Question RX 5700 downclocking and underperforming while fps are low

[gadam93]

Hello,

I bought an RX 5700 to fit my Ryzen 5 3600 in hopes I could finally play my main game Path of Exile without fps drops unter 60. Sadly there seem to be some driver or optimization issues with the Game. Even tho I play without a framecap the RX 5700 wont give 100% of its power and does't even clock up to its max shaderclock. While just standing in town I get about 80% GPU load but when I go into some more performance demanding action the shaderclock and GPU load drop while my fps are also dropping.
I made a little video showing 3 min of gameplay with GPU, CPU and fps stats which show that exact problem:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTImfnsCkys


GPU/CPU stats in top left and FPS in top right (sry for the german language but I'm sure you can figure it out)

You can clearly see the shaderclock is barely crossing the 1000MHz ever while GPU load is sitting at 60-80% but my frames are constantly dropping to 40 and lower. Weirdest part about it I get 100% GPU load and 1700MHz clock in the menu as you can see in the very end. Also it cant be CPU bottleneck because CPU is barely reaching 50%.

Things I've already tried to fix the Issue:
-fresh windows install
-tried some older driver versions
-messed around with all the ingame settings
-messed around with overclocking
-set every windows and radeon driver options to high performance
-haven't tried other games but I did the Heaven benchmark which was able to utilize to the full load of the GPU
-set PCie to 3
-cried 4 times

none worked
If there is no fix to this issue because the driver is simply <Mod Edit> I will definitely try to refund the card and get an NVIDIA card instead
Hope somebody has a good solution for this.

 

[cdrkf]

Hello,

I bought an RX 5700 to fit my Ryzen 5 3600 in hopes I could finally play my main game Path of Exile without fps drops unter 60. Sadly there seem to be some driver or optimization issues with the Game. Even tho I play without a framecap the RX 5700 wont give 100% of its power and does't even clock up to its max shaderclock. While just standing in town I get about 80% GPU load but when I go into some more performance demanding action the shaderclock and GPU load drop while my fps are also dropping.
I made a little video showing 3 min of gameplay with GPU, CPU and fps stats which show that exact problem:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTImfnsCkys


GPU/CPU stats in top left and FPS in top right (sry for the german language but I'm sure you can figure it out)

You can clearly see the shaderclock is barely crossing the 1000MHz ever while GPU load is sitting at 60-80% but my frames are constantly dropping to 40 and lower. Weirdest part about it I get 100% GPU load and 1700MHz clock in the menu as you can see in the very end. Also it cant be CPU bottleneck because CPU is barely reaching 50%.

Things I've already tried to fix the Issue:
-fresh windows install
-tried some older driver versions
-messed around with all the ingame settings
-messed around with overclocking
-set every windows and radeon driver options to high performance
-haven't tried other games but I did the Heaven benchmark which was able to utilize to the full load of the GPU
-set PCie to 3
-cried 4 times

none worked
If there is no fix to this issue because the driver is simply <Mod Edit> I will definitely try to refund the card and get an NVIDIA card instead
Hope somebody has a good solution for this.

That looks a lot like a blizzard game- potentially built on the same engine? I can tell you Starcraft 2 will drop it's fps way down, even on the very fastest hardware when the number of units and things gets high, no matter what you run it on.

The problem is twofold: firstly these sort of games can spawn vast numbers of units and totally overwhelm the cpu, secondly is the optimisation. You say it 'cant' be a cpu bottleneck however that is almost 100% what you are looking at. The issue is the game itself- the game can probably only load a couple of cores (and critically the main simulation will be limited to a single core)- the cpu usage statistic is listing usage of the whole cpu so whilst overall your cpu is only being used at 50%, you will likely find one core is pegged at 100% all the time (the one doing the actual sim) and that is what is slowing the game down. This is why the gpu is dropping it's clocks, it's waiting on the cpu.

Older titles all had this issue, it's only more recently that games have been designed to use multi core cpu's properly. If you wanted to change hardware to get more performance, really your only option would be to switch to an Intel based rig and overclock it to 5ghz+, that would probably get you a bit more although honestly even at those settings you are unlikely to see that much of a performance jump from the 3600 (that is unless the game is built using Blizzards engine, games like Starcraft 2 and so on all under perform on Ryzen for some reason).

 

[gadam93]

That looks a lot like a blizzard game- potentially built on the same engine? I can tell you Starcraft 2 will drop it's fps way down, even on the very fastest hardware when the number of units and things gets high, no matter what you run it on.

