Question Upgraded my GPU from RTX 2060 to RX 6950 XT. Running into severe performance issues.

[madja]

Hi everyone!

As the title says, I just upgraded my GPU, but am now running into severe performance issues. Overwatch went from a stable 144fps (custom settings, mid-high) to an average of 55 FPS. Fortnite refuses to even start a match now (I get stuck on a loading screen).

I thought it might be a driver issue so I tried uninstalling them with both DDU and the AMD cleanup tool. Nothing helped.

I noticed later that AMD Adrenalin shows that the power usage for my GPU is only around 50W in Overwatch. That can't be normal? Should I be looking at my PSU here?

I realize that my CPU (Intel Core i5-9600K) is quite older than this GPU that I just got, but the reason why I didn't upgrade the CPU also is because my motherboard doesn't support anything much newer, so it would be quite costly, especially considering I just got a new GPU. I knew that I'd be bottlenecking the new GPU but surely it can't be this bad? Everything either runs much worse or doesn't run at all.

Honestly I don't know what the issue actually is. I don't want to jump to any conclusions and spend a lot of money on upgrading my MOBO/CPU before I am sure of what the problem actually is so any advice would be greatly appreciated.

CPU: Intel Core i5-9600K
GPU: AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT
SSD: WD Black SN750
RAM: G.Skill Ripjaws V DDR4-3600 C16 DC - 32GB
MOBO: MSI Z390-A PRO
PSU: Corsair RM850x 850W 80+ Gold

 

[Roland Of Gilead]

Hey there,

That does sound a bit too much of a drop in performance, to be solely down to the GPU change.

Unfortunately, you have already explained the downside to upgrading to a high tier GPU with the same CPU as before.

Your CPU will send-prerendered frames to the GPU at a certain rate. It cannot do more.. Your CPU limits that, so the new GPU will be sitting there doing practically doing nothing. Not even breaking a sweat. So you're not going to see a huge difference until you upgrade your base system.

With that said - Your system is pretty strong. You should be expecting more than you are getting.

What power plan are you running? What bios are you running on the system now? Are all system drivers/chipset up to date.

Have you made any other hardware changes?

 

[madja]

Hi. Thanks for the reply!

I was definitely expecting that I wouldn't be utilizing the full potential of the GPU, but I did not expect an actual drop in performance, so I hope it's something I can fix!

I'm running on the High Performance power plan.
My bios version is American Megatrend inc. 1.6, 21/03/2019
My chipset driver is 10.0.19041.1889 which is newest according to the Intel Driver Assistant says.
I'm not sure if there are other drivers I should be thinking about?

The PSU was bought at the same time, as I needed something beefier with the new GPU.