Ryzen 7 1700 performance at stock speed. Help!

[denitora]

Hello. I have a PC with GTX 1080 and a R7 1700 CPU with 8GB 3000Mhz RAM. I mainly use it for gaming right now but I'm having a lot of troubles during modern games at 1080p, especially the open world ones. My FPS dips down to low 40's in cities even though my settings aren't maxed out in general.
My 3dMARK Firestrike score is around 15200 and my components show good results when I benchmark them individually, however the actual performance in games are a lot lower.

I was thinking that maybe Ryzen 7 1700 is bottlenecking my GPU at stock speed. Every benchmark video I checked had the CPU overclocked so I had to ask about it myself. What do you think? Is the reason why I'm getting low FPS in new games is the CPU or could it be something else? Thanks a lot!
Note: I checked the usage of components with MSI Afterburner. It looks like GPU isn't working much ( it goes between %60-80) but none of the CPU cores run at %99 either.

 

[jay32267]

I think there is something else going on.
Your Afterburner numbers support this.
I don't think the 1700 should bottleneck a 1080 with any significance. I think they should work together great.

Although....I am maxing out a 1080 on Planet Coaster at 1080p FPS in the 50s....so it's very possible to max out a GTX 1080 on 1080p....BUT.....Afterburner is showing 100% usage of the 1080 in my case.....and in your case it's not. There lies the issue.

 

[racksmith101]

Are you using a single stick of ram? Ideally 16gb would have been a better option.

 

[SgtScream]

Using a gtx 1080 for resolutions lower than 1440p will place more strain on the cpu. You'll also notice your gpu load can never reach 100%. This is because 1080p resolution isn't enough demand performance wise on the GPU. What you're seeing is a CPU bottleneck. In addition to my explanation above, you're also lowering the graphics quality of the game and as a result you're thinking that this will improve performance/FPS, but doing so also takes even more demand off the graphics card and places this demand on to an already bottlenecked CPU. The goal is to make use of your very powerful graphics card, and the only way to do this is by increasing the resolution to the resolution settings the gtx 1080 was designed to play at. This can easily be remedied by going into geforce experience and down sample your resolution to higher than 1080p:
https://www.geforce.com/whats-new/articles/geforce-experience-2-1-2-released
Give it a go. I'd be interested to see if your performance and FPS increase, because you'll placing your GPU under 100% load.

 

[denitora]

Are you using a single stick of ram? Ideally 16gb would have been a better option.

Yeah I use 1 stick of 8GB RAM

 

[denitora]

Using a gtx 1080 for resolutions lower than 1440p will place more strain on the cpu. You'll also notice your gpu load can never reach 100%. This is because 1080p resolution isn't enough demand performance wise on the GPU. What you're seeing is a CPU bottleneck. In addition to my explanation above, you're also lowering the graphics quality of the game and as a result you're thinking that this will improve performance/FPS, but doing so also takes even more demand off the graphics card and places this demand on to an already bottlenecked CPU. The goal is to make use of your very powerful graphics card, and the only way to do this is by increasing the resolution to the resolution settings the gtx 1080 was designed to play at. This can easily be remedied by going into geforce experience and down sample your resolution to higher than 1080p:
https://www.geforce.com/whats-new/articles/geforce-experience-2-1-2-released
Give it a go. I'd be interested to see if your performance and FPS increase, because you'll placing your GPU under 100% load.

Hmm sounds like it could work! I will try it out and then tell you the results.
Thank you all for taking your time to suggest solutions to me. Much appreciated

 

[racksmith101]

Thats going to hamper the speed of your pc significantly, you won't get anywhere near the memory bandwidth that you would get with a dual channel setup.

 

[denitora]

So I tested DSR with Assassin's Creed Origins (the game that's giving me the most problem performance-wise). I tried 4K to see if my GPU usage gets maxed out, however it was hanging around %85-95 this time and I never saw it running at %99. The FPS average was 15-20 lower than before, as expected.
This is really frustrating me no matter what I do I can't get my CPU or GPU run at max.
Couple weeks ago I tried overclocking my CPU to see if my performance would go up, however I got very unlucky with the chip. I won't even boot 3.6ghz with 1.3V and my stock fan can't handle more than that.

I'm stil more inclined to think that the issue is my CPU running at stock speeds. Every benchmark video on youtube with my setup runs the CPU with 3.7+ OC so there must be a reason for that

 

[SgtScream]

Thats going to hamper the speed of your pc significantly, you won't get anywhere near the memory bandwidth that you would get with a dual channel setup.

Try this guys suggestion.

 

[denitora]

Would buying another RAM stick really be that effective though? I guess I can look in to it if prices ever go down.
Thanks for all your help!