The problem is twofold: firstly these sort of games can spawn vast numbers of units and totally overwhelm the cpu, secondly is the optimisation. You say it 'cant' be a cpu bottleneck however that is almost 100% what you are looking at. The issue is the game itself- the game can probably only load a couple of cores (and critically the main simulation will be limited to a single core)- the cpu usage statistic is listing usage of the whole cpu so whilst overall your cpu is only being used at 50%, you will likely find one core is pegged at 100% all the time (the one doing the actual sim) and that is what is slowing the game down. This is why the gpu is dropping it's clocks, it's waiting on the cpu.

Older titles all had this issue, it's only more recently that games have been designed to use multi core cpu's properly. If you wanted to change hardware to get more performance, really your only option would be to switch to an Intel based rig and overclock it to 5ghz+, that would probably get you a bit more although honestly even at those settings you are unlikely to see that much of a performance jump from the 3600 (that is unless the game is built using Blizzards engine, games like Starcraft 2 and so on all under perform on Ryzen for some reason).

First of all thx for the reply! It’s not a blizzard game though and it does support engine multi threading so it should use all cpu cores right? I’ll be testing more games later and give report!

 

[gadam93]

That looks a lot like a blizzard game- potentially built on the same engine? I can tell you Starcraft 2 will drop it's fps way down, even on the very fastest hardware when the number of units and things gets high, no matter what you run it on.

The problem is twofold: firstly these sort of games can spawn vast numbers of units and totally overwhelm the cpu, secondly is the optimisation. You say it 'cant' be a cpu bottleneck however that is almost 100% what you are looking at. The issue is the game itself- the game can probably only load a couple of cores (and critically the main simulation will be limited to a single core)- the cpu usage statistic is listing usage of the whole cpu so whilst overall your cpu is only being used at 50%, you will likely find one core is pegged at 100% all the time (the one doing the actual sim) and that is what is slowing the game down. This is why the gpu is dropping it's clocks, it's waiting on the cpu.

Older titles all had this issue, it's only more recently that games have been designed to use multi core cpu's properly. If you wanted to change hardware to get more performance, really your only option would be to switch to an Intel based rig and overclock it to 5ghz+, that would probably get you a bit more although honestly even at those settings you are unlikely to see that much of a performance jump from the 3600 (that is unless the game is built using Blizzards engine, games like Starcraft 2 and so on all under perform on Ryzen for some reason).

I now tested if all 12 threads are performing in Path of Exile and they indeed are and none of them is working on max load. I guess we can be sure its not a CPU bottleneck and indeed a software problem. In search of solving my problem I've came across multiple people reporting very similar issues with the 5700 (XT) and different games like for example Battle Field V or Blade and Soul. I also tested Overwatch now, which is btw a Blizzard game and its working flawlessly with high GPU load at all times. I will now be testing every single older driver for this card and see if I can find a working one.

 

[drivinfast247]

RAM?

 

[gadam93]

RAM?

Got 8gb and the load doesn’t go higher than 4ish while playing. I tested at a friends pc who has same GPU and CPU but 16gb of some gaming ram ( better than mine) and I get the exact same issues there. So it’s not the RAM.

 

[drivinfast247]

Got 8gb and the load doesn’t go higher than 4ish while playing. I tested at a friends pc who has same GPU and CPU but 16gb of some gaming ram ( better than mine) and I get the exact same issues there. So it’s not the RAM.

RAM speed? Is it 2x4gb or a single stick?

 

[gadam93]

RAM speed? Is it 2x4gb or a single stick?

2x4 , don’t know the speed but as I said it’s not the RAM because my friend has some fast gaming ram and same issue there.

 

[drivinfast247]

2x4 , don’t know the speed but as I said it’s not the RAM because my friend has some fast gaming ram and same issue there.

Maybe it's the game.

 

[hutchl]

What is your refresh rate, and what quality setting do you have for the game? Do you have V Sync on or Freesync?

 

[EndEffeKt_24]

I am quite sure you checked that already, but you do not mention temps anywhere...
Is the card thermal throtteling? What exact model do you have?

 

[gadam93]

What is your refresh rate, and what quality setting do you have for the game? Do you have V Sync on or Freesync?

60hz no vsync nor freesync, tried all I game graphics settings. Both high and low settings show the same problem but higher settings show less FPS drops. Probably because is keeps the shaderclock higher overall.

