Question Low GPU usage, high CPU, FPS drops ?

jakeharris97

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Apr 19, 2014
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Good morning ladies and gents,

I'll start off first and say I'm not totally knowledge with everything PC wise and when gets into the more detailed stuff so please bare with!

I have a PC with the following specs:

ASUS RTX 3070
Intel i7-9700 (Not the K) 3.00MHz 8 core
Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB RAM DDR4 3000MHz
H370 Gaming Pro Carbon (MS-7B16) motherboard

This PC was built by a friend who does build PC's and has built a few of my friends systems also.

First a back story...
I'm originally a console gamer (OK I know). When I first received the PC I had a load of issues with really slow download speeds and just glitched windows, turned out it was a bugged copy of windows so had someone else install a fresh set off windows which ended up resolving any issues and away I go on my first decent pc master race! Everything was fine for a few month, I only really play Call of Duty Warzone and mainly the only reason I upgraded to PC (I know, I know). Anyway, a few months later I started running into an issue where I've be sitting on 170/180FPS and I'd get like a 30/40FPS drop which seemed to cause which can only really say was a lag spike as if I had poor connection but the latency was fine and I could see the FPS doing the drops. I have 150mb internet so could hardly be that also. The CPU was also constantly hitting 100% usage when gaming and it looked like that was the issue to why it was stuttering/lagging. I took it back to the 2nd guy who did a full wipe and put me a fresh windows on and he seemed to think it was a bugged software again and reset everything. He also noticed my PSU was a little low and put me in a 750w Corsair one. Received the PC back and like before, was back to normal. It's now came up the big 1 year anniversary of the PC a couple of weeks ago and seemed to run into again the same issue with FPS drop and high CPU usage! I sort of got annoyed and left this for a few weeks/months and just played with the fact of stuttering every couple seconds.

Last Friday night I must have been feeling motivated to try fix the issue... so I was scrolling through Google and Youtube how to fix high CPU usage and then also noticed my GPU running at 0-1% which I suppose doesn't take a genius to work out something isn't right. After trying multiple things to fix on Nvidia control panel and other window settings like power mode settings etc. I loaded up the game again and got hit with 50-60FPS MAX! As a opposed to 170-180 with the dropped frames to 130-140. Of course, this made me rather annoyed as I thought I would have fixed it with all the settings changes! Side note, the GPU was also still doing nothing and the CPU was screaming at 100% again. So, Tuesday night I took it back to the 'windows guy' and again we have done a full reset of everything and got it back last night. Conveniently, my internet was having trouble and hitting around 40 download instead of the 150 download so this took A WHILE to download the game again. Anyway, loaded the game back up without downloading any other programmes at all just in case.

Bam, 180-200FPS to which I was quite delighted with. Checked task manager and was still 100% CPU usage and 1% GPU usage... which again something doesn't seem right! But I suppose at least my FPS was fixed and had a full game without stuttering. Again, I sat up and followed tutorials of how to fix low GPU usage. Loaded up the game again to try these settings and the GPU was now doing around 10-11% which still doesn't sound great but an improvement! CPU seemed to be more 80-100% so it helped the load a little I guess. The bad news... my frames had dropped to 95-105FPS which was confusing having the GPU run better!

As you can see, I'm at a bit of a stopping point and I hate to say it but my £450 console didn't have this! Haha so I can't help but think it might be easier just splitting and going back to console!! I'm currently in the process of buying a house also so the motivation to possible buy a new CPU isn't very inviting either! haha.

Any help or info or things to check with these issues? Any help etc is greatly appreciated and look forward to the replies!

Thanks,
Jake.
 
Good morning ladies and gents,

I'll start off first and say I'm not totally knowledge with everything PC wise and when gets into the more detailed stuff so please bare with!

I have a PC with the following specs:

ASUS RTX 3070
Intel i7-9700 (Not the K) 3.00MHz 8 core
Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB RAM DDR4 3000MHz
H370 Gaming Pro Carbon (MS-7B16) motherboard

This PC was built by a friend who does build PC's and has built a few of my friends systems also.

