Question Ryzen 5 3500U and Vega 8 only using 20% during gaming

[pavle2222]

I recently bought an ASUS X512DA and i'm reasonably happy with it.
But it seems to have trouble actually utilizing its components. When i'm playing a videogame I get fairly low FPS regardless of settings and i was confused since despite it being an iGPU, it managed very decent gaming performance in YT benchmarks.
So i went on task manager and realized that i'm only using ~20% for both my CPU and the Vega 8. I still have RAM to spare, both the physical 6 GB and the 2 GB reserved for the GPU, and yet they won't go any higher? What could be the cause of this? This problem also manifests when i'm browsing, when the entire browser will simply feel slow and sluggish, even though this is a fairly capable CPU/GPU and I have tons of RAM to spare. How can I make my laptop go full throttle? (when it needs to, of course).

 

[rgd1101]

what game? did you see if all the cores is running or just one at 100%?
plug in the power and not battery only?

 

[pavle2222]

what game? did you see if all the cores is running or just one at 100%?
plug in the power and not battery only?

The game was Savage Hunt, an older MMO.
I was looking at it through the task manager, which was showing the utilization to only be around 20%. the whole time, not 100%, And it was around 20% for both the CPU and the GPU. As for power, you mean put it into the charger? I was playing with the battery and i would use the charger when the battery would drain - but i don't think that should have an impact as i'd like to make the laptop run properly regardless of charging state, but no, putting it into the charger didn't help.

Also, this problem also happens during browsing, where things like gmail and youtube would run extremely slowly, even though i have ample RAM to spare. I've tried using the "high performance" battery setting but it did nothing. I also thought i could switch the CPU to always be at 100% but i felt like that would just be an unnecessary drain.

 

[rgd1101]

you need to look at each individual cpu cores
and try playing plug in.
change the power profile?

 

[pavle2222]

you need to look at each individual cpu cores
and try playing plug in.
change the power profile?

I explicitly stated that I did change the power profile to no avail... And that I already tried plug in... I don't think there's a need to repeat myself. As for CPU cores, running HWInfo shows the same thing. None of the cores are at 100% and total CPU and GPU utilization is always around 25% average. I also have RAM to spare. This doesn't happen with just this game - but it is the game that i play the most on the laptop. It also happens during browsing.

 

[pavle2222]

I've managed to fix it myself. It took a while but I narrowed the problem down to the PCIExpress power options. They were (from factory) set to maximum power savings on all power plans. By turning that off, my FPS jumped.
So, thank you for your replies.