I am quite sure you checked that already, but you do not mention temps anywhere...
Is the card thermal throtteling? What exact model do you have?

Temps don’t get higher than 65-70 C. Pretty sure it’s showing in the video.

 

[cdrkf]

I now tested if all 12 threads are performing in Path of Exile and they indeed are and none of them is working on max load. I guess we can be sure its not a CPU bottleneck and indeed a software problem. In search of solving my problem I've came across multiple people reporting very similar issues with the 5700 (XT) and different games like for example Battle Field V or Blade and Soul. I also tested Overwatch now, which is btw a Blizzard game and its working flawlessly with high GPU load at all times. I will now be testing every single older driver for this card and see if I can find a working one.

You can't rely on windows task manager to identify a cpu bottleneck. The Windows scheduler bounces single thread tasks between cores (this is done to prevent localised heating of one core of the cpu)- making it look like single or low thread applications are using all the cores.

What you are describing though, the GPU usage and clocks dropping during game is typical cpu bottleneck behaviour- although it's not due to your cpu being bad but the game being from 2013 and built on an engine that doesn't properly support multi-thread rendering.

There is nothing wrong with your setup as far as I can tell, this is an issue with the game itself. If you want to test to see if your machine is working as intended I suggest downloading and running the 3D Mark timespy benchmark (get the free demo version on Steam). That will give you a comparative score against other systems and is designed to fully utilise modern hardware. If the score is much lower than other systems of a similar configuration then maybe you have a problem, if not though I'm 99% certain it's just an old game engine which is limiting you.

 

[gadam93]

You can't rely on windows task manager to identify a cpu bottleneck. The Windows scheduler bounces single thread tasks between cores (this is done to prevent localised heating of one core of the cpu)- making it look like single or low thread applications are using all the cores.

What you are describing though, the GPU usage and clocks dropping during game is typical cpu bottleneck behaviour- although it's not due to your cpu being bad but the game being from 2013 and built on an engine that doesn't properly support multi-thread rendering.

There is nothing wrong with your setup as far as I can tell, this is an issue with the game itself. If you want to test to see if your machine is working as intended I suggest downloading and running the 3D Mark timespy benchmark (get the free demo version on Steam). That will give you a comparative score against other systems and is designed to fully utilise modern hardware. If the score is much lower than other systems of a similar configuration then maybe you have a problem, if not though I'm 99% certain it's just an old game engine which is limiting you.

I’m getting the exact same issue in Sekiro and Everyone’s going to the Rapture and these are not old games right? Also heard people get this in battlefield v and Blade and Soul. Everyone seems to be so defensive about these Amd cards trying to blame everything but the card or the driver, it’s funny.

 

[cdrkf]

I’m getting the exact same issue in Sekiro and Everyone’s going to the Rapture and these are not old games right? Also heard people get this in battlefield v and Blade and Soul. Everyone seems to be so defensive about these Amd cards trying to blame everything but the card or the driver, it’s funny.

I'm not being defensive, I'm running all Nvidia graphics boards currently (although no strong bias either way)- it's just the symptoms you are describing (and that specific game you mention, which is pretty old) sound very much like a cpu bottleneck. If you are having issues with other games it suggests it could be a driver issue, although to say that you first need to establish a basline for what performance you should get in that specific game with that hardware.... "dropping below 60fps" isn't a problem in and of itself if that is the speed that game runs at on that hardware.

I don't play either of those other games you mention but could be worth looking to see if there are any youtube vids or benchmark charts showing performance of those games on a 5700. Then you can set your machine to match the graphics settings and resolution and compare your fps. This is why I suggest you should run 3D Mark- that is a well known benchmark with plenty of results, it will show if your machine is working correctly or not.

 

[Sheriffen]

Hello,

I bought an RX 5700 to fit my Ryzen 5 3600 in hopes I could finally play my main game Path of Exile without fps drops unter 60. Sadly there seem to be some driver or optimization issues with the Game. Even tho I play without a framecap the RX 5700 wont give 100% of its power and does't even clock up to its max shaderclock. While just standing in town I get about 80% GPU load but when I go into some more performance demanding action the shaderclock and GPU load drop while my fps are also dropping.
I made a little video showing 3 min of gameplay with GPU, CPU and fps stats which show that exact problem:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTImfnsCkys


GPU/CPU stats in top left and FPS in top right (sry for the german language but I'm sure you can figure it out)

You can clearly see the shaderclock is barely crossing the 1000MHz ever while GPU load is sitting at 60-80% but my frames are constantly dropping to 40 and lower. Weirdest part about it I get 100% GPU load and 1700MHz clock in the menu as you can see in the very end. Also it cant be CPU bottleneck because CPU is barely reaching 50%.