First a back story...
I'm originally a console gamer (OK I know). When I first received the PC I had a load of issues with really slow download speeds and just glitched windows, turned out it was a bugged copy of windows so had someone else install a fresh set off windows which ended up resolving any issues and away I go on my first decent pc master race! Everything was fine for a few month, I only really play Call of Duty Warzone and mainly the only reason I upgraded to PC (I know, I know). Anyway, a few months later I started running into an issue where I've be sitting on 170/180FPS and I'd get like a 30/40FPS drop which seemed to cause which can only really say was a lag spike as if I had poor connection but the latency was fine and I could see the FPS doing the drops. I have 150mb internet so could hardly be that also. The CPU was also constantly hitting 100% usage when gaming and it looked like that was the issue to why it was stuttering/lagging. I took it back to the 2nd guy who did a full wipe and put me a fresh windows on and he seemed to think it was a bugged software again and reset everything. He also noticed my PSU was a little low and put me in a 750w Corsair one. Received the PC back and like before, was back to normal. It's now came up the big 1 year anniversary of the PC a couple of weeks ago and seemed to run into again the same issue with FPS drop and high CPU usage! I sort of got annoyed and left this for a few weeks/months and just played with the fact of stuttering every couple seconds.

Last Friday night I must have been feeling motivated to try fix the issue... so I was scrolling through Google and Youtube how to fix high CPU usage and then also noticed my GPU running at 0-1% which I suppose doesn't take a genius to work out something isn't right. After trying multiple things to fix on Nvidia control panel and other window settings like power mode settings etc. I loaded up the game again and got hit with 50-60FPS MAX! As a opposed to 170-180 with the dropped frames to 130-140. Of course, this made me rather annoyed as I thought I would have fixed it with all the settings changes! Side note, the GPU was also still doing nothing and the CPU was screaming at 100% again. So, Tuesday night I took it back to the 'windows guy' and again we have done a full reset of everything and got it back last night. Conveniently, my internet was having trouble and hitting around 40 download instead of the 150 download so this took A WHILE to download the game again. Anyway, loaded the game back up without downloading any other programmes at all just in case.

Bam, 180-200FPS to which I was quite delighted with. Checked task manager and was still 100% CPU usage and 1% GPU usage... which again something doesn't seem right! But I suppose at least my FPS was fixed and had a full game without stuttering. Again, I sat up and followed tutorials of how to fix low GPU usage. Loaded up the game again to try these settings and the GPU was now doing around 10-11% which still doesn't sound great but an improvement! CPU seemed to be more 80-100% so it helped the load a little I guess. The bad news... my frames had dropped to 95-105FPS which was confusing having the GPU run better!

As you can see, I'm at a bit of a stopping point and I hate to say it but my £450 console didn't have this! Haha so I can't help but think it might be easier just splitting and going back to console!! I'm currently in the process of buying a house also so the motivation to possible buy a new CPU isn't very inviting either! haha.

Any help or info or things to check with these issues? Any help etc is greatly appreciated and look forward to the replies!

Thanks,
Jake.
Ok a lot to read through so sorry if I missed something somewhere but in all of this cluster f of a situation of people helping with this system and installing windows did anyone bother to install the motherboard drivers that controls the communication between the whole system?
 
Ok a lot to read through so sorry if I missed something somewhere but in all of this cluster f of a situation of people helping with this system and installing windows did anyone bother to install the motherboard drivers that controls the communication between the whole system?
Good morning ladies and gents,

I'll start off first and say I'm not totally knowledge with everything PC wise and when gets into the more detailed stuff so please bare with!

I have a PC with the following specs:

ASUS RTX 3070
Intel i7-9700 (Not the K) 3.00MHz 8 core
Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB RAM DDR4 3000MHz
H370 Gaming Pro Carbon (MS-7B16) motherboard

This PC was built by a friend who does build PC's and has built a few of my friends systems also.

