Question Low FPS on League of Legends and Low GPU Usage ?

GeorgeRG

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Nov 17, 2019
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Hello everyone!

I finally had enough of trying to solve my problem on my own so I am asking for help.
Last week I bought a sapphire RX 5700 xt nitro+. I deleted my old drivers with ddu and installed the new ones and everything seemed to be fine.
At first, I hadn't noticed any problem until I tried league of legends. I was shocked, the game was running awfully. I was getting 60 - 90 fps with big drops down to 30 fps.
Obviously, this card is capable of running this game better than that but I double-checked with a friend of mine who has the same card that I bought and he told me that he is getting more than 140fps at all times.

I started digging for a problem but I couldn't find anything.
I tried everything on both windows and Linux OS:
  • Reinstalling the drivers
  • Flashing the GPU's bios
  • Checking for compatibility problems
  • Reinstalling the game
  • Testing the card with benchmarks and other games
  • Even tried the Linux open-source drivers
4 days later and still no improvement.
The frustrating thing is that while the game struggles to render all the metrics are perfectly normal, even lower than normal. The GPU sits at 20% utilization, and all the CPU cores are at around 40% utilization. Also, all the temps are low around 80C on the GPU and 50C on the CPU.

My system specs are:
  • MSI B350 Tomahawk plus
  • Ryzen 5 2400G
  • Sapphire RX 5700 XT Nitro+
  • 16GB RAM @ 3200MT/s
  • 500w PSU from Thermaltake
  • Kingston NVME boot drive
  • Windows 10 PRO, Linux Manjaro
I am aware that the CPU only has an x8 PCIe slot for the GPU but I am pretty sure that is plenty of bandwidth for this GPU
I also know that the 500w PSU is barely enough but I don't believe that is the bottleneck because all the usages are pretty low

Any help will be much appreciated.
Thank you in advance.
 
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Well, you're using a 500w PSU and this is what AMD states for that card: "Recommended 650 Watt Power Supply (Minimum 600 Watt Power Supply)"

https://www.sapphiretech.com/en/consumer/nitro-radeon-rx-5700-xt-8g-gddr6 (scroll down to Specifications)

That could certainly be a problem. Do you run GPU-Z in the background? You should. Pause the game, open it and go to the Sensors tab and scroll down to PerfCap Reason (Performance cap Reason). See what codes it is showing. When you hover over the word PerfCap it gives an explanation of each code.

My guess is you're going to see Pwr, VRel, and/or VOp. All indicate not enough or unstable power. I'm guessing league of legends is working your card harder than other games, and your card is throttling because it doesn't have enough power being supplied to it.

Even if that doesn't wind up being the problem, you should seriously consider upgrading to a 750w PSU right away. You are pushing the limits of you current PSU... and when they die, they sometimes take the whole system with them - fried mobo, gpu, etc.

The EVGA SuperNOVA 750 G5 is a good choice. Trust me, go full modular. You only need to plug in the wires you need, it looks a lot cleaner, and is much easier to swap out since you don't have to rewire everything.

https://www.newegg.com/evga-superno...cription=psu&cm_re=psu-_-17-438-162-_-Product
 
Well, you're using a 500w PSU and this is what AMD states for that card: "Recommended 650 Watt Power Supply (Minimum 600 Watt Power Supply)"

https://www.sapphiretech.com/en/consumer/nitro-radeon-rx-5700-xt-8g-gddr6 (scroll down to Specifications)

That could certainly be a problem. Do you run GPU-Z in the background? You should. Pause the game, open it and go to the Sensors tab and scroll down to PerfCap Reason (Performance cap Reason). See what codes it is showing. When you hover over the word PerfCap it gives an explanation of each code.

My guess is you're going to see Pwr, VRel, and/or VOp. All indicate not enough or unstable power. I'm guessing league of legends is working your card harder than other games, and your card is throttling because it doesn't have enough power being supplied to it.

Even if that doesn't wind up being the problem, you should seriously consider upgrading to a 750w PSU right away. You are pushing the limits of you current PSU... and when they die, they sometimes take the whole system with them - fried mobo, gpu, etc.

The EVGA SuperNOVA 750 G5 is a good choice. Trust me, go full modular. You only need to plug in the wires you need, it looks a lot cleaner, and is much easier to swap out since you don't have to rewire everything.

https://www.newegg.com/evga-superno...cription=psu&cm_re=psu-_-17-438-162-_-Product

Unfortunately, AMD does not have such a thing as PerfCap but I know that the PSU is underpowered for this GPU and I am planning an upgrade BUT the thing is that when I stress the system with synthetic benchmarks (both the CPU and GPU at the same time) the GPU has the expected performance. Because of that, I am pretty sure that while underpowered the PSU is handling to supply power to the system. Furthermore, league of legends is known to not be a very challenging game for the system to run so it would not be logical for it to have that kind of issue while the benchmarks run correctly.


It's not a GPU issue, but a CPU issue. LOL likes fast CPUs and that 4 core 3.9ghz is gonna struggle to push out framerates.

What CPU does your friend have?

I believe this is actually the issue. My friend tried with a Ryzen 5 3400g and a Ryzen 7 5800x. While the 5800 is on a whole other class compared with my 2400g the 3400g is actually comparable but that small performance gap may actually be the problem.

By the way thanks for replying. <3
 
Unfortunately, AMD does not have such a thing as PerfCap but I know that the PSU is underpowered for this GPU and I am planning an upgrade BUT the thing is that when I stress the system with synthetic benchmarks (both the CPU and GPU at the same time) the GPU has the expected performance. Because of that, I am pretty sure that while underpowered the PSU is handling to supply power to the system. Furthermore, league of legends is known to not be a very challenging game for the system to run so it would not be logical for it to have that kind of issue while the benchmarks run correctly.




I believe this is actually the issue. My friend tried with a Ryzen 5 3400g and a Ryzen 7 5800x. While the 5800 is on a whole other class compared with my 2400g the 3400g is actually comparable but that small performance gap may actually be the problem.

By the way thanks for replying. <3
You misread my reply. Perfcap is a sensor in the GPU-Z app. Has nothing to do with AMD specifically.

Feel free to ignore the rest of my post, until your overworked GPU potentially dies and possibly leaves your system fried. May or may not happen - but you're a prime candidate based on your specs.

Either way good luck.
 
You misread my reply. Perfcap is a sensor in the GPU-Z app. Has nothing to do with AMD specifically.

Feel free to ignore the rest of my post, until your overworked GPU potentially dies and possibly leaves your system fried. May or may not happen - but you're a prime candidate based on your specs.

Either way good luck.
GPU-Z doesn’t do magic it just read the info the GPU provides. Nvidia provides the thing you say PrfCap so GPU-Z reads it but AMD doesn’t as you can see on the following link


I believe that you refer to my PSU when you are saying overworked and as I said I’ll upgrade very soon as it’s the only thing that makes sense to effect my pc this way.
 
Hi, my apologies for my last reply, which I now see came across as rather snarky.

I do feel that your PSU is causing your card to throttle big time. Hopefully you'll be able to upgrade it in the near future.

Cheers!
 
I don't think that PSU is the problem. For about 2 weeks i have same issue with League of Legends, tho I am playing on a laptop with:
GPU: 1660 Ti maxQ
CPU: Ryzen 7 4800HS
RAM: 16 GB

This started for me randomly and the funniest thing is that more power intense games run just perfectly, but LOL is unplayable for me. I have something like 10 fps on 1% frametime, but when i play for example in Elden Ring i get stable 50-60 fps on medium settings.