't seem like a gpu issue.
I'll have to look more into it.
 
Thanks again for all the help and suggestions.

With vsync enabled, it' caps your fps to match your monitor.  About the same thing you're talking about there.  I leave the setting, in the NVIDIA control panel set to adaptive, unless I'm benchmarking..and then it's disabled.