HELP - Slight VSync Stutter After Buying New Graphics Card

Hello There

As elaborated on my previous thread, I have just upgraded from a 9600GT to a GTX 550 TI.

Now, its performance is way ahead of the old card, and can run uninterrupted for a few minutes. However, about 10-15% of playing ANY game on my system, there is an oddly short stutter, like it's only skipping one frame, which is quite irritating when playing the games that I play.

This stutter is confirmed in Crysis 2, rFactor, F1 2010, Guitar Hero World Tour, Fifa 11, Sims 3 and Grand Prix 4.

Now although I didn't really play that much with VSYNC on with my old card, I'd be lying if I said I ever noticed it with my old card when using VSYNC, and I even tried putting it back in to look for frame skips, but the framerate is so bad that I wouldn't even be able to notice it anyway. And the tearing is too bad now to turn off VSYNC after getting used to having it on permanently with the new card, so I need to keep it on.

It seems to be happening - when it's happening(as I said, about 10-15% of the time) - at about a constant rate of 1Hz, in other words, once per second.

What I have tried thus far:
1. Re-install drivers, including in safe mode, and the first and latest drivers for my card.
2. Triple Buffering, on and off.
3. Set my Monitor's refresh rate to all supported frequencies(50, 59 and 60 Hz).
4. Disabled AVG Free Antivurus.
5. Set my GPU's fan speed to lowest(30%), intermediate values(50, 60, 55, 70% etc.) and highest(100% obviously) values.
6. Lowered my GPU Core Clock to 900MHz.
7. Disabled, ExperTool, the overclocking utility that comes with the card.

Needless to say, these didn't work.

It's a funny thing, as it runs super smooth the rest of the time, and for the rest of the full seconds when it actually skips a frame, it runs awesomely as well. And it is like a frame being skipped, as opposed to the game being paused for a split second.

It goes fine for sometimes 7 to 8 minutes, before doing that for about a minute.

One thing that tells me that it is not head-related is the fact that sometimes I only just start up the PC, start a game and it immediately stutters...

Also, the CPU temps has never gone above 65 deg Celsius (159 Fahrenheit I believe), except on a benchmark run, on which it kept a steady frame rate right through.

It has been doing this pretty much from the beginning.

Your help is appreciated, as I want to pull my hair out! :P

UPDATE: Running Furmark3D's Burn-In test, the FPS jumps between 59-61Hz, when it's clearly set to 60Hz.

Any way to FORCE it to keep stable at 60Hz maybe? i think this is the source of my problem.

Also, when setting a custom resolution via Nvidia Control Panel, I set it to 60, but it shows "59Hz to 61Hz".

Why wouldn't it be consistent???



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 07/26/2011 07:20PM by Ho3n3r.