New Video Card - Now CPU struggling?

Incoming wall of text :(

I just upgraded my video card, went from a BFGTech GTX 260 to a EVGA GTX 560 ti. I'm a little disappointed as the improvement in performance was unimpressive. Before I go further, here's my computer specs:

ASRock X58 Supercomputer Mobo
Intel Core i7-920 Bloomfield 2.66GHz
CORSAIR XMS3 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
Intel X25-M Mainstream SSDSA2M080G2XXX 2.5" 80GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)
EVGA GTX 560 ti (Pre-overclocked version)

I chose the video card as the most recent upgrade due to FPS drops I was seeing when dropping totems (I run a 5 shaman team) Without totems out, on the old card I was running mostly capped at 60 fps and 30fps background. It would hover around 60fps, and drop to 20-30 during the expected times, like in major cities and in BG start areas. This is with all settings on "Low" and camera positions on all slave slots positioned in a zoomed-in, pointing down on the character.

The new card does handle FPS drops better, it isn't affected by totem drops, and drops to a more acceptable 40 fps during high stress times. However, it doesn't hit 60 fps as much as the old card did, and if I try and increase any video settings above Low it can't handle it very well. Even increasing just the view distance to "Medium" on one window prevents me from ever hitting 60 fps. I was expecting to be able to run a much higher level of graphic quality with this upgrade. Also, with the new card I've had a few instances of extreme lag, where the screen freezes and gives me ~1 frame per second, and I have to stop and wait for it to catch up, eventually it recovers. This never happened with my old card.

In addition, with my old card my GPU would frequently max out during high stress situations, but my CPU would rarely go above 50% utilization per core. With this new card installed, the GPU rarely goes above %50, which is odd because it's not keeping up the framerate I'd like, you'd think it'd hit 100% before the frame rate would drop under cap. Also, even when not in high-stress situations, my CPU is hitting 100% utilization on multiple cores.

I've tried the standard nVidia driver clean and reload, and I haven't let the nVidia bloat touch my system. No HD audio drivers, no 3D vision drivers or anything. Any opinions? Am I just setting my expectations too high?

Again, apologies for the wall of text. If I don't get any replies, I think I'll know why. :p

I might have better ideas if I saw your ISBoxer config ;) For example if you have the background FPS setting set to 60, drop it to 20-30 because there's no sense in trying to get 60 on 5 windows. Also I have no idea what your CPU Strategy selection was, but it's entirely possible that running the CPU Strategy Wizard a couple times and trying different settings will help.

Here's one that's probably not in your config though: do you have the game in Direct3D9, or Direct3D11 mode when you launch through ISBoxer? You have a Direct3D11 card now, so if possible I would be on d3d11 and expect better performance than d3d9. However, either way you can try the opposite to see if it helps any. This old post on isboxer.com has details on switching the game between d3d9 and d3d11: http://isboxer.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=774

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Lax

I might have better ideas if I saw your ISBoxer config ;) For example if you have the background FPS setting set to 60, drop it to 20-30 because there's no sense in trying to get 60 on 5 windows. Also I have no idea what your CPU Strategy selection was, but it's entirely possible that running the CPU Strategy Wizard a couple times and trying different settings will help.

Here's one that's probably not in your config though: do you have the game in Direct3D9, or Direct3D11 mode when you launch through ISBoxer? You have a Direct3D11 card now, so if possible I would be on d3d11 and expect better performance than d3d9. However, either way you can try the opposite to see if it helps any. This old post on isboxer.com has details on switching the game between d3d9 and d3d11: http://isboxer.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=774

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I pmed you my ISBoxer profile in case it helps. I do have it set to 60 fps foreground and 30 fps background. I've run the CPU strategy wizard once since I made these changes, but I'm still using the same setting - "Round-robin balancing (HyperThreading) (Dedicate CPU 1) (FPS 60/30)" I guess I can try some other settings to see if it helps.

I have tried both D9 and D11, and haven't noticed much difference between them, but I wasn't sure if that should be a surprise or not. My GTX 260 also ran pretty much identically using either D9 or D11.