Hi all,
 
Coming from an antiquated Radeon 7950, I was hoping the 1070 SC would be a huge upgrade. But I've been here wrestling with this
thing for a week and can't get it to run properly. I'm out of ideas and about to request a refund.
 
System specs:
i5 3570K @ 4.4 (Hyper 212 Evo)
16 GB G.Skill DDR3 1600
Gigabyte z77mx-D3H F15 bios
Windows 7 Ultimate / Intel 520 SSD
 
On the 7950 with the Crimson drivers at 1080P I was pulling 120fps (capped) consistently in Battlefront with the settings lowered on every map. Felt like butter. I figured
with the 1070 I could set the resolution scale @ 150%, rendering the game at 2560x1440 to sharpen up the image and run the game at 120 (maybe 144 fps?) with the same mixture of low/medium settings.
 
No luck. Framerates with the 1070 aren't consistent at any resolution unless the card is maxed out at 200% scale (4K) where it hovers in the 50's and 60's with 99% utilization.
I can be at 150 fps, spin around and see things dip in the 50's and 60's for no apparent reason, then it goes right back up to where it was until a big hiccup happens again seconds later causing the game to "hitch". Jetpacking into the air and zooming in with the pulse cannon weapon seems to activate the hitch and stuttering as well. My old Radeon card never exhibited these problems. I thought the clock speeds might be changing on the fly so I monitored GPU-Z and found both the memory and clock were running at full speeds without any dips. Temps on the GPU core are around 60c (running the latest BIOS). The card just doesn't seem to want to feed my CPU with a steady stream of frames at any resolution lower than 4K.
 
The CPU doesn't appear to be bottlenecking the card. Utilization on each of the 4 cores is between 70-85% at any resolution over 1080p with the framerate uncapped.
All C-states have been disabled with the hottest core never going above ~55c in the game.
 
A few things I've tried:
New (and older) Nvidia drivers dating back to July, uninstalling with DDU
Trying a different VGA power cable
Trying a different power supply (750w EVGA Supernova G2)
Reseating the card
Forcing the power mode in the Nvidia control panel (and Windows) to maximum performance
 
Thanks for any suggestions you might be able to provide. A friend of mine has a 980ti on a similar system and runs it at 1080p with low settings, getting between 150-180 fps.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Yes, I removed all traces of previous AMD and Nvidia drivers in safe mode with DDU. The older Nvidia ones I'm running now (368.81) added a lot of DPC latency in Windows which was another step backwards (was between 10-50 microseconds before, now it's 400-1,200). This added another layer of hitching, but not as noticeable.
 
I'll uninstall these and try the latest ones. At this point I'm not sure if it's a driver issue/incompatability or a hardware problem with the card.

Ok, I'll give that a try and report back.

DeathAngel, holy crap.. thank you. The difference is like night and day with these drivers. My framerate problems are gone!
 
I also took the liberty of uninstalling some usb 3.0 drivers I long suspected of causing issues and grabbed a utility that let me force the card into MSI mode. Googling "Windows: Line-Based vs. Message Signaled-Based Interrupts" should bring up a thread on Guru3D about that.
 
I can't tell exactly what it was that made the most difference, but the game feels like silk now and is way more responsive, both in game
and on the desktop. There were some areas where Battlefront would dip down to 100fps before @1080P, but now I'm rock solid at 130-140 in those same areas.
 
Let my stupidity be a lesson to anyone that thinks they have a faulty card, it might be software/driver related.
 
Thanks again,
Matt