[SOLVED] Why am I losing FPS when nothing in my system reaches a cap?

Tennis987

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Sep 9, 2015
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I currently have a Ryzen 5 2600, RTX 3080, 16 GB of RAM, 650W PSU, and I play at 1080p. I was going to upgrade from 1080p to 1440p after the holidays as well as later down the line buy a better CPU because I am not getting the performance at 1080p that I want in my video games. Obviously, my Ryzen 2600 is holding back my 3080, especially at 1080p but it got me thinking. If a game is not maxing any of my cores to 100%, my GPU is barely being touched, my RAM is being used less than half, and my PSU has room to spare, why am I dropping frames in my games? My CPU is stock, and my GPU is undervolted to 0.925mV. To add onto this, let's say I'm standing still and am getting around 80-85 FPS when one of my cores never goes above 90% usage. Shouldn't the game keep pumping frames until something gets capped?

HWinfo numbers below on Tales of Arise at 1080p maxed out 10 mins of gameplay.
View: https://imgur.com/a/1arteJM
 
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Solution
If a game is not maxing any of my cores to 100%,
You can only say that for sure if you look at what the threads of the software are doing, windows juggles threads around all cores to keep one core from becoming much hotter than all the others.
You need a tool like the free "process hacker" double click on the game exe and see the actual threads, if at least one of them is at ~8% (100 divided by 12 threads) you are hitting single thread maximum.
D

Deleted member 362816

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What is the make and model of the power supply? 650 bit low for that setup even with a soild one.
 

boju

Titan
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What motherboard and ram (xmp enabled?) have you got?

There may be short of power but rest of the system isn't exactly taxing so could probably get away with it.

Ram speed 2933+ would help 2600 do things quicker but what would make more of a difference is upgrading to a more capable processor with much better ipc ie 5600x coupled with 3600 cl16 ram.
 

Tennis987

Distinguished
Sep 9, 2015
123
3
18,695
What motherboard and ram (xmp enabled?) have you got?

There may be short of power but rest of the system isn't exactly taxing so could probably get away with it.

Ram speed 2933+ would help 2600 do things quicker but what would make more of a difference is upgrading to a more capable processor with much better ipc ie 5600x coupled with 3600 cl16 ram.
MSI B450 Tomahawk and Corsair Vengeance 3200 CL16. XMP enabled.
 
If a game is not maxing any of my cores to 100%,
You can only say that for sure if you look at what the threads of the software are doing, windows juggles threads around all cores to keep one core from becoming much hotter than all the others.
You need a tool like the free "process hacker" double click on the game exe and see the actual threads, if at least one of them is at ~8% (100 divided by 12 threads) you are hitting single thread maximum.
 
Solution