First a back story...
I'm originally a console gamer (OK I know). When I first received the PC I had a load of issues with really slow download speeds and just glitched windows, turned out it was a bugged copy of windows so had someone else install a fresh set off windows which ended up resolving any issues and away I go on my first decent pc master race! Everything was fine for a few month, I only really play Call of Duty Warzone and mainly the only reason I upgraded to PC (I know, I know). Anyway, a few months later I started running into an issue where I've be sitting on 170/180FPS and I'd get like a 30/40FPS drop which seemed to cause which can only really say was a lag spike as if I had poor connection but the latency was fine and I could see the FPS doing the drops. I have 150mb internet so could hardly be that also. The CPU was also constantly hitting 100% usage when gaming and it looked like that was the issue to why it was stuttering/lagging. I took it back to the 2nd guy who did a full wipe and put me a fresh windows on and he seemed to think it was a bugged software again and reset everything. He also noticed my PSU was a little low and put me in a 750w Corsair one. Received the PC back and like before, was back to normal. It's now came up the big 1 year anniversary of the PC a couple of weeks ago and seemed to run into again the same issue with FPS drop and high CPU usage! I sort of got annoyed and left this for a few weeks/months and just played with the fact of stuttering every couple seconds.

Last Friday night I must have been feeling motivated to try fix the issue... so I was scrolling through Google and Youtube how to fix high CPU usage and then also noticed my GPU running at 0-1% which I suppose doesn't take a genius to work out something isn't right. After trying multiple things to fix on Nvidia control panel and other window settings like power mode settings etc. I loaded up the game again and got hit with 50-60FPS MAX! As a opposed to 170-180 with the dropped frames to 130-140. Of course, this made me rather annoyed as I thought I would have fixed it with all the settings changes! Side note, the GPU was also still doing nothing and the CPU was screaming at 100% again. So, Tuesday night I took it back to the 'windows guy' and again we have done a full reset of everything and got it back last night. Conveniently, my internet was having trouble and hitting around 40 download instead of the 150 download so this took A WHILE to download the game again. Anyway, loaded the game back up without downloading any other programmes at all just in case.

Bam, 180-200FPS to which I was quite delighted with. Checked task manager and was still 100% CPU usage and 1% GPU usage... which again something doesn't seem right! But I suppose at least my FPS was fixed and had a full game without stuttering. Again, I sat up and followed tutorials of how to fix low GPU usage. Loaded up the game again to try these settings and the GPU was now doing around 10-11% which still doesn't sound great but an improvement! CPU seemed to be more 80-100% so it helped the load a little I guess. The bad news... my frames had dropped to 95-105FPS which was confusing having the GPU run better!

As you can see, I'm at a bit of a stopping point and I hate to say it but my £450 console didn't have this! Haha so I can't help but think it might be easier just splitting and going back to console!! I'm currently in the process of buying a house also so the motivation to possible buy a new CPU isn't very inviting either! haha.

Any help or info or things to check with these issues? Any help etc is greatly appreciated and look forward to the replies!

Thanks,
Jake.
Or update the system bios that also helps control the whole entirety of the system?
 
Good morning ladies and gents,

I'll start off first and say I'm not totally knowledge with everything PC wise and when gets into the more detailed stuff so please bare with!

I have a PC with the following specs:

ASUS RTX 3070
Intel i7-9700 (Not the K) 3.00MHz 8 core
Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB RAM DDR4 3000MHz
H370 Gaming Pro Carbon (MS-7B16) motherboard

This PC was built by a friend who does build PC's and has built a few of my friends systems also.

