Focus on enhancing your skills and consistency.
Focus on enhancing your skills and consistency.
Hey everyone, I'm trying to understand what's slowing me down. About a month ago I bought a GTX 970 to dive deeper into PC gaming. Some titles perform excellently—like Tomb Raider on Ultra with over 100 FPS. Others give solid FPS at Ultra settings but drop when I tweak them. Even after adjusting things, the game still skips. My max performance is limited by single display and power usage, vertical sync is off, though I've experimented with those options. The video from *Vanishing of Ethan Carter* is included for reference. Also, MSI's afterburner claims I'm seeing around 200k FPS in that game—something that hasn't happened before. I just recorded a clip starting at about 0:40 to share. This is frustrating. I'm trying to pinpoint the issue—CPU, graphics card, HDD? Are these settings too demanding for my GTX 970? In-game skips happen even when lowering settings. The specs are listed if you want details. I'm also playing at 120Hz on a Samsung monitor. Recently, I bought several parts for Black Friday: replacing my PSU, HDD, and adding an SSD. If needed, I'll swap out the motherboard or CPU to improve stability and smooth gameplay.
It's the only game that's been affected. I enabled MSI for monitoring, but it seems to be causing issues. Unlike other titles, it displays inconsistent FPS readings. You're right about the stuttering—it's happening across several games and is quite bothersome.
I wasn't sure what MSI was showing, so I think it's not about the cores but the threads. I've noticed this too—I just logged into the game and it behaves the same. When something freezes, everything briefly jumps up for a second before returning to low percentages. I also enabled the temp monitor for all threads, which were running between 35-40 during the game.
You're seeing occasional stutters, possibly due to background programs. Your RIG seems solid unless it's been overclocked, which could be the issue. The CPU isn't weak unless it's not already OC'd—then that might be the cause. Could be specific games triggering the problem? Check what applications are running in the background. If you've done an overclock, ensure it's stable at around 4GHz.
The I7-980 features a six-core processor with hyper-threading, meaning it offers 12 logical cores. Applications leverage threads rather than physical cores, while monitoring tools display 12 cores, though only six are real processing units from the six cores.
Steam, MSI Afterburner, Task Manager, EasyTune6, and a few Chrome tabs. Running them quietly shouldn't trigger lag on my machine. Also, I don’t have an OC disk. This is my first time with an OC, and I’m using the 980 CPU, not the X version. My board has an auto 4GHz overclock switch, and the Gigabyte guide mentioned support for 980x but not 980—so I’m unsure if it’s safe. I just bought it recently and haven’t played many games yet. Far Cry 4 feels sluggish, almost like the skip you saw online, but more frequent. The game I got today runs poorly overall, with noticeable stutters even in League of Legends, though benchmarks are decent otherwise.