FPS fluctuating on GTX 870M

Hi, I've been having an issue with my frame rate dropping from a solid 60 down to 30 for about half a second and then going up immediately after.

I have a Razer Blade 2014 laptop(GTX 870M) and this occurs most frequently in GTA V. However, it also happens in games that are not demanding at all such as CS:GO. My frame rate will be constant and it will usually drop down to(usually) exactly 30 frames before going back up. This drop occurs frequently(about once every 10 seconds in GTA and once every 20-30 in CS:GO).

I am running the latest Nvidia drivers and have tried disabling streamer service and doing a complete clean reinstall of drivers. My power management settings are also all on high performance in windows and in the nvidia control panel.

I've been troubleshooting this issue for the past week now with no luck, so any help is greatly appreciated. Let me know if I need to provide any extra information.

Thank you!

 

Turn off V-sync in game and turn on adaptive v-sync in your nVidia control panel, or just turn v-sync off altogether.

See this post here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...me-why-this-happens-and-how-to-fix-it.778807/

 

Razer Blade 14, eh? Sounds like something is overheating and throttling.

 

Adaptive vsync is not available for mobile GPUS, and disabling vsync does not fix the issue either.

I took a video of the issue:

I doubt it. The issue does not simply start after a while of playing when the components get hot, it is present even if I had not been using the computer at all beforehand.

 

Take off ALL Anti-Aliasing! Turn on V-Sync in Nvidia control panel and in the game.

 

That is classic V-sync issue. Make sure it's turned off everywhere... in game and in Nvidia control panel.

 

Rolls Eyes...

 

Well it's the truth. You've admitted as much on several occasions.

 

Umm.. My notebook doesn't throttle. Where did I admit that? If you're talking about the fact that I purposefully set cpu max state to 99% to prohibit turbo, then that's true. But it never throttles.

 

What difference does it make whether you limit CPU speed manually or you leave it alone and the CPU throttles naturally when it overheats/exceeds TDP? This is not a semantics discussion. Intel XTU will even tell you that it's throttling.

@D2 Ultima will have a field day with this one.

 

I'm doing it so the fan stays a little quieter for my wife's ears with zero perceptible gaming impact. It never overheated and throttled beforehand, the fans just ramped up a little higher. There's no field day to have by anyone.

If you don't believe me maybe notebookcheck.net? Though not sure why I would lie about it. I only spent quite a bit of time in XTU analyzing it before I settled on the solution of 99% state.

Or maybe tom's hardware http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/razer-blade-benchmarks-review,3393-14.html

Oh yeah.. only way to throttle after 72 minutes? Block the vents (2013 model.. but still)

So someone did get the 2015 to throttle.. but admitted it was a non-gaming situation.. not sure what they meant by that.. It seems like they synthetically pegged all 8 logical cores, which doesn't happen normally in a game.

This is clearly a vsync issue, not sure why you're even bringing throttling up. It makes you sound petty and uninformed. I don't know why I'm even bothering to waste my time on this, just to stop the misinformation I suppose.

 

I have the same card and GTA V. I have V-Sync on and I get a constant 60 FPS, NO DROPS. It might be certain graphic settings he's on. Give all details of the graphic section!

 

This is incorrect. It is not available using OPTIMUS. Mobile GPUs like yours and mine have the capability just like desktops do. There is a big difference between conflicting tech (Optimus + Adaptive sync/Gsync/Custom resolutions/DSR/desktop shadowplay capture/etc) and a product line lacking the function entirely.

I'm going to say you're one of the few people who owns a razer that does not throttle. Most of the time when Razer owners tell me they don't throttle they're not playing games that would throttle their CPUs, or doing things that won't throttle their CPUs. I've seen razer owners complain in GTA V that they're throttling, or in Crysis 3, or in certain other games that murder a CPU. Or when doing some nice rendering via handbrake or something.