First a back story...
I'm originally a console gamer (OK I know). When I first received the PC I had a load of issues with really slow download speeds and just glitched windows, turned out it was a bugged copy of windows so had someone else install a fresh set off windows which ended up resolving any issues and away I go on my first decent pc master race! Everything was fine for a few month, I only really play Call of Duty Warzone and mainly the only reason I upgraded to PC (I know, I know). Anyway, a few months later I started running into an issue where I've be sitting on 170/180FPS and I'd get like a 30/40FPS drop which seemed to cause which can only really say was a lag spike as if I had poor connection but the latency was fine and I could see the FPS doing the drops. I have 150mb internet so could hardly be that also. The CPU was also constantly hitting 100% usage when gaming and it looked like that was the issue to why it was stuttering/lagging. I took it back to the 2nd guy who did a full wipe and put me a fresh windows on and he seemed to think it was a bugged software again and reset everything. He also noticed my PSU was a little low and put me in a 750w Corsair one. Received the PC back and like before, was back to normal. It's now came up the big 1 year anniversary of the PC a couple of weeks ago and seemed to run into again the same issue with FPS drop and high CPU usage! I sort of got annoyed and left this for a few weeks/months and just played with the fact of stuttering every couple seconds.

Last Friday night I must have been feeling motivated to try fix the issue... so I was scrolling through Google and Youtube how to fix high CPU usage and then also noticed my GPU running at 0-1% which I suppose doesn't take a genius to work out something isn't right. After trying multiple things to fix on Nvidia control panel and other window settings like power mode settings etc. I loaded up the game again and got hit with 50-60FPS MAX! As a opposed to 170-180 with the dropped frames to 130-140. Of course, this made me rather annoyed as I thought I would have fixed it with all the settings changes! Side note, the GPU was also still doing nothing and the CPU was screaming at 100% again. So, Tuesday night I took it back to the 'windows guy' and again we have done a full reset of everything and got it back last night. Conveniently, my internet was having trouble and hitting around 40 download instead of the 150 download so this took A WHILE to download the game again. Anyway, loaded the game back up without downloading any other programmes at all just in case.

Bam, 180-200FPS to which I was quite delighted with. Checked task manager and was still 100% CPU usage and 1% GPU usage... which again something doesn't seem right! But I suppose at least my FPS was fixed and had a full game without stuttering. Again, I sat up and followed tutorials of how to fix low GPU usage. Loaded up the game again to try these settings and the GPU was now doing around 10-11% which still doesn't sound great but an improvement! CPU seemed to be more 80-100% so it helped the load a little I guess. The bad news... my frames had dropped to 95-105FPS which was confusing having the GPU run better!

As you can see, I'm at a bit of a stopping point and I hate to say it but my £450 console didn't have this! Haha so I can't help but think it might be easier just splitting and going back to console!! I'm currently in the process of buying a house also so the motivation to possible buy a new CPU isn't very inviting either! haha.

Any help or info or things to check with these issues? Any help etc is greatly appreciated and look forward to the replies!

Thanks,
Jake.
Chipset driver
I believe the guy who set my PC is well equipped enough to do this haha. Anything I can check to ensure this stuff?
The bios may have been done and will stay that way unless you flash it to something else, the drivers however whenever you reset windows or anything with their drivers it will always reset what windows are you using 10 or 11 and when they reset the PC did you have to set up the login screen or was it already set up for you??
 
Chipset driver
The bios may have been done and will stay that way unless you flash it to something else, the drivers however whenever you reset windows or anything with their drivers it will always reset what windows are you using 10 or 11 and when they reset the PC did you have to set up the login screen or was it already set up for you??
That got setup for me, I just received PC back with it all set up to just turn on
 
The CPU was also constantly hitting 100% usage when gaming and it looked like that was the issue to why it was stuttering/lagging. I took it back to the 2nd guy who did a full wipe and put me a fresh windows on and he seemed to think it was a bugged software again and reset everything.
Running games like Cod Warzone at high FPS is extremely CPU intensive, 100% on a 9700 at those sorts of frame rates is not surprising and will be the cause of your FPS drops.

