GPU not working at full speed

[LT_Paul]

Hello guys. I recently purchased a new laptop, which has AMD A6-7310 with R4 integrated GPU. It also has AMD R5 M330 dedicated GPU, so I overclocked R5 to 1100Mhz both memory clock and core clock with MSI Afterburner. So my problem is, that in game I have lag. I know, I know, it isn't gaming laptop, but when I go to MSI Afterburner and make that I could see the temps, how much is GPU working, I see that gpu is working about 60% which is pretty low. Sometimes it jumps to 99% then goes back to 60%. When it jumps to 99% there is no lag in game, but when it goes back to 60% it starts to lagging. Any advice?

 

[leo2kp]

A lot of the time your GPU will wait for your CPU, so the utilization drops while framerates drop. Check the status of your CPU while this happens and see if one or two cores are at 100%. If so, then your CPU is the bottleneck.

 

[LT_Paul]

no, the cpu is running at 50-60 %

 

[LT_Paul]

I just checked and uh it seems that all cores work at the same speed

 

[LT_Paul]

if it helps these result are in Scrap Mechanic, other heavy games like The Forest, uses about 80-100% of cpu, and 60-100% of gpu. (when I'm inside cave or building % drops, when I'm outside or in forest chopping trees its 99%) and if its important I overclocked my GPU from 925mhz to 1100mhz (both mem clock and core clock.)

 

[LT_Paul]

and fps in the forest never drops below 25 FPS in 720p lowest possible

 

[leo2kp]

no, the cpu is running at 50-60 %

Are you running Windows 10? You may have to change Task Manager CPU monitor settings to show you individual core load. Games will use one or two cores. If you have a quad core and 2 of them are at 100%, that would register as 50% overall load but is still a CPU bottleneck.

 

[LT_Paul]

I went to resource monitor in task manager and all the cores were about the same speed, there was just a few % difference

 

[leo2kp]

Hard to say what the issue is then. I still wouldn't rule out CPU bottleneck, but from experience if the GPU is not under heavy load and you aren't capping your framerate, the GPU is waiting for something.

 

[LT_Paul]

But it ''waiting'' just in Scrap mechanic, In The Forest, Mafia 2, GTA IV everything seems to be ok. Maybe its because of the game? or maybe I need more RAM? (now I have 4gigs)

 

[leo2kp]

But it ''waiting'' just in Scrap mechanic, In The Forest, Mafia 2, GTA IV everything seems to be ok. Maybe its because of the game? or maybe I need more RAM? (now I have 4gigs)

Yep could definitely need more memory. Each game is coded differently - they don't all use resources the same way.

Story Time: I play ESO, WoW, Witcher 3, Skyrim, and Diablo 3. For 6 years I ran a 1st gen Core i7 970 with 6 cores, overclocked to 4GHz and 12GB RAM. Over the years I only upgraded the GPU, SSDs, and monitor, ultimately ending with a GTX 1080 on a 1440p screen on the original platform. Most games ran awesome in Ultra mode except for ESO, and sometimes WoW would even take a performance hit in certain scenarios. After a lot of research and testing, the problem was that MMOs generally use one core for most game-related tasks, and offload smaller items to other cores. I would frequently hit 12FPS in ESO and as low as 25FPS in WoW when there were a lot of other players around. After a lot of research and testing, the issue was that my processor, even though it was overclocked and had 12 threads, had terrible single-core performance compared to modern CPUs. When framerates were low, my GPU utilization was also very low. I decided to upgrade to a 6850k (6 cores, 12 threads, much better single-core performance) and at the same clock speed of 4GHz, my minimum framerate improved by well over 100%.

Like you said, it's not a gaming laptop and 4GB RAM may be hurting you. It's possible that the game is bugged and future game patches or driver releases may help performance. There may be other factors as well such as CPU cache performance which may not necessarily show up as CPU load, and with your particular CPU being similar to a lower-power Core i3, that's entirely possible. It could be that the game is being paged to disk because of the lack of memory and it's trying to pull game data from the page file. Since RAM is dirt-cheap, I would start with a memory upgrade and see what that does for you. I assume you're running a 64-bit OS? Also check your Power Options and set it to High Performance. Perhaps that will kick the CPU performance up a bit. If you don't have a laptop cooling pad, that might also help keep performance up by lowering the chances of a core speed slowdown due to heat.

 

[LT_Paul]

Thanks for reply! Yeah, everything already is on maximize performance, I just stoped playing mafia 2, and I like played for 2 hours temps wasn't too bad, GPU@72C CPU@65C. so I will try my best to get more RAM. I think 4 gigs would be enough because I already have four so eight gonna do it job

 

[JeffDaemon]

Thermals will cause both cpu and gpu to throttle back. If the laptop maker has deemed the cooling system to be inefficient, it may have set the bios to throttle early. These you cannot change.

 

[LT_Paul]

And yeah I'm using 64 bit windows 10. Thanks for all the advices and replies! Have a great weekend!