Hardware & Technical Low FPS after 1803 and Nvidia update

[munz]

Hi Everyone,

Apologies if this belongs in a different section but I updated my Win 10x64 Pro to 1803 (with Elite Dangerous Launcher: V 2018.3.27.168330 0.4.64 15.0 FD) last week and the first thing I noticed while playing Elite was how quickly the screen would switch from game to desktop whilst pressing Ctrl+tab (so I could check emails periodically). I thought it was a fantastic feature (with better graphics cards that could handle it perhaps it would be). Prior to the 1803 update, Ctrl+tab used to take a few seconds while the graphics cards processed the new information from whatever program I was switching to (Chrome etc).

After 1803, I noticed my FPS drop from 60 in open space, to 20 and (even 12ish) after jumping into a new system. That's NEVER happened before so I updated the Nvidia drivers as suggested on various forums. I re-enabled SLI (Maximise 3D performance in Nvidia Settings) and can see the temps on both my 770Ms (stock speeds) go up whilst gaming and down when idle.

I looked into the new features of 1803 and disabled the Game Bar, Game DVR (just to free system resources as I don't need it) and whatever else I could see. I still can't find the setting to fix blurry apps and I strongly suspect that's also part of the problem.

From my experience, the graphics cards are rendering not just the graphics in elite but also rendering the bells and whistles found in 1803 by providing an aesthetic desktop that's in memory when I don't need (nor want that). I want the graphics cards focused on game play and I was happy to wait a few seconds to switch between tasks.

I've disabled transparencies, tried using Geforce Experience's optimal settings and that didn't help at all. The frame rates are all over the shop where I get a solid 60 at times, and in the middle of combat they'll drop to 15 which is absurd.


It feels like the developers have pushed out new updates, which as a consumer I thought would be more efficient. There's probably a disclaimer somewhere stating certain system settings/preferences may change and create drops in performance. I saw no option to simply update the code without changing the preferences/settings that work (like adding blur reduction etc).

Recommendations? Thanks in advance.


Alienware 18 BTX Base Mod
Overclocked 4th Gen Intel(R)Core(TM)i7-4930MX Processor (8MB Cache, up to 4.3GHz w/ Turbo Boost)
18.4 inch (467.36mm) WLED FHD (1920 X 1080) TrueLife Display
Palmrest with Non Variable Pressure Technology
Anodized Aluminum
Internal High-Definition Performance Audio
16GB Dual Channel DDR3L at 1600MHz
512GB mSATA SSD Boot + 750GB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s
Slot-Loading Dual Layer Blu-ray Reader (BD-ROM, DVDRW, CD-RW)
330W A/C Adapter
8-cell Lithium Ion (86 wHr) Battery
Dual NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770M with 3GB GDDR5 - NVIDIA SLI Enabled
5G WiFi Broadcom 4352 802.11n/ac and Bluetooth 4.0
5G WiFi Broadcom 4352 802.11n/ac and Bluetooth 4.0 driver
Alienware Non-VPT Keyboard English International
6 programmable Macro module key

 

[CMDR MAIN SEQUENCE]

You're not going to like my suggestion - time for a Windows re-install. Although I'd had no issues with 1803, a couple of months back I had similar symptoms to what you describe - whereas before it would take my monitor several seconds to alt-tab it was now instantaneous (as if the game was set to Borderless and not Fullscreen*) and I was getting frame-skipping, stuttering. Oddly, it was only ED (and VR was worse), other games etc. were fine. I tried loads of things over the course of 2-3 days, only thing that fixed it was a re-install.

* you've checked that, right?

Before you do that, try a complete wipe and clean install of the nvidia drivers using DDU.

 

[munz]

You're not going to like my suggestion - time for a Windows re-install. Although I'd had no issues with 1803, a couple of months back I had similar symptoms to what you describe - whereas before it would take my monitor several seconds to alt-tab it was now instantaneous (as if the game was set to Borderless and not Fullscreen*) and I was getting frame-skipping, stuttering. Oddly, it was only ED (and VR was worse), other games etc. were fine. I tried loads of things over the course of 2-3 days, only thing that fixed it was a re-install.

* you've checked that, right?

Before you do that, try a complete wipe and clean install of the nvidia drivers using DDU.

