I'm getting so frustrated with PC gaming lately.

[GeorgeCostanza94]

You're gunna have to excuse this little rant of mine, but this has been really pissing me off about PC gaming. My current set up is an Intel i5-4690 Quad Core @3.5gh, 16gb RAM, GeForce GTX 970 4GB graphics card, and Windows 8, which I built a couple of years ago. Not the greatest rig in the world, but I wouldn't say it's really that bad either. Cost me almost and up to $2,000 (Canadian) to build, which is money I saved up over a long time and bought the parts separately as I got paid from work, if I had enough left over after paying rent and buying food to feed myself and my cat. After all of that, it feels like I can still NEVER run ANYTHING smoothly. Sure it was great for the first while, but then as developers update their games, the performance, I think, seems to get worse. GTA V on graphics that match to about the Xbox 360 graphics still doesn't run smoothly. Killing Floor 2 runs like ass no matter what. Doom 3 is hit or miss. Fallout New Vegas, I can never get a steady frame rate out of. Some games I play, like the aforementioned Fallout New Vegas should run like butter on max settings. But nope, even with no mods, goes from smooth to choppy. Not even Doom 1 and 2 can escape this if I run certain mods like Brutal Doom. 

 

Now bear in mind I don't mean they're unplayable, but they stutter just enough, hiccup just the right amount that it's still 'playable', but enough to irritate me. I see a new trailer like Red Dead Redemption 2 and any excitement I get is always shot down by the "Good luck getting it to run on your PC". I'm not demanding 4k resolution with my rig, but I was hoping some games could look ok while running smoothly. And I hate it when people smugly say 'Why don't you just spend $6,000 to upgrade your rig? What are you, gay?" Well, I'm a 20-something bachelor who supports himself 100%. I make ok money, but these days I have more expenses, I have to start savings accounts, RSP's, pay off student loans, not to mention how expensive rent has become where I live these days. I don't have $6,000 to just drop on the newest gaming pieces every year so that I can play a two year old game. And before you say it yes I'm exaggerating, but I'm trying to express what it feels like to me. Sometimes I do wish I would have just gotten a PS4, and a half decent laptop just for Doom. 

 

Now I suspect some might say that something seems wrong here, as my rig should run Fallout New Vegas and most Doom mods perfectly, but for me it doesn't. I suspect my computer may have an issue, but I've spend days researching and testing performance fixes for my computer, checking for viruses, changing .ini files for specific games, cleaning the hard wear, nothing seems to work. And I don't want to send my PC into a shop so that they can scam me for $2,000 just to tell me I didn't plug something in all the way. I'm simply not as savvy with this stuff as I guess I should be.

 

I'm not really posting this for help, I just want to vent my frustration on PC gaming in general. I remember playing GTA San Andreas, Doom 3, Return to Castle Wolfenstien, on my Xbox. And before that playing Luigi's Mansion and Mario Kart Double Dash on my GameCube. There was none of this faffing around with the hard wear. You could just play the games and have fun. You didn't have to be shamed by the community for not being knowledgeable enough. You could just.... play the games.

Edited October 4, 2017 by GeorgeCostanza94

[geo]

Is it a dual core? Those seem to struggle running modern games no matter what the gHz.

[GeorgeCostanza94]

2 minutes ago, geo said:

Is it a dual core? Those seem to struggle running modern games no matter what the gHz.

It is a quad-core.

[Mánibranðr System]

Use after market coolers, stop browsing to shady websites, scan for malware, update your drivers and make sure the internals are clean. Also, if you've cheaped out on the mobo and PSU, don't, those are important too.

[Edward850]

48 minutes ago, GeorgeCostanza94 said:

I suspect my computer may have an issue

No suspicion about it here. There's something fundamentally wrong with your hardware/system configuration if you have an i5-4690 and GTX970 and claim to be getting "hit or miss" performance out of Doom3 of all things. Doom3 scales to utter insanity to the point that people got it to run on a Voodoo2 SLI configuration, and the engine was ported somehow to the original Xbox (~700Mhz x86 CPU, custom GPU), and as such pretty much runs on toasters.

