Alright, I need a little help and you guys probably have the know-how to set me straight.
So, I recently upgraded to a Gigabyte GTX 670.
In synthetic benchmarks, it seems to perform just fine. For example,
Unigine Heaven (1920x1080, 8xAA, 16xAF, extreme tesselation, everything else maxed):
FPS - 44.6
Score - 1125
Min - 21.5
Max - 116.7
3Dmark 11 (extreme preset):
3DMark Score - 3099 3DMarks
Graphics - 2887
Physics - 6520 (low, but perhaps limited by my i7-860)
Combined - 3317
Both seem to be in line with the benchmarks of official reviews, I believe.
However, when I benchmarked Arkham City (everything maxed out and except tesselation at normal) I got terrible scores:
Min FPS: 16
Max FPS: 60
Avg FPS: 54
I also noticed that the game didn't run particularly well when I actually played it (lots of frame dips). Just for the hell of it, I turned off D3D Overrider (which I use for triple buffering), ran AC again, and got:
Min: 24
Max: 99
Avg: 71
The latter result is closer to what I expected. I also get better performance when I play the game (though it the frame rate is still more erratic than I would like). Only now it's tearing like crazy.
Here are my questions:
1. Why would triple buffering/D3D overrider have such a huge impact on performance?
2. If the tearing is killing me, what should I do to resolve it, given that D3D overrider seems to be problematic?
3. If Vsync is an option, should I enable it in the game or force it the nVidia control panel?
I know this is a lot, so I appreciate any help you can provide. I should note that I'm playing on a big screen TV with a max refresh of 60.