REALLY low fps (new issue)

[Ballsfalsky]

Ok. First off, i'd like to start off by saying that this is the first time i've ever had this problem, and that I have an XFX 6870 1gb (ZHFC (Non reference)).

So, about an hour ago, I was playing on hurricane hills online. There were 4 people in the race (on the 01 server). I can run any track @ a solid 125 fps on maxxed out settings, and have had no issues previous to this. Anyways, I noticed that my FPS was dipping from 125 to 18-25 and then back up to 125. I tried re-installing catalyst 11.12, with no success. I am now getting 52FPS in the menu's. I've checked all of my settings over in mxs, nothing has changed. I joined the 02 server and noticed that im getting 6FPS I was just playing no more than 3 hours ago and I had a solid 125 FPS with 10 people! and with only 5 people I was getting 6!

Something is seriously wrong here. I've rebooted, re-installed my drivers, checked all my connections, and i've even done a cold reset (turned my PC off, unplugged my PSU power cable, and pressed the power button 10 times, plugged PSU cable back in, and turned my PC on). I don't know what to do here.

[Ballsfalsky]

I may have found the problem. I have been playing dirt 3 for the last couple of days and I remember I went into CCC and forced all of the anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering etc. to max. I changed everything to "use application settings" and put the anti aliasing mode to "adaptive multi-sample AA" instead of "super sample AA". I am now fluctuating between 125 and 111 FPS. I still don't see why I was getting normal FPS earlier today and then randomly getting super low FPS but an hour or 2 later.

[Yamaha285]

Yeah i switched from ATI to Nvidia i think the more you mess with the control the worse the ATI cards become. Usually changing them from a balanced setting to high quality or performance setting seem to plague mine all the time. No problems with my GTX 560 since my recent updates

[Ballsfalsky]

my original plan for my build was an i5 2500k and a 560ti or a 570 but I came up short on my goal of 1200. I went the AMD route because it was substantially cheaper and performed only 2% worse on the graphics spectrum (comparing my XFX 6870 to a 560ti) and 10% worse on the CPU side.

Anyways, It only affected MXS. I am actually getting BETTER FPS on games like Skyrim, Dirt 3, SR3, BF3, and MW3 with my CCC settings forced on max. Its weird, I know. Its just something im going to have to deal with.

[Yamaha285]

what CPU are you using?
And im building around a i5 2500k they respectable speedy and cheap.

[Ballsfalsky]

Phenom II x4 965BE. It runs all my games quite nicely. I could use a little better GPU, but I built around my budget.