Hi Main Sequence, many thanks for your response. Yes I forgot to add the starred point you mentioned is precisely what's happening with me. It's as if I was playing in windowed mode which in my experience almost always takes a hit to performance (unless I was playing a very old game). Like yourself, it's more so with ED, my GTA5, Metro, Far Cry 4 installs seem to run just fine, though Universe Sandbox 2 is also sluggish. I'll give the driver reinstall a try as you suggested before taking the reinstall plunge. I used to use CCleaner before, I haven't used DDU before - would you recommend that over CC? Again many thanks for the advice, I needed to hear it from someone else before committing to a full reinstall.

 

[Caramel Clown]

Check if you're running in borderless windowed mode

 

[Strangepork]

Hi Everyone,

Apologies if this belongs in a different section but I updated my Win 10x64 Pro to 1803 (with Elite Dangerous Launcher: V 2018.3.27.168330 0.4.64 15.0 FD) last week and the first thing I noticed while playing Elite was how quickly the screen would switch from game to desktop whilst pressing Ctrl+tab (so I could check emails periodically). I thought it was a fantastic feature (with better graphics cards that could handle it perhaps it would be). Prior to the 1803 update, Ctrl+tab used to take a few seconds while the graphics cards processed the new information from whatever program I was switching to (Chrome etc).

After 1803, I noticed my FPS drop from 60 in open space, to 20 and (even 12ish) after jumping into a new system. That's NEVER happened before so I updated the Nvidia drivers as suggested on various forums. I re-enabled SLI (Maximise 3D performance in Nvidia Settings) and can see the temps on both my 770Ms (stock speeds) go up whilst gaming and down when idle.

I looked into the new features of 1803 and disabled the Game Bar, Game DVR (just to free system resources as I don't need it) and whatever else I could see. I still can't find the setting to fix blurry apps and I strongly suspect that's also part of the problem.

From my experience, the graphics cards are rendering not just the graphics in elite but also rendering the bells and whistles found in 1803 by providing an aesthetic desktop that's in memory when I don't need (nor want that). I want the graphics cards focused on game play and I was happy to wait a few seconds to switch between tasks.

I've disabled transparencies, tried using Geforce Experience's optimal settings and that didn't help at all. The frame rates are all over the shop where I get a solid 60 at times, and in the middle of combat they'll drop to 15 which is absurd.


It feels like the developers have pushed out new updates, which as a consumer I thought would be more efficient. There's probably a disclaimer somewhere stating certain system settings/preferences may change and create drops in performance. I saw no option to simply update the code without changing the preferences/settings that work (like adding blur reduction etc).

Recommendations? Thanks in advance.


Alienware 18 BTX Base Mod
Overclocked 4th Gen Intel(R)Core(TM)i7-4930MX Processor (8MB Cache, up to 4.3GHz w/ Turbo Boost)
18.4 inch (467.36mm) WLED FHD (1920 X 1080) TrueLife Display
Palmrest with Non Variable Pressure Technology
Anodized Aluminum
Internal High-Definition Performance Audio
16GB Dual Channel DDR3L at 1600MHz
512GB mSATA SSD Boot + 750GB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s
Slot-Loading Dual Layer Blu-ray Reader (BD-ROM, DVDRW, CD-RW)
330W A/C Adapter
8-cell Lithium Ion (86 wHr) Battery
Dual NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770M with 3GB GDDR5 - NVIDIA SLI Enabled
5G WiFi Broadcom 4352 802.11n/ac and Bluetooth 4.0
5G WiFi Broadcom 4352 802.11n/ac and Bluetooth 4.0 driver
Alienware Non-VPT Keyboard English International
6 programmable Macro module key

Hello cmdr, I had the same, at the bottom of this thread the issues were solved for me and another cmdr.

Comment #13

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/426149-Last-stable-NVIDIA-Driver-19fps!

All the best.

 

[Asp Explorer]

Ahh you have an actual hard drive in your build

Have a look in Task Manager and see if Windows has decided to plop your pagefile on there

Open a command prompt and CD to D: or whatever the hard drive is and dir /w/a

 

[mossfoot]

Last time I had that kind of FPS drop, I uninstalled everything related to the game, including NVIDIA drivers, then reinstalled them.

 

[CMDR MAIN SEQUENCE]

Hi Main Sequence, many thanks for your response. Yes I forgot to add the starred point you mentioned is precisely what's happening with me. It's as if I was playing in windowed mode which in my experience almost always takes a hit to performance (unless I was playing a very old game). Like yourself, it's more so with ED, my GTA5, Metro, Far Cry 4 installs seem to run just fine, though Universe Sandbox 2 is also sluggish. I'll give the driver reinstall a try as you suggested before taking the reinstall plunge. I used to use CCleaner before, I haven't used DDU before - would you recommend that over CC? Again many thanks for the advice, I needed to hear it from someone else before committing to a full reinstall.

