GPU usage Drops to 0% , is that bottlenecking? (GTX 1060 + G3250)

Alberto Bj

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Oct 16, 2015
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Hello im playing assassins creed syndicate, assassins creed unity and witcher 3, my cpu usage is often at 100% , and gpu usage only around 40-70 , sometimes gpu usage drops to 0% that causes the game to freeze( observed using msi afterburner, the freeze will happen when the gpu usage drops to 0) and get back after 2-3 seconds.. is that bottlenecking? or something might be wrong? or i just dont meet the minimum requirements for the game.. ? on games like League of legends and CS:GO it doesnt stutter or freeze. , i tried reinstalling the OS, installing windows 8.1, moving games to ssd, still experiencing freezing i want to know if something is wrong with my pc or its normal to experience this because my CPU is too weak ? tried testing Prime 95 + msi kombuster 1m particle for 15 mins, no problems, tried running valley benchmark, no problems too, tried windows memory diagnostic no problems , the freezing only occurs on these mentioned games : (witcher 3, AC:S and AC:U)

Specs:

ASUS H81M-D
GTX 1060 3GB
G3250
12GB DDR3 Ram (8+4) 1866mhz @1400mhz (downclocked because motherboard only supports 1400)
ADATA SP550 120 GB SSD
500 GB laptop HDD Seagate momentus thin
Seasonic m12 520w Powersupply

 
Solution
The Assassins Creed and Witcher series are among the more CPU-intensive ones. You won't get an enjoyable experience out of those with anything less than an i3, with an i5 or Ryzen 5 being much preferred.
GPU usage dropping to 0% either means that there was a hardware/driver error that caused the GPU to stall or something else went wrong in the software/OS side that caused the GPU not to receive new frames to render.

A bottleneck is when you are at 100% CPU usage (CPU bottleneck) or 100% GPU usage (GPU bottleneck), which is clearly not the case here when your GPU drops at 0%. Check Windows' event logs to see if there was a GPU driver crash, that's the only thing I can think of that would cause the game to freeze for a few seconds.
 



then whats wrong? im not getting any kernel driver crashes or notifications.. i saw some people having the same problem because they have a dual core cpu
 
Another possibility is that more heavily threaded games running on a dual-core/thread CPU are running into deadlock situations due to threads not finishing their tasks in a timely and orderly fashion. Many of the more intensive newer titles outright refuse to run on 2C2T CPUs.
 


i see. i almost had an heart attack so ur implying my cpu is just too weak for those games? im afraid something is wrong with my hardware. i just wanted to clarify
 


i see thank you.. can you recommend me some games that i can enjoy ? rather than csgo or league of legends