[SOLVED] PC Underperforming: RTX 2070 Super

[ArvisDren]

Hello all. First off I want to state that I really don't know anything in-depth when it comes to computers and their quirks on how they operate. I do know that computer "speed" is based on many different variables including power settings, software, RAM usage, internet, and hardware. Getting that out of the way, I have had many questions during my time playing computer games. Originally building my first pc back when the Nvidia 275 was new and I had SLI. Back then gaming really wasn't to the max, and I never used my computer to the max. Now though, I'm playing some games on 1080p (my monitors), and even then I'm not getting consistent 60FPS. Elden Ring, for example, Will play at 60FPS 1080p If I stare at the ground. If I'm looking anywhere else, it's immediately down into the 50-55 FPS, and sometimes will go down to 34ish and stay there until I move to a different area. This happens with other games like MSFS2020, some VR games, and other instances that I really don't need to mention. What makes this interesting to me is this. I have multiple hardware monitoring programs that I have used to try and find the bottleneck, and I cannot seem to find it. RAM isn't maxed, CPU isn't maxed, GPU isn't maxed, Temperatures never pass 50C (passively cooled system). Gaming off SSDs along with operating system working off a separate SSD. The power supply is plenty for the rig. I have even gone into windows settings and made sure that the power and performance were increased. I'm not overclocking, but I really feel like I shouldn't need to because my system has a bottleneck somewhere, and overclocking hardware, without fixing the bottleneck seems counterintuitive to me.

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7820X CPU @ 3.60GHz, 25500 Mhz, 8 Core(s), 16 Logical Processor(s)
GPU: Nvidia Geforce RTX 2070 Super
RAM: 16GB (15.7GB usable) 3600 MHz
Motherboard: ASRock X299 Taichi XE
Memory: 2x850 EVO SSD (Games and OS)

I really hope someone can help me out. My father and my other gaming friends were unsuccessful in providing me with information on why a (barely) 4k gaming rig, cannot provide 60fps 1080p in new games. It might take a day or two in order for me to respond. I am very busy and do not get the opportunity to game as much as I used to.

 

[cdrkf]

Hello all. First off I want to state that I really don't know anything in-depth when it comes to computers and their quirks on how they operate. I do know that computer "speed" is based on many different variables including power settings, software, RAM usage, internet, and hardware. Getting that out of the way, I have had many questions during my time playing computer games. Originally building my first pc back when the Nvidia 275 was new and I had SLI. Back then gaming really wasn't to the max, and I never used my computer to the max. Now though, I'm playing some games on 1080p (my monitors), and even then I'm not getting consistent 60FPS. Elden Ring, for example, Will play at 60FPS 1080p If I stare at the ground. If I'm looking anywhere else, it's immediately down into the 50-55 FPS, and sometimes will go down to 34ish and stay there until I move to a different area. This happens with other games like MSFS2020, some VR games, and other instances that I really don't need to mention. What makes this interesting to me is this. I have multiple hardware monitoring programs that I have used to try and find the bottleneck, and I cannot seem to find it. RAM isn't maxed, CPU isn't maxed, GPU isn't maxed, Temperatures never pass 50C (passively cooled system). Gaming off SSDs along with operating system working off a separate SSD. The power supply is plenty for the rig. I have even gone into windows settings and made sure that the power and performance were increased. I'm not overclocking, but I really feel like I shouldn't need to because my system has a bottleneck somewhere, and overclocking hardware, without fixing the bottleneck seems counterintuitive to me.

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7820X CPU @ 3.60GHz, 25500 Mhz, 8 Core(s), 16 Logical Processor(s)
GPU: Nvidia Geforce RTX 2070 Super
RAM: 16GB (15.7GB usable) 3600 MHz
Motherboard: ASRock X299 Taichi XE
Memory: 2x850 EVO SSD (Games and OS)

I really hope someone can help me out. My father and my other gaming friends were unsuccessful in providing me with information on why a (barely) 4k gaming rig, cannot provide 60fps 1080p in new games. It might take a day or two in order for me to respond. I am very busy and do not get the opportunity to game as much as I used to.