 

Investigate the obvious and the not so obvious; is your hardware cooling properly and with correctly applied thermal paste? Are you running overclocking configurations from the BIOS? Is your motherboard adequately operating your CPU and GPU (this catches out many people)?

[Quasar]

Honestly it almost certainly has to be a software issue because those specs are way more than good enough to be running something like Doom 3 flawlessly. I'd suggest reinstalling the operating system. If you went OEM you may be out of luck here though, since if they even allow a reinstall at all, it'll still come with all their shit shovelware built into the OS.

[Mánibranðr System]

Just now, Quasar said:

Honestly it almost certainly has to be a software issue because those specs are way more than good enough to be running something like Doom 3 flawlessly. I'd suggest reinstalling the operating system. If you went OEM you may be out of luck here though, since if they even allow a reinstall at all, it'll still come with all their shit shovelware built into the OS.

This is why i still stick to Windows 7, but failing that, move to Linux.

[GeorgeCostanza94]

30 minutes ago, ArcheKruz said:

Use after market coolers, stop browsing to shady websites, scan for malware, update your drivers and make sure the internals are clean. Also, if you've cheaped out on the mobo and PSU, don't, those are important too.

Funnily enough, I bought a cooler and it didn't fit into the case. I try not to, I have BitDefender that warns me when I'm about to. I update my drivers quite a bit. I've been scanning for malware over and over for days at a time at one point, and it didn't fix anything, and as I said, I cleaned my internals. I don't think I cheaped out on those.

 

29 minutes ago, Edward850 said:

Investigate the obvious and the not so obvious; is your hardware cooling properly and with correctly applied thermal paste? Are you running overclocking configurations from the BIOS? Is your motherboard adequately operating your CPU and GPU (this catches out many people)?

I've never ran overclocking, I've heard you can damage your PC doing that. Maybe for most people that wouldn't happen, but it makes me nervous, besides, I don't even know how to do that. I don't know if my motherboard is adequately operating my CPU and GPU, how would I find that out?

 

29 minutes ago, Quasar said:

Honestly it almost certainly has to be a software issue because those specs are way more than good enough to be running something like Doom 3 flawlessly. I'd suggest reinstalling the operating system. If you went OEM you may be out of luck here though, since if they even allow a reinstall at all, it'll still come with all their shit shovelware built into the OS.

I'm going to give this one a shot. It sucks since I'll have to reinstall all of my games and so much other stuff, but what other choice do I have at this point?

 

Thanks for the suggestions guys. But this is a big part of my point is that this all is so complicated to me (Maybe I'm just stupid), and so much it feels like I'm swinging in complete darkness.

[Bauul]

It sounds like something is definitely bottlenecking your computer. I'd personally start by formating your harddrive and resinstalling everything from scratch. Hopefully it's a software issue, and that should fix it.

 

If it doesn't, then you have a hardware problem. Identifying which component is fucking up can be challenging. Ideally you would find benchmark programs that specifically test for CPU, GPU and Memory performance. Perhaps one of those is noticably slow. Thermals are also a definite possibility, especially if the performance issues come and go.

 

Worse case scenario is one (hopefully just one!) component is broken and you need to replace it, but you definitely should be seeing much better performance from your rig.

[Caffeine Freak]

I remember there was an issue for me a few years back, where it seemed Doom 3 would lag whenever I used the higher AA settings, even though my hardware, like yours, was more than sufficient to run it at max settings and had been doing so previously. I was using Vista at the time (shudder) and once I moved to 7 it mostly seemed to clear up. *shrugs* I still use 7. Probably will for a while longer.

[Edward850]

1 hour ago, GeorgeCostanza94 said:

I don't know if my motherboard is adequately operating my CPU and GPU, how would I find that out?

Typically check that your motherboard is actually manufactured for your CPU (without compromise of reduced CPU cache as well, you can check this on your motherboard manufactures website, typically) and is supplying full 16x PCI-E to your GPU under full load (chuck GPU-Z in the background and monitor the bus-interface; need to be full load because the BUS speed scales to workload).

