Hi all,

A while ago, I picked up FarCry 3 as part of a humble bundle, and I recently got round to trying it out. One thing that is bothering me in it is that from time to time, the frame rate tanks; usually, I'm getting 60-100fps, but occasionally, the frame rate drops to c20-30 fps. This isn't just for a second or so - it's for a good 30 seconds+.

I have installed MSI afterburner, and looking at the log file from that, basically, the GPU power consumption drops (from c90% to c50%) as does the GPU usage - from 90% to about 30%. CPU usage increases from mid 60s to about 80%.

The problem seems to be fairly random in occurrence; I can't pin it down to any specific scenes in the game.

I'm running:

AMD FX-8350
Geforce GTX 660
16gb RAM
Windows 7 Professional x64
WD Black HDD (7200 RPM)

I know that the FX-8350 isn't brilliant (and neither is the GTX 660), but I'd have thought they should be able to handle FarCry 3. I have dusted the inside of the PC.

I haven't seen this to the same level on any other games; Call of Juarez Gunslinger runs in the 80s-100s on my setup, with the occasional one second drop into the 30s (which I'm assuming is something to do with loading areas).

I'm running the second most recent Nvidia drivers (did a roll back from most recent to see if that made a difference).

Any ideas?

Do you monitor the temperature your card runs at? Most GPUs will drop to lower power if they start to get too hot. It doesn't have to be directly tied to how new the game is or how pretty it looks - some are just more CPU intensive, and some are more GPU intensive. As you note, it isn't a terribly new card, so it may be working very hard to get you those frame rates. And even well-dusted, a card can still overheat if a bearing starts to go in the fan, or if evaporation from imperfect sealing has caused your liquid reservoir to drop low, if you're using liquid cooling.

If dusting it doesn't help
Have a look if the nvidia drivers allow you to change the clock speed. Try under clocking it by 10% and see how it runs.

Is that to try to keep it running cooler? I'll look into it.

I've been thinking about upgrading my card at some point (potentially to a GTX 1070), although if I've got bigger issues in the system, I might need to think about processor first (I've been trying to hold off on that until I can see whether Zen shakes up the market/pricing)

Yep.
A yew years back I had a couple of AMD cards that would keep crashing, its was on this one game (can't remember which) but just dropping the clock rate kept it happy.

You might want to change the energy management from Balanced to High Performance.
It most likely won't solve your problem but you never know.

I meant to say - I tried that earlier. No difference.

I'll also see if I can put the fan on 100% all the time. Airflow in my case is good - I've got an Antec P180 case, with three case fans to suck cold air from the front and eject it out the back. I've also got a custom cooler on the Fx-8350 and a MSI Twin Frozr cooler on the GTX.

I'll try underclocking/increasing fan speed later tonight.

It just seems odd that Far Cry 3 is the one game where it really notices, although it also seems to have a high processor occupancy as well (presumably because unlike most games it seems to use most of my cores).

Those openworld games are pretty demanding, large levels and huge drawdistances and lots of stuff going on.

The game suffers from framerate drops and high CPU usage.

You can try setting priority with Task Manager or similar and change priority.

Also, when the frame rate starts to drop like you mentioned, switch back to desktop and look at the task manager sort by cpu usage, and check if any process is using a lot of the CPU, like AV doing something.

The framerate drop might also be related to IO, like the game is loading a new area. Even though it's all one seamless world, it still might load assets from disk regularly as you move around. Disk IO is another thing you can monitor.

How old is this set up? The thermal paste loses efficiency over time, especially if you put it under constant stress, if that's the case it's going to overheat no matter what you do.

That's what happened with me, granted I use a laptop, I couldn't get it to stop overheating; turns out I never replaced the thermal paste and by that point I might as well not even be using any. Replaced it and the problems all went away.

Interestingly, I used Afterburner to take 40mhz off the clock speed, increased fan to 100% and upped the power limit to 107% and although I lost about 2-5fps, I got through the whole of the intro pirate base and chase through the jungle without a slowdown (lowest the frames got was in the high 40s, which as I've got a gsync screen is perfectly acceptable).

The question for next weekend is which of the settings I changed fixed things? In any case, I've saved it as a separate Afterburner profile.

Well, looks like I spoke too soon; the problem hasn't gone away. It also persists when I reduce resolution. Interestingly, it only seems to happen seriously (as I have noticed) in Far Cry 3. Metro 2033 Redux (which I understand is quite CPU intensive) runs fine.


Finally fixed this. It turns out that on my Asrock 970 extreme 3 r2.0, the vrms are only 4+1 phase and Asrock don't recommend using a tower cooler. I upgraded from an Arctic Cooler A30 to a NH-C14S (which blows into the motherboard, keeping airflow over the VRMs) and problem solved.

Today's lesson - stick to Intel next time and avoid a 125 TDP processor!