Lasting, reproducible frame rate drop to ~7FPS on GTX 560 Ti, 313.18 driver

This issue first appeared when playing native Team Fortress 2 (on highest settings). The game runs with very good frame rate of 200 FPS+ until after a varying amount of map changes it will drop to just about ~7 FPS right after the loading screen. This can be forced to happen by alt+tabbing out of full screen and playing a bit with desktop effects (or other things that potentially demand the GPU/vram, I assume).

Bug report in the TF2 issue tracker: [url]https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/140[/url]

Today I noticed this also happens with the Unigine Heaven benchmark ([url]UNIGINE Benchmarks).
Running the benchmark at the “Extreme” preset will result in normal behavior until the benchmark run ends and the world reloads, then the FPS are locked to ~7 FPS for the entire second run without change, not even in less demanding scenes.

Other Linux users with different distributions, desktop environments, etc. have also been able to reproduce this on their systems.

System information:
[url]https://gist.github.com/eisbehr/50759c44922ae4d959ae[/url]

The nvidia-bug-report.log I took contains nothing but the uname. I don’t know how to enable debug logging as my distribution doesn’t support use of the “startx” command.

EDIT: Got tipped off by another one affected by this that AA seems to be an issue. Running the benchmark or TF2 without AA seems to prevent this from happening on both our systems.

same issue here.
Arch x86_64
kernel 3.7.7-1
nvidia 313.18

nvidia 560Ti

Yes, same here with Heaven and Serious Sam 3 on Ubuntu 12.10, Kernel 3.8-rc7, Geforce GTX 560 TI…7 fps after a while. Maybe memory pressure ?

Same problem here with 310 drivers, GF8800 under Ubuntu and Arch Linux. I am affected by exactly same issue. Except fact my FPS is around 10. Normally game is running with FPS 200-300.
I have one difference, I am affected right from the start of the game in 70% of cases - I mean when map is loaded. If not, game is working for longer time as it should.

In TF2, when I have to select team, I can clearly see if game is working properly or not.
With higher settings, even without AA I am affected. Higher settings → more frequent occurance.
With “medium” settings, game is running pretty good.

Interesting in CS:Source I am not affected, it could be related with lower memory comsumption? TF2 loading time is noticeable longer. That could mean more usage of video memory too.

i was just thinking about possible memory issue.
i remember some older drivers 310.09 or something showed me that i have 1023MB memory under nvidia-settings, but now with newer ones i see 1024MB. might be something with that?

did some tests with unigine valley benchmark and Far Cry 3 under wine.
this bug appears when Memory usage hits 100% for at least 1 time. then the framerate drops to 5 FPS in my case and locks it to there, even if memory usage goes down after that.
on wine i can prevent this by setting registry parameter to make it see 1023MB of video memory, so far cry 3 wont hit 100% usage and wont get the bug.

So… Still not even a response to this report?

This issue still makes my system rather unusable for games, and that for months now.

Using the new Unigine Benchmark Valley i can confirm that issue.
In the middle of the benchmark the performance drops to 5 or 6 fps and does not recover.
This happens with extreme hd preset @ full hd.

Using the same settings and disabling onöy AA fixes that issue.

Ubuntu 13.04
Nvidia Gtx 560 Ti
313.08

Still an issue on 313.26 :(
GTX460/Valley 1.0/1 benchmark test ok/second one trips at about test 7 and it’s stuck at ~4fps from there on no matter if one benchmarks or one just walks around.

yeah still an issue with 313.26
confirming

Still an issue on 319.12 at least with Unigine Valley 1.0 and Heaven 4.0 :(

still an issue on 314.22 and a major notice from many reports has been on world of warcraft. it sometimes freezes on a set fps and after bringing to front and minimizing again different windows many times i get the casual fps back again which isn’t optimal ! what is wrong with this graphic card. my conclusion is how much cpu is it draining ?

another thing i noticed from reports. is people with older cards had better fps in certain games… sure there are many variables but still it can’t be used as an excuse

What disappoints me is that there is not a single response from the nVidia guys. I thought this is some kind of a support forum, not a user to user forum…

It would be interesting to hear from nVidia if there was any bug filed internally and/or if the bug is reproducible for them.

I don’t get it. aren’t these cards supposed to be pre-tested - on like a variety of cpu’s, tests, situations or variables ?
My system is a 2008 with a 3.3ghz e5200 low-budjet pc in all. but as i said before i don’t want to hear an excuse cause the fact of the matter is people who upgraded To This card has worse performance in some situations as i did, i had an nVidia 9600gt man that card was a wonder! and putting me aside,
There are others with i5 / i7 reporting the same problem !
test this card out please.

i’ll come back to myself now. i play world of warcraft m.o.p for ex. and with the cpu running at 70-80% the game has 30-50 fps in the zone im testing it. lowering view distance and fidling around can get me to 60 fps (v-zync on) But if there is a crowd, even with low distance the fps plumits. i say again cpu at 70-80% usage ! after a while it’s as if the card is getting too much data and can’t keep up.
i have also seen in these situations GPU at 50-60% usage. aye you will say the CPU is bottlenecking but then why won’t it hit 100% usage ?

-the only situation i have seen this card at it’s peak is on GPU Tests, Furmark, 3D-mark, Heaven etc.etc. where everything is at 100% !

I ain’t a Brain-wiz but either i have missed something searching on this matter or this card is throwing the cpu’s performance down the drain.

Much help is appreciated

There is no 314.22 version driver for Linux. Whatever do you mean?

it’s the same on the windows drivers

@nazzgull
Your issue sounds like something different. The issue I reported has different characteristics.
Performance is good until it breaks in and locks to a very low FPS… that’s actually completely different than what you describe.
On top of that you’re apparently on Windows, not on Linux. Sorry to say, but it doesn’t seem relevant here.

Still happening on 319.17

Really seems like no one at Nvidia even cares that their customers have problems, for months now.

Same problem here. It just started happening after I upgraded from 304.51 to 319.17. Starcraft 2 under Wine slows down to <1fps after a while. No messages in any logs.

card:
03:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation G92 [GeForce GTS 250] (rev a2)

It would at least be useful to know What chipsets are affected. (nvidia, are you there?)
I’ll stay with my 9800gtx until then…

Well, to me the title is misleading, and not very helpful. Are you stating that there is a 7frame per second drop in current frames? For example, a drop from 100fps to 93 would be an ~7fps frame rate drop.

However, are you stating that your frame rate drops to ~7fps which is 7 above 0?

Come clarification is needed, because in the first example, that may not be a significant drop in overall performance to merit a response from nVidia?

Also in all your posts, you fail to mention your system specs to include the following:

CPU
RAM
Motherboard Model and Chipset
Power Supply Model Number with amps rating on the 12volt rails.
Hard Drive’s (RAID/None RAID/IDE Mode/ACHI Mode)
Operating System Flavor and Kernel Versions