GV-N460OC-1GI Stuttering in Games

[Chumley Marchbanks]

I recently put my 4870 to rest due to overheating problems and in it's place I bought a GTX 460 1GB. Here are my full system specs:

AMD Phenom II X4 955 @ 3.2GHz
Gigabyte GTX 460 1GB OC
Corsair 4GB 800MHz DDR2 (2x2GB)
ASUS M3A79-T Deluxe
Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi XtremeGamer
Western Digital 320GB SATA-II (x2)
OCZ ModXStream 600W
Windows 7 Home Premium

Essentially, I get two types of stuttering: split-second freezing when loading and jerkiness when moving. When the first type happens the game will freeze for a split-second every couple of seconds for between five and thirty seconds. It happens in every game whenever a new map or level loads. This was significantly reduced overall with the latest beta drivers (260.63) but it's still very apparent. When the second type happens the game jerks and splutters whenever I move around or the camera moves during a cutscene. It affects most games I've played, although it is more apparent in some more than others, and using the latest the beta drivers hasn't made any difference.

Some of the games that have been most significantly affected by this include Crysis, Final Fantasy XIV, GTA4, Mafia II, and Dead Rising 2 (you'll notice these games have large open environments, which seems to be a prominent factor). Other games that have been marginally affected are Mass Effect 2, Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, and Trine. I run most of these games on high graphics settings and some on medium.

So far I've tried updating to the latest NVIDIA beta drivers (260.63), reformatting with a fresh version of Windows 7 and turning down the graphics settings but all have been of little help. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

[Dark Mantis]

Hi and welcome to the forum.
It is possibly two things. The first could be the drivers as there have been a lot of reports regarding driver problems, some of which have supposedly been helped by returning to older versions of the drivers. Secondly it could be caused by latency in your system. I would advise you to download and run DPCLatency Checker. It is available here: http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml
Run it and see what readout it gives you. If there are any bars that go into the red then you have latency problems for sure. Post back when you have tested.

[Chumley Marchbanks]

Hi and welcome to the forum.
It is possibly two things. The first could be the drivers as there have been a lot of reports regarding driver problems, some of which have supposedly been helped by returning to older versions of the drivers. Secondly it could be caused by latency in your system. I would advise you to download and run DPCLatency Checker. It is available here: http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml
Run it and see what readout it gives you. If there are any bars that go into the red then you have latency problems for sure. Post back when you have tested.

I had some trouble installing older drivers; some said they were unable to find appropriate hardware and others just hung about halfway through installation. So far I've successfully used 258.96 and 260.63 with the problem still persisting. The DPC Latency Checker stayed low and in the green both on the desktop and whilst playing Dead Rising 2, which suffers significantly from stuttering.

[Dark Mantis]

Well it looks like you probably don't have a latency problem then although I would recommend continuing testing for a while until you are certain.
I don't run the cards myself and so don't know what drivers to recommend. However whilst stating the obvious I would say that you need to uninstall the old drivers each time before attempting to install new ones. It might be worth doing a search of the forum and see if you can pick up some info on what the best drivers are.

[C++vid]

Not to Hijack the thread but, I'm also getting poor performance with this card.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 runs worse with this card than when I had my old Radeon HD 5770.

I've tried everything:

• Different set of drivers (every single one since 258.56 to 260.63)
• DPC latency check, although most latency problems went away with 260.63
• Installing CPU control (a person over NVIDIA's forums suggested this, saying that BFBC2 had CPU usage issues under Windows 7)
• Clean Windows Install
• Disabling NVIDIA's HD Audio devices (again, someone suggested this @ NVIDIA's forums)
• Every single setting in NVIDIA Control Panel and Game Settings

What I haven't tried is flashing the BIOS.

Could that be it?

Specs:

AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition
ASUS M4A89GTD PRO/USB3
GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 460 1GB OC Edition
4GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3 @ 1333Mhz
Windows 7 Home Premium x64
Thermaltake TR2 TRX-750M 750W Modular PSU.

[Dark Mantis]

What I haven't tried is flashing the BIOS.

Could that be it?

Are you referring to the card's BIOS(firmware) or the motherboard's?

[C++vid]

What I haven't tried is flashing the BIOS.

Could that be it?

Are you referring to the card's BIOS(firmware) or the motherboard's?

Card's BIOS.

[Dark Mantis]

Always worth trying if nothing else works. Is there a great difference between the versions?

[C++vid]

Always worth trying if nothing else works. Is there a great difference between the versions?

Is there a tutorial on how to flash a GIGABYTE's GPU BIOS?

Didn't found one @ GIGABYTE's main web page.

[absic]

Hi there,

check out this thread; http://forum.giga-byte.co.uk/index.php/topic,2439.0.html I think it's the kind of thing you're looking for.