Last Friday night I must have been feeling motivated to try fix the issue... so I was scrolling through Google and Youtube how to fix high CPU usage and then also noticed my GPU running at 0-1% which I suppose doesn't take a genius to work out something isn't right. After trying multiple things to fix on Nvidia control panel and other window settings like power mode settings etc.
Your GPU is not running at 0-1% while gaming, are you using Task Manager by any chance to determine this? When using low level API's like DirectX 12 the true GPU usage is not reported by Task Manager and some FPS monitors.

Use the latest version of MSI Afterburner to monitor GPU usage in game instead.
 
Running games like Cod Warzone at high FPS is extremely CPU intensive, 100% on a 9700 at those sorts of frame rates is not surprising and will be the cause of your FPS drops.


Your GPU is not running at 0-1% while gaming, are you using Task Manager by any chance to determine this? When using low level API's like DirectX 12 the true GPU usage is not reported by Task Manager and some FPS monitors.

Use the latest version of MSI Afterburner to monitor GPU usage in game instead.
Thanks for this. I will try the MSI afterburner and see what that is saying. I run 1440p on Warzone but not high settings, usually low/medium.
 
Thanks for this. I will try the MSI afterburner and see what that is saying. I run 1440p on Warzone but not high settings, usually low/medium.
It's common for competitive play for people to lower the graphical settings to hit higher FPS, the issue is the CPU has to be able prepare those frames for the GPU and 170/180 FPS is quite a lot. Personally I would try running the game at 144hz or 120hz instead, you will likely get smoother performance then.
 
It's common for competitive play for people to lower the graphical settings to hit higher FPS, the issue is the CPU has to be able prepare those frames for the GPU and 170/180 FPS is quite a lot. Personally I would try running the game at 144hz or 120hz instead, you will likely get smoother performance then.
Bit of a noob with the Hz stuff. My monitor is 165Hz so just run that. Like I say I run 1440p but a lot of the settings are pretty low
 
Bit of a noob with the Hz stuff. My monitor is 165Hz so just run that. Like I say I run 1440p but a lot of the settings are pretty low
It does depend on the game and what the setting is doing but lowering the graphical settings in most cases will simply reduce the load on the GPU, it won't reduce the load on the CPU. Capping the FPS at something more manageable like 120 or 144 would make for smoother gameplay. If your hitting 180 FPS then your playing with an unrestricted frame rate, if the graphical settings are low enough to remove the GPU as a bottleneck then the CPU will just churn out every frame it can but it won't be able to do that consistently if it's completely saturated.

I have a 165hz monitor as well but I tend to play at 144hz in FPS games.
 
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You don't have this kind of "issues" with consoles, because consoles are usually 2 set of components.

While in PC you can have +1000 combinations of different hardware.

In PC its all about balance, you can combine a i7 9700 (or even a i9 9900K) + RTX 3080 for a online FPS game at 1080p, and the CPU will be usually tax at 100% all the time, if you lower the graphic settings, it will be only worst.

Similar thing will happend at 1440p for many online FPS games.
 
You don't have this kind of "issues" with consoles, because consoles are usually 2 set of components.

While in PC you can have +1000 combinations of different hardware.

In PC its all about balance, you can combine a i7 9700 (or even a i9 9900K) + RTX 3080 for a online FPS game at 1080p, and the CPU will be usually tax at 100% all the time, if you lower the graphic settings, it will be only worst.

Similar thing will happend at 1440p for many online FPS games.
Can't help but think this didn't offer advice for counter this then? haha
 
Unsure how to really attach photos to this but last night before trying to mess with settings I have a screenshot of 208FPS. I then tried to follow video above regarding best settings to which it in fact lowered my settings so I restored the Nvidia control panels back to normal and the fps is still lower at 135FPS on todays screenshot.
 
Can't help but think this didn't offer advice for counter this then? haha

Fair enough, a piece of advice.

Have you tried any other AAA game to see how it performs?

For instance, when I build a gaming PC (not very often where I live due to economy and import taxes), the first thing I do is load a game I know pretty well to see the performance, in this case Shadow of The Tomb Rider. If this game play well then I know that most likely I did everything ok. If its not, then I need to start trying other things, like GPU or CPU benchmarks to try and narrow the issue (software and/or hardware).

