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Does this usually happen with video cards?
So I recently built a rig as some of you might already know because you helped me lol, and for my graphics card, i got the xfx 6870. So far i played Starcraft 2 and Lord of the rings. Whenver I play starcraft i wouild check my fps constantly and normal would be about 50-85. However sometimes, randomly i would get 30-50 sometimes. I thoguht this was just a starcraft thing but even in Lord of the Rings online the game would be smooth then I would notice it being noticeably stuttery randomly sometimes. I konw my card is not overheating because i downloaded msi afterburner which lets me automatically adjust the fan speed depending on the temperature. It didn't go over 75 in furmark for 40 minutes. So what could the problem be? Would I have to RMA the card, or could something else be the problem?( I got the latest video card drivers also)
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I have had this happen to me before during RIft, with my 6850, but if I rebooted the problem went away, I think it was a computer problem and not the graphics card.
Something running in the background that was causing the FPS drop, or it could have been this fualty secondary hard drive I had.. this thing wound up dying on me eventually , but I think it was a blessing since the drive was probably causing me some of these problems.
"When it comes to GW2 any game is fair game"
1: 30fps is the natural limmed human eyes can see. ( well a bit higher but your brain cant cope more) so thats not a bad thing
2: fps always stutter, loading a area, intense gfx effect , other programs using cpu/memory. it all affect fps.
3: memory can build up and needs to clear itself, this gives a stutter aswell
never ever let a silly fps counter tell you if your card is bad, sure when you get below 30 on a super rig then its someting to worrie about.
so if you run both those games on the highest possible setting and whit a high resolution then your card is working just fine.
There isn't much reason to believe that the human eye works in terms of frames per second. You can commonly see artifacts of discrete frame rates like the wagon wheel effect in videos that have a steady frame rate, but not often in real life.
There's also the issue of how steady the frame rate is. An average frame rate of 30 frames per second might correspond to 1/10 of a second between consecutive frames at times, and you most certainly can see that.
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There are a lot of possible explanations for what you're seeing. Overheating isn't likely, as a game that can deliver 30-50 frames per second at the emergency overheating clock speeds isn't pushing your hardware very hard, and isn't likely to make it overheat in the first place.
The most likely is that some parts of games are simply more demanding to render than others. If you're looking at an open field, then the video card doesn't have to do much work to render a frame. If you're looking at a massive battle in a big base, then it has to draw lots of units and buildings and effects, and that makes it take longer to render each frame. That sends your frame rate way down.
Another possible explanation is a program popping up in the background and using your hardware. StarCraft II is pretty CPU-intensive, so if a program in the background decides to claim one of your processor cores for itself, then the game has less processor resources available, and your frame rate suffers.
So its most likely nothing wrong with my video card? Because furmark i get 29-31 fps all the time on 1080p. So that justifies it right?
Try running your card with Vsync turned on, usually the frames run smoother no highs and lows it just locks your frame rendering to your monitors refresh rate.
The following statement is false
The previous statement is true
No matter what hardware you have, if you turn settings high enough, you can make it choke. The advantage to better hardware is that you can turn settings higher while keeping the game playable.
I doub something is wrong with your videocard specially the games you mentioned your videocard should handle them verywell.
Make sure you have tweaked your PC right way or not to many background programs running while playing like protection programs or download in background and are you alone on your network or more using your connection. Is your IP stable?
Many thinks can couse fps drops that will for most part not be couse by your videcard if its rather new card.
Check if driver is ok maybe latest driver have issue and you need a early version?
Make sure all your settings are ok. Do you run it fullscreen or windowed?
Do you have 32bit OS or 64bit OS that also can make difference with your memory.
Dit a little spelling check for you, and moved the questions down in the post. Dutch got to stick together
English is a bitch whitout a working Google Check sometimes :")
Ain't your graphics card, dude. Could be hundreds of reasons for stutter. Games stutter sometimes, particularly MMOs. Imagine the amount of code that's chugging through your system at any given time you're playing.
what quizzy said. most likely you either ran into an area where you are stressing the partical engine and/or rendering engine more then usual, or you might have virus scan kicking up in the background.
your machine shouldnt have a issue running those games. the only thing i can think of that "might" help is for you to turn off pagefiles in windows.
If you're using a 60hrz LCD monitor and vsyn on, those fps are about right. Turn vsyn off, may see if it doesn't tear to bad and should see a rise in fps. also turn options on gfx card control panel to performance in the 3d settings section and see if that helps. Or get a monitor tha supports 3d then using vsnyc will put your fram rate at 120cap with today graphic cards. 60hrz LCD's are a bottleneck for gpu's of today. You get back the CRT smoothness with a 120hrz LCD. Same if you plug in to cheap 1020p flatscreen with a hrz under 100
The eye may only be able to discern about 24-30FPS but it can certainly notice framerate drops at much higher frequency.
To the OP - those frame rates sound about right. If the drop in frame rate is distracting, you'll probably just need to adjust the game options so that the drops aren't as noticeable. Games like SC2 are very CPU-intensive, and in very large maps/games it's going to choke pretty well every computer to some degree.
If something were wrong with the card, more than likely it would go from ~500/60 down to like... 4 or 5 (and that would indicate a thermal problem). Sometimes drivers can have that effect as well - there was a problem that was notorious with some of the lower-end 5000 series where they would go into low power slow clock mode, and not always come out of it to kick into high power mode on some games.
Vsync is a good idea, I leave it enabled in my driver full time. You get no benefit from anything over 60Hz anyway, other than bragging rights and the ability to post benchmark scores.
But the things is that sc2 fps drop will happen like in the quietest settings. And it will stay there for a while. I'm pretty sure nothing is running in the background since I dont have that many things installed.
The human eye cannot see full discrete frames at above 20fps or so. In fact, I have a camera that does 20fps 1080P video, and it's at least semi-okay (though not ideal).
That does not mean, however, that you cannot see severe visual distortions at even far high framerates. There are many variables that affect what framerate is necessary to avoid visible artifacts, but the two biggest are screen size and speed of motion of an object.
If you have a fast object quickly moving across a big screen, then you tend to be able to much more easily discern discrete "hops". Reduce the speed of motion or the size of the screen, and an object will make smaller and smaller discrete movements. The line at which those movements are either big or small enough to be perceptible or imperceptible may differ from person to person, but generally it's accepted that for the purposes of typical computer gaming usage, 60fps is enough to make almost any motion seem fluid and continuous. On my little laptop screen, 30fps honestly looks pretty fluid in most games, but it's a much different story on my desktop.
OP: 50-80 is a good range. You might see some tearing without Vsync, but Vsync will drop you to 30fps if you can't maintain 60, and I'd rather have 50 with a bit of tearing than 30 without. If you start dropping to 30 anyways, that probably could get annoying.