Only just seeing your reply (as at 11:00UTC), guess your posts were stuck in moderation due to low post count Yes I would trust DDU over CCleaner (for starters it does more WRT graphics files/entries). But hopefully you've seen the reply by john willi below and tried that first.

 

[munz]

Check if you're running in borderless windowed mode

Hi Caramel, yup checked and definitely have not been in windowed or borderless windowed mode.

Hello cmdr, I had the same, at the bottom of this thread the issues were solved for me and another cmdr.

Comment #13

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/426149-Last-stable-NVIDIA-Driver-19fps!

All the best.

Thank you John, I'll have a read through it and see if that resolves the issue.

Ahh you have an actual hard drive in your build

Have a look in Task Manager and see if Windows has decided to plop your pagefile on there

Open a command prompt and CD to D: or whatever the hard drive is and dir /w/a

Haha, I guess my old desktop replacement is turning obsolete with a drive with moving parts I just checked and Virtual Memory is being automatically managed (16384MB) and set to drive C which is a SSD

Last time I had that kind of FPS drop, I uninstalled everything related to the game, including NVIDIA drivers, then reinstalled them.

If nothing else works it's that before a full OS reinstall :/

Only just seeing your reply (as at 11:00UTC), guess your posts were stuck in moderation due to low post count Yes I would trust DDU over CCleaner (for starters it does more WRT graphics files/entries). But hopefully you've seen the reply by john willi below and tried that first.

Yup I kept checking and they hadn't been approved by the mods yet. I'll give John's thread a go, I had forgotten how painful it is to recover misplaced product keys (Office/Windows etc).

Thank you everyone, it would be nice to get back into the game and not want to quit every few minutes due to this issue. I'll post back once I've given it a try.

 

[munz]

DDU (Windows Safe Mode) and Driver Reinstall Worked!

DDU (Windows Safe Mode with several restarts also under safe mode) and driver reinstall worked like a charm. I haven't tried other games but Elite works perfectly now, and since I've been suffering withdrawal for the past week I'm jumping back into it. Thank you to everyone for your help!

 

[Flimley]

I was getting drops in framerate after the 1803 update every five seconds or so.... which was strange. So did this above ^ and updated my Nvidia drivers and all good again.
In addition windows media player was not working properly, this was most annoying and much time wasted trying to solve that yesterday. But the above fix solved that too !

Flimley

 

[mossfoot]

DDU (Windows Safe Mode with several restarts also under safe mode) and driver reinstall worked like a charm. I haven't tried other games but Elite works perfectly now, and since I've been suffering withdrawal for the past week I'm jumping back into it. Thank you to everyone for your help!

I'm gonna have to try this one. I usually just use CClean.

 

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

I haven't played ED for a while, but prior to 1803 I was getting consistently smooth gameplay in Crysis 2.

Now after the update, when I launch the game, it runs like garbage, until I switch to windowed mode and back to full screen.

That's with the latest nVidia drivers.

And Crysis 1 no longer launches.

 

[munz]

I haven't played ED for a while, but prior to 1803 I was getting consistently smooth gameplay in Crysis 2.

Now after the update, when I launch the game, it runs like garbage, until I switch to windowed mode and back to full screen.

That's with the latest nVidia drivers.

And Crysis 1 no longer launches.

I feel your pain...

I don't know about those of you who tried the above solution but unfortunately I'm back to square one :/

After a full evening of ED at 45-60FPS, I turned off the PC for the night. Upon switching the PC on, Windows prompted me that the system is SLI capable. SLI was working the night before, however after restarting the next morning, Windows somehow turned it off. I re-enabled SLI hoping that's the only issue. When I started ED in the evening I came across the exact same issues, only this time I decided not to let the low FPS keep me from my fun and it just kept getting worse and worse (12 fps) until I got the following System Error message:

"The file has failed to load after multiple attempts as Direct3D cannot lock a buffer.

Please check your machine meets the minimum specs for Elite: Dangerous. If the minimum specs are met then upgrading graphics drivers may rectify the problem."

At present the only solution is uninstall drivers, run DDU in safe mode, reinstall drivers and NEVER EVER reboot/shutdown the PC [wacko]

 

[Henkka77]

The usual Microsoft stuff..

 

[maffc]

Hello cmdr, I had the same, at the bottom of this thread the issues were solved for me and another cmdr.

Comment #13

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/426149-Last-stable-NVIDIA-Driver-19fps!

All the best.

Thanks, this worked for me too