Can only use 2gb of my 4gb Rx480 when playing games.

[pengwenonelson]

can only use 2gb of my Rx480 gb when playing games such as rainbow six siege and overwatch. I have had this card for a while (almost a year) and use it with an fx 8350. I don't think that its getting bottlenecked because my cpu doesnt seem to be working too hard. Anyone know whats wrong?

 

[mdd1963]

The card will only use as much VRAM as is needed based on the resolution and texture details...; naturally, 1080P might not max out the VRAM in most games.....

Higher resolution and more details/textures/AA, etc. will use more....

 

[pengwenonelson]

The card will only use as much VRAM as is needed based on the resolution and texture details...; naturally, 1080P might not max out the VRAM in most games.....

Higher resolution and more details/textures/AA, etc. will use more....

Why is it that I can't run at higher fps though. I run around 80 fps and often have frame drops to 40. is the gpu getting it limited to 2 gb? and if so how can I make the frames more consistent because I feel that my gpu can perform better.

 

[pengwenonelson]

Also I just checked, and another friend with a worse graphics card than me is able to utalize all 4 gb of his card in siege without lagging. My problem is that I start to lag around the 1.5-2gb range

 

[TJ Hooker]

Does your friend use the exact same settings as you?

What is your max CPU utilization while gaming? Don't look at total utilization, look at the utilization for each individual core and let us know the highest one. What is max GPU temp? What is the lowest thermal margin reported by AMD Overdrive (higher is better, measures how far it is from overheating). What motherboard do you have?

 

[mdd1963]

The FX8350 was hardly the 'trend setter' for high framerates at 1080P....

Possibly your CPU's lack of 'oomph' is causing the frame rate drops offs.....

If your frame rates still tank even with low res/lower detail, your CPU is the issue, generally....

 

[pengwenonelson]

thank you guys for the help so far, I will post my specs and other statistics later tomorrow because I don't any more time tonight. Seems like the issue is my cpu is it possible to overclock it to a usable rate?

btw my motherboard is a 760GMA-P34(FX)

 

[TJ Hooker]

I don't think that motherboard is up for overclocking. It may be struggling to even run it at stock.

 

[pengwenonelson]

Does your friend use the exact same settings as you?

What is your max CPU utilization while gaming? Don't look at total utilization, look at the utilization for each individual core and let us know the highest one. What is max GPU temp? What is the lowest thermal margin reported by AMD Overdrive (higher is better, measures how far it is from overheating). What motherboard do you have?

My friend uses higher settings then me and has a gtx 970 I believe

I played a few games of Rainbow six siege. My highest Cpu usage is around 90% at peek, and hovers around 75-85% while gaming. Lowest thermal margin is around 11 C. My GPU temp was around 58 C the whole time.

 

[TJ Hooker]

So the highest usage seen by any individual core was 90%? Does the CPU maintain a constant frequency (4-4.2 GHz) under load?

 

[pengwenonelson]

it does stay around 4.1 most of the time

 

[TJ Hooker]

So there were no significant dips in CPU clock speed?

How much RAM do you have, and what speed?

 

[pengwenonelson]

didnt really see any dips farther down than 4000 when playing, and I have 8 gbs of ram. Im not sure what kind of ram I have though. In my task manager it just says Other where it should say what type it is.

 

[mdd1963]

An older FX AMD running at 4 GHz is about like an i3 running at 3.2 GHz...

They lack in gaming, especially at 1080P

 

[TJ Hooker]

If it's staying above 4 GHz then it would seem the motherboard VRMs aren't throttling. I'm not sure what else to suggest. If it's getting to ~90% usage on single thread(s) I guess it could be starting to bottleneck at that point. As said above, FX CPUs have very low single threaded performance compared to Intel/modern AMD CPUs.