[SOLVED] Games not using full gpu power

[vlad0934]

Specs :
Ryzen 5 1500x
Msi Rtx 2060
24gb of ddr4 ram

So the problem only happens with games that my gpu shouldn't struggle with and that have lower requirements

I can play games like red dead 2 at high 1080p with around 60fps no problem
but i can't run minecraft with shaders above 40fps
getting lower fps in csgo than i got on my 960 (with the exact same settings and cpu,ram,storage....)
and overall alot of the lighter games just refuse to consume more gpu

currently testing in minecraft and the gpu usage only goes up when the settings go up, what i mean by that is i can jump to 4k with insane render distance, shaders, and mods and still get 40fps but now with 60% gpu usage instead of 25% usage at 1080p

same with csgo, low settings 800x600 - 180fps, max settings 1080p - 185 fps with the gpu usage at about 20-50%
now its weird because with the old 960 i had i would get 230 fps at low 800x600, and 210 at high 1080p and the gpu usage would stay at 100%

vsync is off, power settings are set to performance, and as far as i can tell there is nothing in the nvidea panel that would influence this, i am also using the latest drivers for the 2060

another problem i noticed is my gpu tends not to turbo to 2ghz unless it feels like it, it can sustain the turbo since i play red dead 2 with it constantly running at 2ghz at 65c so its not a cooling issue

the cpu also doesn't bottleneck anything as it basically never reaches above 80% usage and 60c

i dont think 24gb of ram is a bottleneck either (if you are wondering how i got 24gb its cuz i had an 8gb stick, bought 16 gb sticks, set the 2 16gb sticks to run in dual channel and the 8gb to run as a reserve in single channel, all the sticks are from same manifacturer with same voltage, speed, cycle applied to them) - they are also not the reason for the problem as the old 960 played games without any problems

any help is appreciated thank you

 

[stefanos50]

It is because your cpu bottlenecks the gpu. The higher the resolution the less the bottleneck thats why at 4k you still manage to get 40fps with better gpu usage. Also csgo is a really cpu demanding game the graphic card does not matter that much in this game. The cpu does not have to be at 100% usage to be a bottleneck but the single core performance is what matters the most. I had a kinda same specs pc with Ryzen 5 1400 overclocked and GTX 1070Ti and i had bottlenecks too until i upgraded to Ryzen 5 3600. Also if your ram kit is low speed too then the problem it would be worse because ryzen depends really much to the ram speed. Also running 3 sticks is bad because all will run at single channel and ryzen benefit from dual channel. First i would try to remove that one dimm of ram and try to overclock the cpu and see if your gpu usage will rise.

 

[vlad0934]

It is because your cpu bottlenecks the gpu. The higher the resolution the less the bottleneck thats why at 4k you still manage to get 40fps with better gpu usage. Also csgo is a really cpu demanding game the graphic card does not matter that much in this game. The cpu does not have to be at 100% usage to be a bottleneck but the single core performance is what matters the most. I had a kinda same specs pc with Ryzen 5 1400 overclocked and GTX 1070Ti and i had bottlenecks too until i upgraded to Ryzen 5 3600. Also if your ram kit is low speed too then the problem it would be worse because ryzen depends really much to the ram speed. Also running 3 sticks is bad because all will run at single channel and ryzen benefit from dual channel. First i would try to remove that one dimm of ram and try to overclock the cpu and see if your gpu usage will rise.

cpu usualy doesnt reach 50% in alot of games accept, cod mw where it hits 80% with 100% gpu usage, as i said in the thread ram sticks are running 16gb in dual channel slot 2,4 @ 3ghz with the 8gb stick sitting in slot 1 as a reserve only for when the system uses over 16gb which usually doesn't happen unless i do video editing si having it there has 0 impact on gaming as it simply doesnt get used (yes ive confirmed it by taking it out and trying the same thing and it had 0 effects on basically everything accept photoshop and premiere pro which would lag with large projects

both cpu and gpu have custom fan curves as well as clock+voltage
cpu runs idle at 2.5-3ghz on idle, turbos to 4ghz when playing games stepping up to 1.39v
Gpu idles at 1-1.3ghz, boots up to 1.5ghz on lite applications, and 2.1ghz in games, voltage is controlled by msi afterburner and switches from 0.93v to 1.04v

what im confused about in this situation is i can run minecraft with 100% gpu usage and respectable 80fps with maxed out shaders and 20 chunk render distance but the problem is it does not do it all the time and sometimes it just decides to run at 30% usage with 40 fps

cpu is unlinkey to be the bottleneck since i can run modern games at high-ultra settings 60fps

ram is not a bottleneck because i tested minecraft, gta 5, red dead 2, evil within 2 with just the 2 sticks and saw no difference in fps

overall its mostly these 2 games that i have found a problem with since mostly everything else locks to 60fps no matter the settings

fallout 4 also has a bit of this problem where if i uncap the fps it goes to 90 with 70% gpu usage but that doesnt really impact the gameplay in anyway

