[SOLVED] High Vram usage when playing games at any resolution.

[theuglysandwich]

Specs:
AMD RYZEN 7 3700x
Asrock B550M Gaming motherboard (cant find any information on this and can't even update the bios to see if that would be the issue, but bios is from august 2019 so)
AMD RX 5700 XT
16 GB DDR4

So, this problem is really frustrating me. Let's say im playing squad. I play it at 1440p high settings, and i get good enough frames, but it stutters crazily. I got msi afterburner and saw that its using all of my vram and wanting more. Just to test to see if this was the issue, I set my res to 720p and low settings. Barely a drop in vram usage. Next game- rust. Play at 1440p nearly max settings, all of my vram is used. I would understand that it uses all my vram in this game if this was the only one. Lower it to 1080p and lower settings, and it uses a little bit less. Same with black ops 3. The only games that work are games that aren't hard to run. Does anyone have any ideas to what this could be? My cpu usage is fine, never seen it go above 50%. My ram is usually 12gbs or under, i think ive seen it one time above that. I usually do not have a browser open. If you got an idea of what it is (faulty card, bad drivers, etc...) let me know. It is a prebuilt desktop ( I would've built my own but I built my last one... and it wasn't built very good haha, so i figured I would buy a decent pc on black friday with all the sales. I got it at a decent price but I've been struggling with this. Thank you guys!

Edit: Wanted to add this is on a 4k monitor if that mattered, but im playing the games at 1440p or 1080p.

 

[richiestang_78]

Sounds like a B450M board, probably a typo or they misled you to think it's a 550 which haven't been released.

I would start by making sure you have the latest BIOS for you board as well as the latest driver for you video card.

I'd also get the latest chipset driver from AMD.

Finally make sure there isn't any weird bloatware installed and running.

 

[theuglysandwich]

Sounds like a B450M board, probably a typo or they misled you to think it's a 550 which haven't been released.

I would start by making sure you have the latest BIOS for you board as well as the latest driver for you video card.

I'd also get the latest chipset driver from AMD.

Finally make sure there isn't any weird bloatware installed and running.

I will do the chipset thing but I don't know if its a b450m board unless they can mess with what my computer registers it as. I used cpu z to check some stuff and it says its a b550am board. I will try everything you said! Thanks friend, and ill update soon.
Edit: I wanted to say that I did some research and found that it is a B550AM board, its just specially released for this cyberpowerpc. Furthermore, on a cyberpowerpc forum, someone called a technician from cyberpowerpc and they said they don't plan on doing any bios updates as that causes more problems then it fixes. I am stumped on what to do. I really like everything about this pc but I need to be able to fix this. I can't update the chipset driver because they don't have my B550AM, only b450m. Do you guys got any new ideas on what to do?

 

[TJ Hooker]

Should be able to get the chipset driver from Cyberpower's product support page for your PC. Same for BIOS.

Did you install the latest graphics card driver from AMD's site?

 

[theuglysandwich]

Should be able to get the chipset driver from Cyberpower's product support page for your PC. Same for BIOS.

Did you install the latest graphics card driver from AMD's site?

On cyberpowerpc's website it just links you to the motherboard manufacturer's website and then when I search for the Mobo it doesn't find it. I found that this Mobo is just a rebranded b450m so should I download the BIOS and chipset for that or no? I am not at home right now so I can't do anything but when I get home I'll try whatever you advise me to do. Thanks!

 

[TJ Hooker]

Hmm, yeah it might be worth a shot just getting the B450 chipset drivers from AMD and seeing if those work. Hopefully the driver installer has some sort of compatibility check to guarantee it doesn't get installed on the wrong system, but even if not it's not going to blow up your system if it isn't the right one to be installing.

I'd be a little more wary about using a BIOS you aren't 100% sure it's right for your board. Again, I think it should prevent you from flashing it if it's not the right one, but if something goes wrong there you could brick you whole computer.

It may be worthwhile contacting cyberpower and/or asrock directly to confirm where you should be getting your BIOS and chipset drivers from.

 

[theuglysandwich]

Hmm, yeah it might be worth a shot just getting the B450 chipset drivers from AMD and seeing if those work. Hopefully the driver installer has some sort of compatibility check to guarantee it doesn't get installed on the wrong system, but even if not it's not going to blow up your system if it isn't the right one to be installing.

I'd be a little more wary about using a BIOS you aren't 100% sure it's right for your board. Again, I think it should prevent you from flashing it if it's not the right one, but if something goes wrong there you could brick you whole computer.

It may be worthwhile contacting cyberpower and/or asrock directly to confirm where you should be getting your BIOS and chipset drivers from.