If you want, cause it may not bring any new info to the topic, but runing userbenchmark test, and posting the complete result link may help members reading this identify a culprit (or not). Its free and only takes a few minutes. https://www.userbenchmark.com/
 
Fair enough, a piece of advice.

Have you tried any other AAA game to see how it performs?

For instance, when I build a gaming PC (not very often where I live due to economy and import taxes), the first thing I do is load a game I know pretty well to see the performance, in this case Shadow of The Tomb Rider. If this game play well then I know that most likely I did everything ok. If its not, then I need to start trying other things, like GPU or CPU benchmarks to try and narrow the issue (software and/or hardware).

If you want, cause it may not bring any new info to the topic, but runing userbenchmark test, and posting the complete result link may help members reading this identify a culprit (or not). Its free and only takes a few minutes. https://www.userbenchmark.com/
Apologies I should have done a Userbenchmark originally too. Please find results:

https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/54373799
 
Morning people,

Sat down last night with the original guy who built the pc on a call and I downloaded 'Open Hardware Monitor' and he noticed the CPU speed was around 2800MHz so way less than it was meant to be. We then went into the BIOS and changed this to the correct values it needed to be, 4500MHz maybe off the top of my head. This got me feeling positive and loaded the game back up to a nice 180 ish frames.

We then messed with a few game settings to help and also used MSI afterburner and put an overclock on the GPU. This has now seen me over 200FPS in certain areas of the map and sometimes nearly 220FPS!! Even got 21 kills, 2nd game into new settings on Warzone for you fans of it🤣

This is certainly looking like its done the job and back to being all about the PC master race again 🤣

Thanks all for the help and suggestions, will certainly be using this forum again if I have any future problems. I will run a user benchmark later when home to see what change there is from the previous!

Thanks again,
Jake.
 
Morning people,

Sat down last night with the original guy who built the pc on a call and I downloaded 'Open Hardware Monitor' and he noticed the CPU speed was around 2800MHz so way less than it was meant to be. We then went into the BIOS and changed this to the correct values it needed to be, 4500MHz maybe off the top of my head. This got me feeling positive and loaded the game back up to a nice 180 ish frames.

We then messed with a few game settings to help and also used MSI afterburner and put an overclock on the GPU. This has now seen me over 200FPS in certain areas of the map and sometimes nearly 220FPS!! Even got 21 kills, 2nd game into new settings on Warzone for you fans of it🤣

This is certainly looking like its done the job and back to being all about the PC master race again 🤣

Thanks all for the help and suggestions, will certainly be using this forum again if I have any future problems. I will run a user benchmark later when home to see what change there is from the previous!

Thanks again,
Jake.
Sounds like power limits were in place, good to hear you got it fixed.
 
Morning people,

Sat down last night with the original guy who built the pc on a call and I downloaded 'Open Hardware Monitor' and he noticed the CPU speed was around 2800MHz so way less than it was meant to be. We then went into the BIOS and changed this to the correct values it needed to be, 4500MHz maybe off the top of my head. This got me feeling positive and loaded the game back up to a nice 180 ish frames.

We then messed with a few game settings to help and also used MSI afterburner and put an overclock on the GPU. This has now seen me over 200FPS in certain areas of the map and sometimes nearly 220FPS!! Even got 21 kills, 2nd game into new settings on Warzone for you fans of it🤣

This is certainly looking like its done the job and back to being all about the PC master race again 🤣

Thanks all for the help and suggestions, will certainly be using this forum again if I have any future problems. I will run a user benchmark later when home to see what change there is from the previous!

Thanks again,
Jake.

This was the reason I aksed about cpu cooling, when I saw avg turbo at 2800MHz in the report you linked, I knew there was something fishy with your CPU.

In any case, now that you removed power limits, be sure to have enough cooling to keep your CPU safe.
 
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