 

ADIA64 is also a good tool for stress testing hardware and checking potential thermal throttling if your system isn't cooling sufficiently. https://puu.sh/xPEnl/a1e34fa1cb.png

Edited October 4, 2017 by Edward850

[MrGlide]

What does task manager say about your computers resources? is it showing anything being maxed out? Also I didn't hear you talk about your hard/solid state drive at all. first thing I would do is check those. if your hard drive is bottle necking nothing will run ok, no matter what the other components.

[Agentbromsnor]

3 hours ago, ArcheKruz said:

Use after market coolers, stop browsing to shady websites, scan for malware, update your drivers and make sure the internals are clean. Also, if you've cheaped out on the mobo and PSU, don't, those are important too.

This. Stock coolers are a blight.

[GeorgeCostanza94]

Welp, I refreshed and reinstalled windows, and now I can't connect to the internet. I have an ethernet cord, but nothing. I spent all night last night and all morning looking for a fix, but nothing works. What a huge fucking mistake that was...

[Neurosis]

48 minutes ago, GeorgeCostanza94 said:

Welp, I refreshed and reinstalled windows, and now I can't connect to the internet. I have an ethernet cord, but nothing. I spent all night last night and all morning looking for a fix, but nothing works. What a huge fucking mistake that was...

 

Go into device manager, uninstall ethernet controller and network adapters, and reboot. 

 

edit: windows usually auto-detects and re-installs within the device manager after a reboot

 

you might need your Ethernet drivers installed in the first place too. If your PC came with a CD (lol) then it should have the drivers but if not then hopefully you don't have to hunt it down and put it on a USB drive

[GeorgeCostanza94]

35 minutes ago, Neurosis said:

 

Go into device manager, uninstall ethernet controller and network adapters, and reboot. 

 

edit: windows usually auto-detects and re-installs within the device manager after a reboot

 

you might need your Ethernet drivers installed in the first place too. If your PC came with a CD (lol) then it should have the drivers but if not then hopefully you don't have to hunt it down and put it on a USB drive

Uninstalled the Ethernet Controller, but there was no option in Device Manager for network adaptors. But after doing that I rebooted, and it didn't fix the issue. The Ethernet Controller icon had an exclamation point over it again, so I'm not sure. I tried updating it before too, but didn't do anything. My PC did not come with a CD... Ugh...

 

Unless you mean the Motherboard disk, if so I'll give that a shot.

[Neurosis]

6 minutes ago, GeorgeCostanza94 said:

Motherboard disk

 

A google search says this might be the issue, so hopefully that disc has the Ethernet drivers for your motherboard. 

[MrGlide]

You'll be ok, this is all a healthy learning experience.

[GeorgeCostanza94]

10 minutes ago, Neurosis said:

 

A google search says this might be the issue, so hopefully that disc has the Ethernet drivers for your motherboard. 

Yes!! It worked!! What a frigging relief! I was inches away from just giving my PC up to Geek Squad or something. Thanks for the help bro!

[Neurosis]

7 minutes ago, MrGlide said:

healthy learning experience

 

ain't nobody got time for that

 

1 minute ago, GeorgeCostanza94 said:

It worked

 

glad to hear

[GeorgeCostanza94]

Just now, MrGlide said:

You'll be ok, this is all a healthy learning experience.

I guess in the same way sticking a knife underneath your fingernails is.

[Nevander]

In a way I feel your pain (referring to the OP). It's funny I seem to get more issues with time instead of less. These days I'll be lucky if I can have a session of gaming without a stutter, hitch, or drop in frames at some point. I suspect GREATLY that my video card or at least the shitty drivers are the problem. However since AMD continuously puts out lackluster software, I have to always be greeted by new problems. I am so close to switching to nVidia forever and never buying garbage man GPUs ever again. Major AMD hate but this is coming from a guy who owns AMD hardware. So sick of having performance problems. I only do PC gaming so you can imagine how frustrating it is when I want to sit down to some Doom after a long day and be greeted by this kind of shit.

 

I still hope for the day when stuff like this gets more streamlined and foolproofed. We need some third party graphics company to show up and have kickass hardware and software that works with everything, even legacy software.