Spoiler: Throttling stuff

Let me be clear about what throttling is. If, under sufficient load, your CPU for any reason does not maintain its maximum turbo boost multiplier for the cores stressed (3.3GHz for a 4710HQ and 3.4GHz for a 4720HQ in these cases) then it is throttling. XTU's throttle flags will say it's throttling. Even if you hit 3.2GHz down from 3.3GHz, a throttle flag will be lit for that duration. Maybe it'll be temperature; that's certainly the most common with games. But it could be current limit as well; an easy way to current limit throttle is to run XTU's benchmark (not stress test) with CPU current limit set to anything below 256 amps (even though if I remember right, the current limit throttle there sent me down to 3.3GHz, so a 4710HQ may not actually exhibit "throttling" during that bench; but if you overclock it, you'll see the throttling happen as it won't be able to hit the 3.5GHz multiplier that is allowed to the 4710HQ) and finally, power limit throttling where you don't pass 47W load (for an extended duration, at least. Some of them allow 57W for 2.5 minutes, some don't. It's also an issue all HQ chips share).

Power limit is a little hard to hit unless you're at stock settings though, honestly. Usually an undervolt will clear it up for GAMING, unless you have one of those 4720HQs that have some retarded voltage amount like 1.402v (yes, we've seen this be stock for some of those chips in some notebooks), but this doesn't really help say... rendering out a video or livestreaming or other various things a performance notebook would likely be expected to do (and yes I've seen people try to stream from razer notebooks before; quite commonly in fact). And the lower you reduce voltage, the faster you run into a current limit throttle. If your BIOS doesn't allow you to raise/lower the current limit but allows you to do it with voltage, you might very well switch hands from power limit to current limit after a certain point. There was another user that had that issue on a different notebook; he got temps down by lowering voltage, but then he had to raise current limit to keep his speeds up, and it ended up negating the temperature drop from the undervolt, so he was pretty pissed off.

But please, don't tell me Razers don't throttle. They do, and without me running benchmarks like Prime95, and I can sure as hell make almost any of them throttle for me without crossing what I'd consider "normal" usage for my notebook, especially so if I use stock settings (which most users buying a Razer notebook will be using; not knowing about adjusting voltage/current/multipliers/etc like you or I would.

Since I lowered settings for my GTA V and I get big FPS fluctuations often (due to swapping between CPU and GPU bottlenecks) I can say it looks like you're getting CPU bottlenecks there. Can you use a program to show you your clockspeeds either in-game via an overlay or run GTA V in windowed mode (won't do much to CPU load; under 1% change) and use something like HWiNFO64 in sensors mode to check your speeds on-the-fly? As well as your temps would be a good idea too. If your CPU is throttling then going back up due to heat, it'd explain it.

 

Awww yes, hfm is a classic Stockholm syndrome .

 

UPDATE: Okay, so I've narrowed(or broadened I guess) the cause down to not being related to a specific game.

This issue of the frame rate dropping from 60 to 30 fps is present in all my games, not just GTA 5. The second the frame rate drops below 60 fps, it jumps straight to 30 fps, which seems to be something which vsync would lead to, but it occurs even when vsync is disabled.

Any ideas? Thanks.

 

Check your global 3D settings for Vsync, and check Intel settings too, and check if it happens in windowed/borderless modes for your games.

Also, when you say "all games", can you test a very undemanding game? Like... CoD Black Ops 2. That game could get 60fps on my 280M; it should sit at 60 flat for your 870M.

 

Yep, vsync is off systemwide and the issue occurs both in fullscreen and windowed modes.
You can see this in the video I posted a page back because the frame rate goes over 60 at a few points.

The issue occurs in extremely undemanding games such as Counter Strike:GO.

With vsync off, my fps can be at around 200 and drop all the way down to 30.

However, I just did a system restore and the problem seems to occur much less frequently now, but I definitely need to test more(need to download some games first).

Another thing that I just noticed also was that enabling vsync via the nvidia control panel does NOT cap the fps at 60 in game. Maybe this has something to do with it?

 

It shouldn't activate vsync unless in fullscreen, I believe.
You might want to try reinstalling your OS? You can always make a backup first.

 

If I saw it throttling when turbo was on, i'd say so. It wasn't.