Incredibly strange issue with games

So for the last 7 months or so i have been having a intermediate issue with just a few out of 50 or so games. The problem is that sometimes BF4, Dark souls and once the Witcher 2 go into smooth slow motion. Riva tuner shows at least 60fps at all times. It seems to be exclusive to player movement and audio. For example in BF4 everything done as a infantry player happens at about 75% speed, and the audio becomes very laggy. If i fire a LMG the audio skips some shots and plays them with the next shot. Weirdest part is that if i for instance hop in a tank or chopper everything runs perfectly. It has happened five times now and each time i fixed it in different ways. Sometimes it is triggered by a change in the GPU driver im running or a game patch but other times it will happen after a restart or even without making any changes to the system. Sometimes i fix it with a GPU driver upgrade or rollback, once i cleaning and resting all the components in the computer, another time all it took was a restart. I may be crazy but it seems like it only affects the games im playing the most.

Some of the things i have done trying to solve the problem; Restarting, Defragging the hard drive, running cc cleaner and multiple AV's, around 6 different GPU drivers, moving game to SSD, messing about with graphics options in game, tweaking network settings, and uninstalling and reinstalling games. It has only happened to BF4, Dark souls and the Witcher 2. Most games are unaffected. I would really appreciate ideas anyone has that could potentially fix this issue.

 

My system specs are as follows. I7 870, GTX 760, random RAM, MSI MS-7613, hyper 212 evo, 2tb barracuda, 1.5tb barracuda, 240gb crucial M500, SSD, Crappy stock HP case that has terrible airflow.

One thing i think im going to try next is starting up with only keyboard, mouse and audio plugged in. I have 7-8 things plugged in via USB at all times and frequently use flashdrives. Obviously that is unlikely to cause this but im desperate so its something to try.

Any suggestions or advice would be very much appreciated. Thanks!

Could you be more specific about your RAM? There's all manner of stability issues that can be caused by your system specification. Especially mixed RAM. I actually think that your system is quite a good gaming solution. Again, it might be a simple problem with the RAM.

Have you tried launching Resource Monitor? (task manager > performance > resource monitor - don't know if it's the same in win 8). Look up for something eating up resources (like unusually high cpu util, or heavy io on hdd). You said you have crappy case with bad airflow. Maybe it's themal throttling. In conjunction to these things I recommend backing up your games and stuff to perform a format, clean reinstall ot the os (install clean os then only essential drivers like gpu and audio, then your game with which you have issues. This is to eliminate software causes from the scope. If it works, then you had just garbaged system. If not then it may suggest hardware instability. Mentioned above RAM issue may be the case but that usually throws BSOD under load like games. The more information you provide, the better.

 

OP run this http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml and provide your results. Launch, let it run in the background, game for a bit. Come back & check. 

The ram is a mix of two 4gb stick of micron/crucial ram and one stick of 1gb samsung ram.

Model numbers are as follows; Micron MT16JTF51264AZ-164D1   1034,  this is under the model number 2RX8

Samsung M378B2873FHS-CH9  1036

Arrangement i think is 4gb in slot 1, 1gb stick in slot 3 and 4gb stick in slot 4. This was a HP prebuilt that i upgraded but i left the ram alone expect removing and resetting once when trying to trouble shoot.

I have left resource monitor running on one of my monitors while gaming as well as running the built in monitoring in BF4. I also always have MSI afterburner open displaying GPU temp, usage, VRAM usage and fan speed as well as a widget that shows CPU temp, usage and ram usage. I see no spikes at all. I have not checked disk usage while gaming but BF4 is on a SSD and dark souls on HDD so that seems unlikely. All temps are within acceptable limits. Usually around 75c for the GPU and 60-65c for the CPU while in BF4. If anything gets too hot i take off the side of the case and turn the fans way up. GPU is factory overclocked to 1115mhz or 1215mhz in gaming mode. I have overclocked the CPU whatsoever. The strange thing is that this is a reoccurring problem that seems to be set off and fixed differently each time.

Okay i downloaded the program and i will start up BF4 here in a second.

One other thing that i forgot to mention but might be related is that i also have audio drop in and out during some but not all cut scenes in every game i have tried.

Hey so what am i looking for with this program? Is everything supposed to stay in green?

One last strange this is that if i record gameplay with NVIDIA shadowplay its looks perfect, no slow motion at all.

While playing BF4 on high/ultra in test range

CPU/GPU data

 

All that looks good which is a relief. The occasional small spike can be tolerated.

I'll have a think.

New developments. I uninstalled 337.50 driver, clean installed 335.23, uninstalled that then reinstalled 337.50 and booted with nothing but keyboard, mouse, and audio/video out and its working perfectly again. One thing tho is the DPC latency checker shows much worse latency now. A max of 3208us and frequently hitting red. The program is saying some driver is malfunctioning. Im thinking i should disable drivers one at a time and see if anything changes. Even idle its around 150-300us which to my understanding is high.

Quick question, should i disable all drivers and enable one by one or leave them all and disable one by one?

150 - 300 is not a good reading, even though some will say anything under 500 is ok.

Run this > http://www.resplendence.com/latencymon & see what process exactly is causing the spike

Okay so even more weirdness. Im getting significantly better latency while running BF4 maxed out than when the computer is idle. While messing around in the test range my measured latency was usually under 200us with some large spikes everyone once and a while. Biggest spike was 4486us but most were under 2000us. While idle (only AV, geforce experience, afterburner, DPC latency checker and Latencymon) the average is around 300us with very frequent spikes ranging from 1000-4000us.  This is with only mouse/keyboard and audio/video plugged in and some drivers/devices disabled. The disabled drivers/devices are Acronis TIB mounter and virtual disk. Tap-win32 adapter V9, vitrualbox host-only Ethernet adapter. Anvsoft virtual sound device, NVIDIA virtual audio device (wave extensible) (WDM). MagicISO SCSI host controller. UIM direct device image plugin, UIM drive backup image plugin and UIM controller all disabled.

Im not really qualified to read the this data so i thought id just post it all.