Things I've already tried to fix the Issue:
-fresh windows install
-tried some older driver versions
-messed around with all the ingame settings
-messed around with overclocking
-set every windows and radeon driver options to high performance
-haven't tried other games but I did the Heaven benchmark which was able to utilize to the full load of the GPU
-set PCie to 3
-cried 4 times

none worked
If there is no fix to this issue because the driver is simply <Mod Edit> I will definitely try to refund the card and get an NVIDIA card instead
Hope somebody has a good solution for this.

Hey man how has it gone?

I just bought same Processor and Grapfic cards and exakt same issue for me playing POE

Did you find any solution you wana share?

 

[Sheriffen]

3d benchmark

I find this result rather sad when I just bought brand new computer for 1200 Euros.

 

[cdrkf]

3d benchmark

I find this result rather sad when I just bought brand new computer for 1200 Euros.

Hi,

Here is a recent review of the rx 5700...
https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/amd-radeon-rx-5700-and-5700-xt-review,26.html

The score you got is very much in line with this so your machine is working properly.

I'm not sure why that is a "sad" result as you have the comparison set to machines from 2020.... And you are in the top 30% of machines built this year. It's a far more powerful system than my gaming rig, which handles everything I throw at it fine.

Just keep in mind looks like POE is a rather badly optimised game which will be why the preformance is low - that title will be slow on anything its not the hardware.

Also with regard to not being higher up the chart, remember the people with machines at the top paid more than the cost of your whole machine for just the graphics card on its own (that's for a 2080ti) and will only be about to get ~ 40% higher score than you despite paying 4x the price for the gpu (when you go higher than the rx 5700 cars / rtx 2060 series the value gets really pretty bad)

 

[Sheriffen]

Hi,

Here is a recent review of the rx 5700...
https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/amd-radeon-rx-5700-and-5700-xt-review,26.html

The score you got is very much in line with this so your machine is working properly.

I'm not sure why that is a "sad" result as you have the comparison set to machines from 2020.... And you are in the top 30% of machines built this year. It's a far more powerful system than my gaming rig, which handles everything I throw at it fine.

Just keep in mind looks like POE is a rather badly optimised game which will be why the preformance is low - that title will be slow on anything its not the hardware.

Also with regard to not being higher up the chart, remember the people with machines at the top paid more than the cost of your whole machine for just the graphics card on its own (that's for a 2080ti) and will only be about to get ~ 40% higher score than you despite paying 4x the price for the gpu (when you go higher than the rx 5700 cars / rtx 2060 series the value gets really pretty bad)

Made me pretty calm! Maby I spent all this weekend worrying about nothing then, Just let POE go and play some Wolcen maby..

Thanks alot btw for this INFO, It confirmed what my friend told me earlier also that high end GPU cost more then entire computer rigg of mine =D

 

[Sheriffen]

I tried some more settings now and found out that, like maxed settings ingame, with E-Sport settings without the Image sharpening. Then Fullscreen or Window Fullscreen with FPs limiter set to my Monitor Hz in my case 144 gives me pretty Joyfull result. Still some drops but it floats really well overall...

 

[Vedixsz]

The fault is with the game. Some games just dont seem to bother with optimizing for AMD.
I got a rx 5700 xt and experienced the same thing on Hellblade, the GPU usage drops and so does the framerate.

 

[gadam93]

Hey man how has it gone?

I just bought same Processor and Grapfic cards and exakt same issue for me playing POE

Did you find any solution you wana share?

