Low FPS reason possibly found!

[Rob Son of Paul]

I made this post in another thread which might have been overlooked. Can anyone else confirm my findings?

The problem I'm having (which I think is the problem that we're all having) is that my video card is running at desktop speed while in game. I have gtx 460 and I use afterburner monitor via my g15 keyboard so I can see the GPU speeds all the time as they are displayed on my keyboards lcd. My card runs at two speeds, desktop and full. Desktop speed is 405mhz core and 324mhz memory. Full speed is 760mhz core and 1800mhz memory. I start the SOW and see that while at the menu screens my card runs at full. But when I load into a game my card runs at desktop speed. I've tried fullscreen on and off with same results.

In all other games my card runs at full speed while playing those games...

[Jim]

Interesting finding. On my NVidia GTX 560, the software shows among other things three clocks, GPU processor clock, GPU memory clock, and GPU graphics clock. The three speeds are coordinated into ah high, medium, and low setting. The game from high to medium to low while loading, back to high at the space bar and stays there until troops start moving when it shifts back to medium. This happens with other programs, even solitaire causes the speeds to reduce. Of note Civ5 drops to low while loading but shifts back to high once the game is loaded and the map is up. We will look into this and see if this is easily adjusted by the game or if it is all load balancing done by the graphics card itself.

-Jim

[Garnier]

I get the same on my GTX 560. I tried running the game with speeds at max and at "desktop" speed, but I couldn't notice any difference in FPS. It hovered between 10-20 while moving the camera around a solid forest map, on both speeds. This with the game paused so no AI or anything.

However, I don't think any of the animations run faster than 10-20 fps, so this "lag" isn't at all noticeable -- the camera still moved and rotated smoothly.

With two monitors, the 560 defaults to full speed when both are enabled, so the card only drops to desktop speed when I disable one monitor.

[con20or]

Ive a GTX560 too - what software are you guys using to see this?

[Rob Son of Paul]

Ive a GTX560 too - what software are you guys using to see this?

http://event.msi.com/vga/afterburner/download.htm

[Jim]

Ive a GTX560 too - what software are you guys using to see this?

It is part of the software installed with the big graphics card driver download from NVidia. Specifically the NVidia System Performance Monitor.

-Jim

[con20or]

Is that a recent driver update? Windows automatic update has been asking me to do one for a few months now, but i generally dont update a driver unless I'm having issues.

I used to get terrible problems with IL2 and some of the old nvidia drivers. 'nvlddmkm.sys' files weren't being deleted, even after using driver cleaner ajnd CCleaner and the files were building up and confusing things...IL2 would crash at the weirdest times....never got it sorted out until i had to buy a new GPU.

[Jim]

Windows device manager reports the video driver version as 8.17.12.9610 with a date of 29 Feb 2012. I have not had issues but I don't play much in the way of graphically intense games.

-Jim

[con20or]

Roger