You have listed two of the worst games for PC performance - both Elden Ring and MSFS2020 are very CPU limited, and your i7-7820X is not the best gaming cpu due to it being based on a mesh interconnect between cores (to support the higher core count parts in the Skylake X range) vs the ring bus design used on the standard desktop parts.

The issue with looking for a CPU bottleneck specifically is that just looking at overall utilisation doesn't tell the whole story - most games cannot evenly spread the load across all cores, usually having a primary thread that can only run on one core that becomes the limiting factor. That means if you are maxing out any one of your 8 cores on your cpu, that becomes the limit and whilst the game will provide a few other bits for the other cores to do they will be no where near 100% load, so your overall load looks fine. This was always the issues with the old AMD FX range of CPU's - plenty of multi core performance for the time but they were just too weak on a per thread basis to consistently hit higher frame rates. This is also why Intel configures it's chips to push very high clocks on just 1 or 2 cores - whilst the all core turbo clock is lower. It allows the cpu to maximise performance when running something like the games you have listed.

There are other titles out there that are much better optimised to use the CPU, games like Doom Eternal have been built from the ground up to spread the load and should run really well on a machine like yours. Elden Ring really wants max single thread performance though, so it flies on Intel's new 12th Gen parts thanks to the higher clocks and IPC of the 'P' cores, and does fairly well on AMD's Ryzen 5000 series parts but tends to struggle a bit with anything much older. MSFS2020 runs fairly slowly on pretty much everything from what I have seen (especially if you have things like volumetric clouds turned up).

 

[ArvisDren]

You have listed two of the worst games for PC performance - both Elden Ring and MSFS2020 are very CPU limited, and your i7-7820X is not the best gaming cpu due to it being based on a mesh interconnect between cores (to support the higher core count parts in the Skylake X range) vs the ring bus design used on the standard desktop parts.

The issue with looking for a CPU bottleneck specifically is that just looking at overall utilisation doesn't tell the whole story - most games cannot evenly spread the load across all cores, usually having a primary thread that can only run on one core that becomes the limiting factor. That means if you are maxing out any one of your 8 cores on your cpu, that becomes the limit and whilst the game will provide a few other bits for the other cores to do they will be no where near 100% load, so your overall load looks fine. This was always the issues with the old AMD FX range of CPU's - plenty of multi core performance for the time but they were just too weak on a per thread basis to consistently hit higher frame rates. This is also why Intel configures it's chips to push very high clocks on just 1 or 2 cores - whilst the all core turbo clock is lower. It allows the cpu to maximise performance when running something like the games you have listed.

There are other titles out there that are much better optimized to use the CPU, games like Doom Eternal have been built from the ground up to spread the load and should run really well on a machine like yours. Elden Ring really wants max single thread performance though, so it flies on Intel's new 12th Gen parts thanks to the higher clocks and IPC of the 'P' cores, and does fairly well on AMD's Ryzen 5000 series parts but tends to struggle a bit with anything much older. MSFS2020 runs fairly slowly on pretty much everything from what I have seen (especially if you have things like volumetric clouds turned up).

I really appreciate the information and the very quick response. To be honest I wasn't expecting it to be that fast. So the problem is the performance of the single cores of my CPU. Because the CPU is made with many cores, its speed and performance are dependent on all the cores equally being utilized at the same time. A game like MSFS2020 and Elden Ring are mainly trying to utilize very few cores, and because of this, my CPU is the bottleneck because it doesn't have the ability to provide the "thinking power" because it is literally being handicapped because the game isn't written to utilize the cores. This makes 100% more sense than what I was thinking. Is there a program that monitors all the cores on the CPU and displays the clock speeds along with the percent utilized? Would be great to actually see what it is doing during the gaming.

CDRKF I appreciate the response!

 

[hotaru.hino]

Is there a program that monitors all the cores on the CPU and displays the clock speeds along with the percent utilized? Would be great to actually see what it is doing during the gaming.

HWiNFO can display this. However, going by % Utilization alone is incredibly misleading. On Intel CPUs, Windows shuffles an application's threads around to balance thermal loads so you'll never see a core being pinged at a high percent unless you limit which cores the program can use.