Nvidia 372.54 serious performance drop?

[Ala12Rv-watermanpc]

Hi guys, I have just installed the new nvidia drivers for my 970 and I can clearly see a BIG performance decrease :noexpression: ...but not only that, suddenly, my card gets like 5-6ºC hotter (previously 70ºC max, now 76ºC+) and the power usage rises from 105/110% to 115/130% :huh: making the card to downclock even with a custom BIOS and making DCS the ONLY game to date capable of doing that :shocking:

 

At the same time, for some reason, I would say that MSAA seems to work better in terms of quality as now image looks better to me, but I might be wrong...

 

There shouldnt be anything wrong with the driver installation, all uninstalled before, registry cleaned, clean install with no problems.

 

Soooo, am I the only one experiencing this?? I dont want to go back to 368.81 to enjoy the latest game releases but I will have to do it if thats how DCS runs now :mad:

 

Thanks!!

[Ala12Rv-watermanpc]

No one installed new drivers??:noexpression:

[Hadwell]

I use a GTX780 and have not noticed any performance issues, but then it's hard to tell in DCS, since the min and max FPS for me is like 50 min, 225 max....

[Ala12Rv-watermanpc]

Thanks for your reply mate!

 

I have just go back to 368.81 and booom!!, I went from 25/30 fps over Vegas to 50/60fps now!!, so I was right! :shocking:

 

I noticed it because the drop was soooo big that it was really noticeable. Also, my temps are back to 70º absolute max (68/69º most of the time) and not the 75/77º I saw with the new drivers.

 

This is the first time I have experienced such a brutal performance drop in a game due to drivers ever :huh:...I doubt its a problem with my system as it works amazing with 368.81 (2560x1080, 4xMSAA, 4xTransparentAA from nvcp and maxed settings except Dof) and I can push 50/60fps at most places over vegas but with the new drivers I get like 25/30fps with those settings WTH?¿?¿?¿?

[BitMaster]

happened to me before...always good to have a few older drivers at hand.

[Chief1942]

Just went with the new drivers and no problems so far. FPS over Vegas is 45-53. My FPS is locked to my monitor refresh rate of 60 FPS. I seldom drop below 60FPS.

[NeilWillis]

No issues here either.

[Ala12Rv-watermanpc]

Thanks guys!, pretty weird its only me the one with the problem :huh:...everything installed correctly with no issues, and after reverting to previous drivers all is working correctly again :huh:...all settings/configuration in the nvcp are exactly the same, no programs running in the background, etc...

[joey45]

Did it happen to other games?

[Art-J]

What about the system? I can see Waterman uses Win7, no idea what Chief and Neil are on. New drivers might be OK for the -10, but fudged for -7 or -8.

[NineLine]

What about the system? I can see Waterman uses Win7, no idea what Chief and Neil are on. New drivers might be OK for the -10, but fudged for -7 or -8.

 

That's possible, I have heard complaints on these drivers from other gamers in other games, but I like many others have had no issue here (on Win10)

[Ala12Rv-watermanpc]

Did it happen to other games?

 

In the ones I tested the answer is NO!...no mans sky and bf4 worked fine.

 

What about the system? I can see Waterman uses Win7, no idea what Chief and Neil are on. New drivers might be OK for the -10, but fudged for -7 or -8.

 

Maybe, I dont like win10 so Im on win 7...really love win7 :D

 

Damn!, I should have taken some pictures to let you see the fps drop :doh: ...but believe me, its incredible...same mission, just after starting it, I pause and look to my left to the city and 25/30fps with the new drivers, the card fans sound like they are going to explode...

 

after going back to older drivers same mission, same situation...look to my left and 55/60 fps and the card is not even close to the same temperature :huh:

 

Also, when flying over less demending areas, with the older drivers, I see the GPU usage as low as 50% some times (vsync enabled of course), so plenty of GPU power available yet but with the new drivers, in the same places, I see the GPU usage bouncing between 80/99% so its like the GPU performance has been reduced in half for some reason with the latest drivers :noexpression:

 

So, it looks like I will stay with the old ones by now...

[Drona]

Most of you guys have too much time on your hands. Why bother changing something if it's working fine already. Unless you have a problem, then changing stuff makes sense. I've only installed my NVIDIA drivers just once, changed the necessary settings for DCS in NVIDIA drivers and have not touched them since. To each their own I guess.

[Art-J]

Nah, that depends on definition of "working fine". Back in the days of late 1.2.x, early 1.5.x updating drivers gave me a neat performance boost in DCS once or twice on my GTX780. I don't do it often nowadays, as I won't be able to squeeze more out of this old card anyway. I can see why next gen card users might want to do it though.