Okay, I will try to contact them, but when I get home I may try to update my chipset drivers anyways. I really like this desktop but I can't keep having this issue.
Thanks for the help, if you think of anything else I'm more than ears! I'll update the post soon

 

[theuglysandwich]

Okay, I will try to contact them, but when I get home I may try to update my chipset drivers anyways. I really like this desktop but I can't keep having this issue.
Thanks for the help, if you think of anything else I'm more than ears! I'll update the post soon

So I updated the chipset drivers using the b450m and it did nothing, but it didn't kill my pc either so. Is there anything else we could try?

 

[TJ Hooker]

What GPU driver version do you have installed?

 

[theuglysandwich]

What GPU driver version do you have installed?

The latest from AMD, 19.11.3
Edit: So I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the driver but I don't think that fixed it, game crashed because I didn't have enough vram to load a texture.
Edit two: Restarted pc after I already restarted it from uninstalling driver, and squad worked. I was using about 7 gbs vram which still seems high because I saw someone playing at 1440p at max settings and only using 4gb. It says I use 4gb of vram in the menus so I still wanna fix the problem but Im going to try other games to see if theres an issue in them as well. Still, if you got any ideas on what the problem/fix is, let me know!

Nevermind, got an error trying out black ops 3 saying that I've run out of memory.
Edit 3: sorry for all the edits lol ive been trying to fix this problem a lot today. So I increased the page file size and now bo3 doesn't give me that error, but playing at 1440p max settings it uses around 7.3 gb vram. Is this normal? Will it use up all available vram it can or just how much is needed.

 

[TJ Hooker]

Can you run www.userbenchmark.com and post a link to your results here?

 

[theuglysandwich]

Can you run www.userbenchmark.com and post a link to your results here?

Ok I just ran it but it says excluding gpu? While it was running it said it had to abort the gpu test. https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/22158894
If this is the incorrect link let me know!

Edit: Figured it out, it was because I had msi afterburner up. Heres the link with the full results.
https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/22159147

 

[TJ Hooker]

Can you run CPU-Z and post screenshots of the Memory and SPD tabs?

 

[theuglysandwich]

Can you run CPU-Z and post screenshots of the Memory and SPD tabs?

Here ya go -

https://imgur.com/a/cGqx3TJ

View: https://imgur.com/a/cGqx3TJ

I added the mainboard tab because I have a question. Under the southbridge column going across, it says x570. Isn't there bios for x570 motherboards or chipset drivers for them? Should I try to download those if I am right and they exist? Thank you!

 

[TJ Hooker]

Hmm, everything looks normal there. Your VRAM usage does still seem kinda high, but I have heard that some games will just use as much VRAM as they can to load extra stuff (given that there's no benefit to keeping empty VRAM), more than what is actually needed for good performance.

Yep, you could try installing X570 chipset drivers. I'd be hesitant about the BIOS though, for the same reasons I mentioned above.

 

[theuglysandwich]

Hmm, everything looks normal there. Your VRAM usage does still seem kinda high, but I have heard that some games will just use as much VRAM as they can to load extra stuff (given that there's no benefit to keeping empty VRAM), more than what is actually needed for good performance.

Yep, you could try installing X570 chipset drivers. I'd be hesitant about the BIOS though, for the same reasons I mentioned above.

Sorry for the late reply. I will try to install x570 chipset drivers, but now in Halo reach on pc, it says I have reached maximum video memory. I still don't know what the problem is haha, but I really need this fixed. Thank you so much for your help, if you think of anything else let me know!

Edit: Wanted to add that I tried playing Gears 5, and it gave me an error saying windows is out of memory. I have 16gb of ram installed, is this an issue? it said I was using 62% of my ram with no games on.
Edit 2: Ok sorry for all the edits lol but while i was playing gears 5 i noticed that after i ran the benchmark, it said i only have 6 gb of vram available but it knows i have 8 gb total. Do you know why this is?

 

[TJ Hooker]

No clue why it'd only be showing 6GB of VRAM
And 16 GB of system RAM should be plenty, as long as you're not running a bunch of stuff in the background.

At this point I'd be tempted to try a clean install of Windows 10. Afterwards be sure to install all drivers again (including chipset drivers). Did Cyberpower ever get back to you on what BIOS/chipset drivers to use?

 

[theuglysandwich]

No clue why it'd only be showing 6GB of VRAM
And 16 GB of system RAM should be plenty, as long as you're not running a bunch of stuff in the background.

At this point I'd be tempted to try a clean install of Windows 10. Afterwards be sure to install all drivers again (including chipset drivers). Did Cyberpower ever get back to you on what BIOS/chipset drivers to use?

Ok I may do a reset on windows but keep all my files. You know what, I forgot to contact them haha, I will do that today and when they reply ill get back to you. Thanks again for your help, I will be updating soon!

 

[TJ Hooker]

I've never tried a reset, does it retain whatever stuff Cyberpower may have installed? If so, I'd rather do a clean install. You can still backup all your files to another drive and restore them later.