Low GPU Usage gaming

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MuscleNerd

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 20, 2016
Messages
219
Hey everyone,

I recently purchases a GTX 1070 superclocked ACX 3.0 card. Love it, but I've been having some issues.

During gaming I'm getting massive fluctuations in my GPU usage. Games Like PUBG (PlayersUnkownBattlegrounds), Rust, and Left for Dead 2, Paladins, CS:GO.

During The Forrest gameplay the lowest usage I saw was 74%, So during that game it held decent usasge. 80-90 most of the time.

Some games are worse than others, but none of them will run consistently at 90-100%. This really affects game play on some of the tiles mentioned above. On Rust and PUBG I've even turned settings all the way down and I still get terrible usage fluctuation.

Things I've tried:

-Bios update
-Disabled all Overclocked
-Turning settings up and down
-Optimizing Setting in Geforce Experience

Nothing seems to work, here is my current system:

-Ryzen 1700 Overclocked to 3.7ghz
-EVGA GTX 1070
-PNY Anarchy 16gb 2400 overclocked to 2666
-Gigabyte AB350M HD3 Motherboard

The rest of my specs do not matter, but those are the main parts. I really need to find a solution. One thing that does confuse me is that during Unigen Valley Benchmark it doesn't got over 70% usage, but I'm holding over 100fps.


Thanks guys.
 
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what resolution are you playing at?..

is V-sync off?.

on non-demanding games will be really easy to be CPU bottlenecked, if you are gaming at 1080P be aware that ryzen have some issues with gaming at that resolution.

Be sure to select high-performance mode on the Nvidia control panels in games where are you having issues..

Rust, Left for dead 2, are very old games you are most likely single threaded CPU limited there, Paladins is really a lightweight non-demanding game, easily CPU bottleneck there, CS:GO even more yet.. so no comments.

Try running really heavy and Visual intensive games and see if the same behavior continue..
 
I don't own anything of that nature right now. Nothing I have is super demanding. Wouldn't a benchmark be classified as demanding? I will run superposition and report my results. That is very demanding.
 
I ran Superposition benchmark and it maxed my card out at 100% usage with a week 27 fps overage on extreme settings at 1080p. These are my MSI Afterburner results during testing. The only portion here that you need to see is where the usage, core, and memory clocks are spiked high. That was the Benchmark period.

gpu_usage_1.png


woah.png
 
everything it's fine then, you are just victim of the bad ryzen performance at 1080P if you want to try to mitigate those effects you could use Nvidia's DSR to increase the games resolution up to 4K (it also provide a bump in graphic quality as everything is sharper) on the mentioned games with that GPU you won't have any kind of issue running at high FPS at 4K...
 
Posting data, like your afterburner charts, would really help.

1070 is a lot of GPU for Ryzen to handle.
 
If you have the settings maxed and you are maintaining an FPS higher than your monitor's refresh rate, then everything is fine even if your GPU isn't hitting 100%. At that point you're CPU bound and you can't do much other than overclock more or get a faster processor. That really isn't necessary if you're maintaining consistent FPS higher than your refresh rate.

Try turning on any super-sampling settings on in the game control panels. That means your card will be rendering higher than 1080p but downsampling to 1080p to show on your monitor. That will put a higher load on it even when everything else is maxed. A lot of the games you listed aren't very graphics intensive, and your benchmark test shows 100% usage which seem to corroborate this.
 
CaptNumbNutz said:
If you have the settings maxed and you are maintaining an FPS higher than your monitor's refresh rate, then everything is fine even if your GPU isn't hitting 100%. At that point you're CPU bound and you can't do much other than overclock more or get a faster processor. That really isn't necessary if you're maintaining consistent FPS higher than your refresh rate.

Try turning on any super-sampling settings on in the game control panels. That means your card will be rendering higher than 1080p but downsampling to 1080p to show on your monitor. That will put a higher load on it even when everything else is maxed. A lot of the games you listed aren't very graphics intensive, and your benchmark test shows 100% usage which seem to corroborate this.
Click to expand...

So just because the GPU is not being utilized 100% that's not a bad thing? I have a 60hz monitor. What about my power limit, voltage limit, and no load limit in the images I posted above, is that normal?
 
What is the explination behind it dropping as low as 9-19 % in games like Rust. Payday2 I get down in the 30%.
 
MuscleNerd said:
What is the explination behind it dropping as low as 9-19 % in games like Rust. Payday2 I get down in the 30%.
Click to expand...

The explanation is quite simple CPU bottleneck, your CPU at that resolution is limiting your GPU, you can try tweaking settings here and there, increasing overclock, selecting windows power plan in performance mode (huge deal in Ryzen builds, that's a must to pick), disabling SMT also help a lot on those old games.. anyway there's no issue with your system, the GPU utilization drop so low is due because it doesn't need more power (Vsync enabled) or the CPU is holding back the GPU.

MuscleNerd said:
So just because the GPU is not being utilized 100% that's not a bad thing? I have a 60hz monitor. What about my power limit, voltage limit, and no load limit in the images I posted above, is that normal?
Click to expand...

No, isn't a bad thing, it just mean the CPU can't keep up with the GPU demands, it's a common and well known issue with ryzen at 1080P. if you have a 60hz monitor then anything above that refresh rate is just wasted power and performance.
 
How is that a CPU bottleneck when my CPU usage During game play is like 12% or less? Sorry if i forgot to mention that detail. A CPU bottleneck would be my CPU being utilized much more than the GPU, which is not the case, Correct?
 
I took a screenshot of it, but for some reason it didn't save. During gameplay on Payday 2 I only had 3 cores that were around 50% usage mark. GPU was at 50% and I was getting 170-195 FPS. I need to download a demanding title and see what happens.
 
you can be actually CPU bottlenecked even if the CPU load is about 6% that would mean a single CPU Logic core is being maxed out. there are a lot of things to check and variables, like RAM speed, I/O (HDD/SSD/etc) but mostly in those old games generally you can be CPU bottlenecked with a single or couple of cores.. that's why disabling SMT on ryzen help a lot as each physical core will have full resources so in those old games perform better. it's well known and documented by lot of sites that ryzen simply doesn't perform good at low resolutions and old games that are coded for one or two cores..
 
Araxie said:
you can be actually CPU bottlenecked even if the CPU load is about 6% that would mean a single CPU Logic core is being maxed out.
Click to expand...
100% / 16 threads = 6.25%

Yep... likely single threaded games. If they are multi-threaded at all, they might use 2 threads. The windows task manager may even show it moving from cpu to cpu... but that is still a single core's worth of workload.
 
Some older games have frame limit caps as well. If you're over 60 Hz and have a 60Hz monitor there's really no issue.
 
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