 

Anyway, Win7x64 here as well, so I'll cynically wait on further reports from Waterman before updating my drivers :D.

[Mustang]

Why don't you Nvidia guys try .dll injection method like AMD users do?

 

If an older driver works better with DCS just get the driver dlls and drop them into the bin folder while running the rest of the system on the newer driver.

[StandingCow]

You might want to try a totally clean install, use DDU: http://www.guru3d.com/files-details/display-driver-uninstaller-download.html

[TAW_Impalor]

No change for me: same FireStrike mark, same DCS performance. And by the way, the latest DDU hangs on my system after cleaning the drivers. Must kill it and manually reboot PC...

[BitMaster]

No change for me: same FireStrike mark, same DCS performance. And by the way, the latest DDU hangs on my system after cleaning the drivers. Must kill it and manually reboot PC...

 

Have you done DDU the way it's meant to be applied ??

 

Reboot in SafeMode, disable DriverInjection, etc....

 

Maybe try again with recommended settings if you havent done so before, DDU can be quite a big help :)

[Ala12Rv-watermanpc]

Thanks for your help guys!!

 

I didnt tried DDU for the last 2 drivers sets as suddenly it stoped working correctly for me for some reason (it didnt totally uninstall ALL driver stuff after the reboot) even rebooting in safe mode. Previously I have always used DDU with no issues.

 

Anyway, DDU is not essential, and just uninstalling every single nvidia driver component and cleaning with CCleaner is enough to make them work fine (as I said, those were the steps I followed last 2 or 3 times and no issues), even reverting back to 368.81 is working perfectly now so I dont think installation/uninstallation could be the problem here.

 

I have no idea what happened with this new drivers, but Im pretty sure ALL setting in nvcp, DCS, etc where exactly the same (always check them after new drivers) and the side effect of the brutally increased temp is a REALLY WEIRD and determinant to demonstrate that there is as "issue"...

 

I will just skip this new drivers, as performance with the previous is in fact amazing considering I like to punish my 970 with 4xTransparentAA (I cant stand trees shimmering) which btw, I highly recommend to everyone for DCS...

Edited August 18, 2016 by watermanpc

[NeilWillis]

That's possible, I have heard complaints on these drivers from other gamers in other games, but I like many others have had no issue here (on Win10)

 

I'm using Win 7.

[droopy114]

I like to punish my 970 with 4xTransparentAA (I cant stand trees shimmering) which btw, I highly recommend to everyone for DCS...

 

What do you mean by this? the regular in-game MSAA or SuperSampling method with NCP or Nvidia Inspector?

[Lange_666]

Most of you guys have too much time on your hands. Why bother changing something if it's working fine already. Unless you have a problem, then changing stuff makes sense. I've only installed my NVIDIA drivers just once, changed the necessary settings for DCS in NVIDIA drivers and have not touched them since. To each their own I guess.

+ 1 on this one.

Once nVidia moves up to a higher range in it's videocards (like going from GTX6xx to GTX7xx etc...) updating the driver doesn't bring much of an improvement to the older range of cards. Just my experience in 25 years of PC gaming (before that there was no need to updating drivers...LOL).

[StandingCow]

Sometimes you want to upgrade drivers for new games coming out.

[BitMaster]

+ 1 on this one.

Once nVidia moves up to a higher range in it's videocards (like going from GTX6xx to GTX7xx etc...) updating the driver doesn't bring much of an improvement to the older range of cards. Just my experience in 25 years of PC gaming (before that there was no need to updating drivers...LOL).

 

 

My son has plenty games on my rig and I have to update them from time to time to have all his games perform well, also NV-Exp profiles change for his games etc...

 

If it only was for DCS...yes...I would have a driver 6-12 month old maybe.

 

 

 

Look the mac, runs almost the same games meanwhile ( at least I have a dozen on my mac i just type on ) and hardly ever get a new driver for the video card ( 650M-GT ).

If it runs, dont touch it unless you look for work and trouble and feel utmost lucky to have it back there hours later where it was before you start messing with it :) hehe

 

btw...thats the way you learn that stuff, play with it, but u have to accept lots of failures and errors while you search your way into administrating PC's and hardware maint..

[dburne]

I upgraded to the 372.54 drivers earlier this week, initially had a problem when I flew DCS again yesterday after the driver upgrade, apparently had a corrupt driver install. Cleaned the drivers out with DDU and did a clean install of the drivers, and all is well again.

 

These drivers are doing well for me, my performance in DCSW has not changed, still get great framerates.