Question GPU Problem so specific I cannot even pinpoint what's wrong with it

Nov 9, 2022
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Hello everyone. I have had this problem with my gaming laptop's GPU for several months now but didn't have the time to do anything about it because of life matters. My laptop is an ASUS TUF Gaming FX505G with an i5-8th gen CPU and a GTX 1060 GPU. My GPU seems to be limiting its VRAM usage (or at least, that's what it looks like) which stops me from doing anything related to gaming at all. The VRAM usage depends on the games I play, it always uses around 300mb on weaker games, but it doesn't go past ~1600MB (number is not constant as it fluctuates) when I'm playing higher end games like GTA 5 and Overwatch which just makes it laggy. As you may have noticed, that is an alarming low usage of it. It wasn't always like this, but it just randomly became like this several months ago. I have tried so many things and searched many different ways in the internet. I have never seen anybody in the internet have the same problem as me. Here are the things I tried, but none of these did anything:

  1. Laptop is always charging and is in performance mode
  2. Nvidia Control Panel settings are all on High Performance
  3. Geforce Experience battery mode is always off
  4. Tried to reset factor my laptop, no changes.
  5. Tried to change my ssd, no changes.
  6. No signs of CPU throttling.
  7. No viruses detected by Windows Defender and Avast.

What I find interesting though is that it only limits its VRAM usage on a single application. I tried testing it using MSI Kombustor and unsurprisingly, the VRAM usage caps at around 1.5GB-1.7GB with very poor performance. However, it can go past that if I run two tests at the same time producing double the VRAM usage. I don't know if this is helpful but I do think it should be noted by.

It will make me very happy if anyone knows how to fix this, or even any idea about what's happening at all because quite frankly, I am confused.
 
when I'm playing higher end games like GTA 5
umm...not really high end game but ok lol
vram is gpu storage, if game doesnt need it, it wont use it, in gta 5 settings it should be telling you how much VRAM is expected to be used and nvidia has vram compressed, so vram usage should be lower then what gta5 settings vram usage suggests

as far as gpu perormance goes, if GPU doesnt have 100% utilisation and you have performance issues, then its a CPU botleneck, even if CPU is not fully utilized

you could run some benchmarks and post benchmark results here, but its a laptop so you cant expect same performance level as on desktop PC as laptops are perma thermal throttled/TDP limited (due to cooling)