Why is my graphics card not running games as well as it should be?

Question

Hey guys, so I've had this Nvidia GTX560 Ti for about 2 years now, and in those 2 years its ran games wonderfully! well recently games have been lagging hard, I've had to turn Battlefield 3 to medium settings and StarCraft II starts lagging within like 10 minutes of the game, and these are both games that ran on max no problem.

I'm pretty sure it isn't the CPU/RAM (Intel i5 2500K/8GB DDR3) I thought maybe heat was the problem but its not my system stays quite cool, I've also scanned for viruses and what not, its found nothing, cleaned out programs that I no longer use.

what makes it even more confusing is when I play with StarCraft 2 with my friend his game runs just fine! and his system is way less powerful then mine! his graphics card is a GTS450... so I don't get why he's able to run games just fine while my GTX560 Ti is just struggling! and yes all my drivers are up to date and no, its not my internet lol.

so yea, any suggestions would help... I just don't know what to do. kinda out of ideas on running diagnostics.

No Feeding The Hippies, Please. · Accepted Answer

you are only "pretty sure" it isn't something else. Try this: take your graphics card and use it in another computer and play your games on that one. Kinda labor intensive, but if you use a friend's computer, this solution makes it free.

if this proves that it IS your graphc is card being problematic, then now you know for sure.

you could also check the error log file (i assume you are using windows). Of course if you are largely computer inept, this isn't a great solution, but if you are willing to dive into a mess of techy lingo then you might be able to find errors there.
(for example, play a game for 10 minutes, turn the game off, and check the error logs for that duration. if you find a CRAPLOAD of errors or anything else that seems like it might be unusual, then google it, and someone is bound to find something to point you in the right direction.

Arnak · Answer

Hi,

It could be that over time you now have more programs running in the background than you did before?

Try altering the amount of startup items so there is less for the cpu and the memory to use.

Arnak

Richard James · Answer

Try reading and understanding this thread including the Nvidia stuff:

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=327922&highlight=registry

Obviously it won't all apply to your system but pick out the tweaks that you need.

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Why is my graphics card not running games as well as it should be?

3 Answers