R9 270x usage capping around 60%

[RobinLB]

Tonight I wanted to monitor my pc's performance to try and figure out which part to upgrade, so I went into The Witcher 3 with HWMonitor open, bumped the settings to the maximum and tried to see what was working the hardest. The thing is, nothing seemed to be working very hard even though my fps was quite low. The GPU Usage essentially stayed at 64% no matter what, occasionally peaking to 100% for a split second before going back down.

Then I lowered the settings, and though the fps got better the GPU load stayed the same. I'm aware that this graphics card isn't supposed to run TW3 at ultra settings but I just can't figure out why it won't use all its power.

I have an i5 4670k which does not seem to be the bottleneck since its usage usually stays lower than 60% for all 4 cores.

I also ran the Heaven Benchmark program and even in there the GPU usage did not go higher than 64%. The same goes for an highly modded version of Skyrim I tried playing. I also used different programs to monitor the GPU load and they all gave me the same figure.

None of my parts are overclocked.

As a whole, it seems to me like the card is giving me the performance it should, but I just don't get why or how it's doing so without using 100% of its power.

 

[Supahos]

rerun the benchmark and monitor temps sounds like it could be getting warm and throttling. the 2XX series cards are known to do so... if it is getting hot and throttling it would explain the spikes, and the lower performance, could try using afterburner to use a more aggressive fan profile, or get better airflow in the case if that is the culprit.