[UglyStru]

I had the same issue with my friend's PC. For some reason, the CPU was only using 1 out of the 8 cores of his AMD CPU. L4D2 ran at 10fps on low settings. It ended up being a BIOS issue. We returned everything and went Intel. Either something is preventing your hardware from working to its maximum potential, or something is eating up all of your PC's resources. Download MSI Afterburner and MSI Kombustor to do some stress tests.

 

My first tip is to gtfo Windows 8. That was an OS catastrophe. Either downgrade to Win7 or upgrade to Win10. Fresh OS install so you can rule out all third-party apps. You could also try reseating your hardware. If you open up cmd and type "systeminfo", does it reflect everything correctly? Mobo might be malfunctioning. GPU might be going bad. CPU might be fucked up. RAM stick might be shitting itself (even though these usually bring in some BSODs with them). Is your PSU strong enough to handle all of your hardware? You'll probably want a 450w MINIMUM. 

I've built computers on $500 worth of hardware that could run Battlefield 3 on High/Ultra. You should not be having problems. Something is indeed wrong. 

 

**EDIT** Just saw the replies. Glad to hear you got it resolved. I'll keep this reply here in case someone comes across this in a Google Search or something.

[CARRiON]

Don't get into PC gaming if you're not ready to troubleshoot your own problems and are not prepared to learn and possibly get your hands dirty. If you just want a plug and play experience you're better off getting a console.

[GeorgeCostanza94]

1 hour ago, CARRiON said:

Don't get into PC gaming if you're not ready to troubleshoot your own problems and are not prepared to learn and possibly get your hands dirty. If you just want a plug and play experience you're better off getting a console.

I've been trouble shooting my own problems, been trying to educate myself, and getting my hands pretty dirty since I started PC gaming. But I ways run into these situations where I'm totally dumb founded, and there are times where I'm stuck for days at a time trying to fix such an awkward issue. It just doesn't seem right when 5% I'm having fun, and 95% of the time fixing rediculous issues.

[Vorpal]

Your "rediculous" issue is a result of not reading the manual that came with your motherboard

[Neurosis]

13 minutes ago, GeorgeCostanza94 said:

It just doesn't seem right when 5% I'm having fun, and 95% of the time fixing rediculous issues

 

Sounds like a car. But PC gaming is more like an older car in that you can actually fix it yourself. Good luck with these newer consoles. I'm sure people have been able to fix those on their own and it's all basically the same technology right? But like newer cars are harder to fix, I think this is also the case here. A google search reveals more repair shops for them than actual ways to repair them yourself. 

 

So also like a car, you just have to keep getting your hands dirty with it, asking questions online, knowing how to utilize google to its full potential, etc. 

 

Basically technology sucks sometimes. AI ain't taking over any time soon LOL

[GeorgeCostanza94]

1 hour ago, Vorpal said:

Your "rediculous" issue is a result of not reading the manual that came with your motherboard

Yeah I figured there would be some dickish comments like this. I didn't realize refreshing windows would require me to reinstall the motherboard. So excuse me for not realising the motherboard was the issue to begin with. Excuse me for being annoyed after spending hours to days, Googleing my own parts, testing several fixes, rerunning installation programs, and swinging in the dark until I finally find the fix. Not even referring to just the motherboard, but to many issues I have with my computer.

[GeorgeCostanza94]

1 hour ago, Neurosis said:

 

Sounds like a car. But PC gaming is more like an older car in that you can actually fix it yourself. Good luck with these newer consoles. I'm sure people have been able to fix those on their own and it's all basically the same technology right? But like newer cars are harder to fix, I think this is also the case here. A google search reveals more repair shops for them than actual ways to repair them yourself. 

 

So also like a car, you just have to keep getting your hands dirty with it, asking questions online, knowing how to utilize google to its full potential, etc. 

 

Basically technology sucks sometimes. AI ain't taking over any time soon LOL

And the biggest problem is I'm not a mechanic. I try to educate myself as I go along, but man, when I spend more time banging my wrench into the car, I wonder if driving it is worth the stress sometimes.

[Neurosis]

2 minutes ago, GeorgeCostanza94 said:

when I spend more time banging my wrench into the car, I wonder if driving it is worth the stress sometimes.

 

I know the feel. Maybe it's time to live in nature