 

[justin.m.beauvais]

This is a CPU bottleneck. Or at least insufficient CPU resources.

currently testing in minecraft and the gpu usage only goes up when the settings go up, what i mean by that is i can jump to 4k with insane render distance, shaders, and mods and still get 40fps but now with 60% gpu usage instead of 25% usage at 1080p

This is exactly how a CPU bottleneck works. Minecraft won't use all the resources your CPU has. It will stress 2-4 cores and leave the rest of the CPU unused, so if you are looking at total CPU usage it looks like 25%-50%, but if you were looking at individual cores utilization you'll see 2-4 of them are heavily utilized while the rest are at idle. The 1500x is a good multicore CPU, but its single core performance is pretty unimpressive. As far as your GPU goes it is going to output as many frames as the CPU can feed it, and the more there is to render the more it will be utilized. So if you have the same frame rate at 1080p as you do at 4K, then that is as many frames as the CPU can push, the GPU is just rendering those frames. At 1080p you'll use a lot less resources than at 4K. So GPU utilization will go up with resolution.

On newer games it totally makes sense you can run at 60 FPS. They are optimized to use more cores and threads, so the burden on a few CPU cores isn't so bad. They spread the work around a lot better.

As for CS:GO... I'm not 100% sure what was going on there. It seems like the GPU was maxing out, but you got higher frame rates because CS:GO would be more optimized for hardware of that era. It certainly isn't that the 960 is a better GPU than the 2060, because that would be a crazy assessment.

When you are talking about GPUs and optimizations you have to realize that GPU architecture and how software interfaces with that architecture changes from generation to generation. Normally it is expected that the more powerful GPU would make up for it, but in this case you hit the max of the CPU before the GPU could be allowed to stretch its legs.

NOW, here is what I think it happening here, because the 1500X should not be having this issue so easily. I think you have some kind of background task that is also using these cores that the games are trying to use. So, fire up Minecraft, watch the FPS counter and start killing off things in your taskbar and tray. See how closing programs affects your FPS. You might find something that is hurting performance.

 

[vlad0934]

This is a CPU bottleneck. Or at least insufficient CPU resources.



This is exactly how a CPU bottleneck works. Minecraft won't use all the resources your CPU has. It will stress 2-4 cores and leave the rest of the CPU unused, so if you are looking at total CPU usage it looks like 25%-50%, but if you were looking at individual cores utilization you'll see 2-4 of them are heavily utilized while the rest are at idle. The 1500x is a good multicore CPU, but its single core performance is pretty unimpressive. As far as your GPU goes it is going to output as many frames as the CPU can feed it, and the more there is to render the more it will be utilized. So if you have the same frame rate at 1080p as you do at 4K, then that is as many frames as the CPU can push, the GPU is just rendering those frames. At 1080p you'll use a lot less resources than at 4K. So GPU utilization will go up with resolution.

On newer games it totally makes sense you can run at 60 FPS. They are optimized to use more cores and threads, so the burden on a few CPU cores isn't so bad. They spread the work around a lot better.

As for CS:GO... I'm not 100% sure what was going on there. It seems like the GPU was maxing out, but you got higher frame rates because CS:GO would be more optimized for hardware of that era. It certainly isn't that the 960 is a better GPU than the 2060, because that would be a crazy assessment.

When you are talking about GPUs and optimizations you have to realize that GPU architecture and how software interfaces with that architecture changes from generation to generation. Normally it is expected that the more powerful GPU would make up for it, but in this case you hit the max of the CPU before the GPU could be allowed to stretch its legs.

NOW, here is what I think it happening here, because the 1500X should not be having this issue so easily. I think you have some kind of background task that is also using these cores that the games are trying to use. So, fire up Minecraft, watch the FPS counter and start killing off things in your taskbar and tray. See how closing programs affects your FPS. You might find something that is hurting performance.

will try the task manager method but i think i found something that might be causing the issue, i was messing around some more, if i join a world, i will get about 30-40fps, and 30% utilization, if i create a world i get full gpu utilization and 90fps, if i quit the created world and joing back into it, i get 30-40 fps again, no settings are changed in these tests

im really confused on why this is happening, and your right it might be the cpu bottleneck but the game oddly uses all the cores at different times, core 1,3,5,7 seems to be utilized more than the rest but then it switches to cores 2,4,6,8 and they seem to get more usage, also oddly enough it tends to really love core 6 with it being utilized at about 60-70% most of the time even when the swap happens above, tried limiting the number of cores to 6 and 7 to the process and it did nothing, but when i force it to not use core 6 it prefers core 4, if i disable 6 and 4 for the game then it reverts back to 40 fps and uses 1 and 2 at 50% (rest are at either 0 or fluctuate from 0 to 7)

i will have to wait untill early 2020 to grab a ryzen 7 3800x and see how that goes

I do appreciate your help with this and thank you for sticking with me through this mindfuck xD