Question 940mx giving abysmal performance

[obiwan005]

It was performing quite poorly in a game I was playing, which I had played before on a friend's 920m laptop. Specifically, Goat Simulator at Medium settings, giving 30-ish FPS. Horrible. After a lot of research, this is the information I have:

• GPU usage is near 100%
• According to MSI AfterBurner, the clock speed is at around 900Mhz when it should be 1122Mhz base according to official specs
• According to userbench, my GPU's performance is 0th percentile, aka terrible

Here's the link of userbench for complete specs and details

Clearly lot wrong with the GPU, but how do I fix it?

 

[punkncat]

A couple of quick issues I see. You have sub optimal background usage going on, and your SSD needs to have some space freed up. Dual channel RAM would be helpful if the system is capable of it.

What kind of temps are you seeing?

 

[obiwan005]

A couple of quick issues I see. You have sub optimal background usage going on, and your SSD needs to have some space freed up. Dual channel RAM would be helpful if the system is capable of it.

What kind of temps are you seeing?

Thank you for the reply. Yeh, I do plan to delete some junk from the SSD, it's only used for the C drive. I believe the laptop is capable of Dual Channel RAM, yeh. But do you think that's the issue which is making the GPU perform poorly?

As for the temps, at idle the GPU is around 50 Celsius, but as soon as the actual game starts it jumps to 87-90 degree Celsius.

 

[punkncat]

I would not venture to say it was the only problem going on. Your C drive is running OS and also is where page file for memory goes among a lot of other things, simply put is the center of activity when operating your PC. When you go to the "This PC" window within File Explorer the line for your disk space should be blue. When you get at and around 10% free space, like you are, that line should be red. I don't recall but seem to remember Windows throwing warnings about free space as well.
The first step I would take would be to run a disk cleanup through Windows, then go in by hand and either delete or move accumulated items to another drive. It is typically good practice to keep ~20% (+) free space on a drive and particularly an SSD.

Running in single channel on your RAM is also a significant hit to performance, so that isn't helping. I am not familiar with where the throttle point for your hardware is, but in a laptop format high temps are pretty much expected. You could blow out the vents/coolers, if you feel confident you could attempt to take the bottom panel off and blow it out, if you haven't already. It is also important to keep the laptop on a solid surface when gaming, not on the bed, etc.

The 940 is far from a power house GPU, but I also figure you should be seeing better performance than what you mention.

 

[obiwan005]

I would not venture to say it was the only problem going on. Your C drive is running OS and also is where page file for memory goes among a lot of other things, simply put is the center of activity when operating your PC. When you go to the "This PC" window within File Explorer the line for your disk space should be blue. When you get at and around 10% free space, like you are, that line should be red. I don't recall but seem to remember Windows throwing warnings about free space as well.
The first step I would take would be to run a disk cleanup through Windows, then go in by hand and either delete or move accumulated items to another drive. It is typically good practice to keep ~20% (+) free space on a drive and particularly an SSD.

Running in single channel on your RAM is also a significant hit to performance, so that isn't helping. I am not familiar with where the throttle point for your hardware is, but in a laptop format high temps are pretty much expected. You could blow out the vents/coolers, if you feel confident you could attempt to take the bottom panel off and blow it out, if you haven't already. It is also important to keep the laptop on a solid surface when gaming, not on the bed, etc.

The 940 is far from a power house GPU, but I also figure you should be seeing better performance than what you mention.

Thank you. I will free up the SSD as soon as I get some free time, should be a couple of days. The RAM upgrade, can't really say.

As far as the GPU is concerned, I guess there's really no obvious solution in sight? I will research some more.