I tried everything and had conversation with many people who have similar setups. We came to the conclusion that it’s a mix of PoE‘s bad optimization and AMD driver hating dx11 for some reason.
For example I had the exact same issues in Monster Hunter World (GPU downclocking and sitting at 70% load with no framecap). Found out you can switch from dx11 to dx12 in the settings and the performance difference is just stupid. In dx12 I would get 30% more FPS and the GPU will suddenly work on 98-100% load if you remove the framecap and finally unleash it‘s full potential.
It looks like we‘ll have to wait for GGG to implement dx12 or Vulkan API support to PoE which will likely happen with the PoE 2 launch at the latest.
Until then you can try this: View: https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/ei3d1u/performance_tip_you_can_actually_reap_the_nosound/

This will give you insane performance boost at the cost of having no sfx sounds. I‘m even using this playing only on HC in PoE because I figured the performance drops were more likely to Kill me than having no sound which basically just means you‘ll not hear the „shhhhhh“ sound of volatile flameblood popping, any other effect sound is irrelevant anyways.
Oh and please don‘t get yourself confused by people (who don’t play PoE neither have a similar rig) telling you that it‘s your CPU/RAM/SSD because it‘s just not. On my journey to make PoE playable I had so many people giving me missleading advice just assuming stuff out of the blue like mister cdrkf in this thread. If you have no clue please don‘t try to help because that will just waste our time.

Hope this was helpful, wishing you all the FPS and mirror drops. Stay sane exile

 

[cdrkf]

I tried everything and had conversation with many people who have similar setups. We came to the conclusion that it’s a mix of PoE‘s bad optimization and AMD driver hating dx11 for some reason.
For example I had the exact same issues in Monster Hunter World (GPU downclocking and sitting at 70% load with no framecap). Found out you can switch from dx11 to dx12 in the settings and the performance difference is just stupid. In dx12 I would get 30% more FPS and the GPU will suddenly work on 98-100% load if you remove the framecap and finally unleash it‘s full potential.
It looks like we‘ll have to wait for GGG to implement dx12 or Vulkan API support to PoE which will likely happen with the PoE 2 launch at the latest.
Until then you can try this: View: https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/ei3d1u/performance_tip_you_can_actually_reap_the_nosound/

This will give you insane performance boost at the cost of having no sfx sounds. I‘m even using this playing only on HC in PoE because I figured the performance drops were more likely to Kill me than having no sound which basically just means you‘ll not hear the „shhhhhh“ sound of volatile flameblood popping, any other effect sound is irrelevant anyways.
Oh and please don‘t get yourself confused by people (who don’t play PoE neither have a similar rig) telling you that it‘s your CPU/RAM/SSD because it‘s just not. On my journey to make PoE playable I had so many people giving me missleading advice just assuming stuff out of the blue like mister cdrkf in this thread. If you have no clue please don‘t try to help because that will just waste our time.

Hope this was helpful, wishing you all the FPS and mirror drops. Stay sane exile

Nothing I have said in this thread is wrong - the problem is a the game is cpu limited - due to how the game is coded. Getting an fps improvement by disabling sounds categorically proves this as it reduces the time the cpu spends processing each frame. The issue isn't a hardware or driver problem, as I've said from the start - it's a game optimisation issue in that the game engine isn't able to utilise multiple cpu threads to issue draw calls to the graphics card so the gpu sits there waiting and not being 100% utilised. This is also why you are getting better results with DX12 and Vulkan as both those API's were written specifically to use multiple threads for issuing draw calls to the gpu and are based on work by AMD themselves when they released the 'Mantle' api back with the Radeon HD 7000 series.

 

[cdrkf]

I just wanted to leave this video here as it is relevant to this discussion about GPU usage and frame rates:

View: https://youtu.be/V2xBd2a0v-8


This was comparing real world configs with a GTX 1660 Super paired with both a 2700X and 9900K cpu showing that in that scenario there's not much performance difference, although the 2700X does show signs of being maxed out due to it's clock speed deficit compared to the 9900K.

They then go on to show using the same CPU (2700X) with a much faster RX 5700 XT (around 14:15 in the vid), running at 1080p high and compare the performance: This clearly shows the game is being CPU limited as the performance doesn't change. They do note upping the graphics settings (e.g. by going to Ultra settings or running at 1440p) would shift more load onto the GPU and then you would see a difference with the same CPU. If you watch the vid though pay attention to the CPU usage, the 2700X isn't maxed out at any point in time as the game doesn't fully load all 16 threads. The issue is even with recent games parts of the game engine do still depend on single thread performance so they can wind up being cpu limited like this, which results in the GPU usage dropping down because it's waiting for the CPU.

 

[Aphex187]

I tried some more settings now and found out that, like maxed settings ingame, with E-Sport settings without the Image sharpening. Then Fullscreen or Window Fullscreen with FPs limiter set to my Monitor Hz in my case 144 gives me pretty Joyfull result. Still some drops but it floats really well overall...

Hi mate, would you care to share your settings ?

Cheers.