[SOLVED] Why won't my games use 100% of my cpu?

[GloriousKev]

Hi all,
I am running some benchmarks and gaming and I get random FPS drops but according to after burner my cpu will be sitting at 53 degrees C and maybe 50 - 60 % usage. My Gpu may be at 80% usage but Ill get FPS drops into the 40s randomly. Its very strange. It does it regardless of in game settings as well. The games i have tested this with are The Division 2 and Total War Three Kingdoms. I tested at 1080p, 1440p and 4k, medium settings no AA at 1440p and 4k and got similar results across the board. This does not happen in other games like Age of Wonders Planetfall, Doom 2016 or Divinity Original Sin 2. Is there perhaps some sort of Windows 10 optimization I need to do for Ryzen?

My specs
GTX 1080
Ryzen 7 1700 w/ stock cooler no overclock
16 gigs of cosair memory
Asus B450 motherboard
Corsair 800 watt psu

 

[Roland Of Gilead]

Well, you have an 8 core 16 thread CPU. There are practically no games out there that would push a CPU with that much grunt to 100% usage. You could hit 100% usage by streaming simultaneously, and having a few tabs of chrome open. You CPU is very capable. Being 100% maxed is not really a metric to worry about. Unless you had a much weaker CPU and a powerful graphics card. Where the weak CPU would hold back the performance of the GPU. A.K.A. a bottleneck. I don't think that's your issue. But if you OC the CPU that might negate some issues. But IMO, you don't need to do that necessarily.

What HD/SSD do you have. If it's full or just an HD then it could be your disk is writing slowly and causing issues.

Also, what speed is your ram. Ryzen loves fast ram, so if you have 2400mhz ram instead of 3200mhz ram, you are losing out on about 25% gaming performance for some games. That's worth looking into,

 

[GloriousKev]

Well, you have an 8 core 16 thread CPU. There are practically no games out there that would push a CPU with that much grunt to 100% usage. You could hit 100% usage by streaming simultaneously, and having a few tabs of chrome open. You CPU is very capable. Being 100% maxed is not really a metric to worry about. Unless you had a much weaker CPU and a powerful graphics card. Where the weak CPU would hold back the performance of the GPU. A.K.A. a bottleneck. I don't think that's your issue. But if you OC the CPU that might negate some issues. But IMO, you don't need to do that necessarily.

What HD/SSD do you have. If it's full or just an HD then it could be your disk is writing slowly and causing issues.

Also, what speed is your ram. Ryzen loves fast ram, so if you have 2400mhz ram instead of 3200mhz ram, you are losing out on about 25% gaming performance for some games. That's worth looking into,

Hmmm I didn't consider the drives or ram speed. I have corsair vengeance ram at 3000 Mhz 2 Dimms at 8 gigs each and 3 Samsung 860 EVO SSDs 500 gigs, and 2 1 TB drives. All less than a year old and a 4 year old San Disk 120 Gig SSD. None of them are near full utilization.

My overall concern is more so about the FPS drops. I am thinking now maybe its a clock speed issue? Perhaps the single thread performance isn't there on the 1700? I think that is why you are suggesting the overclock, but I've never overclocked before so I am a bit nervous to do so especially on AMD's stock cooler.

 

[lordmogul]

Use something like Afterburner or similar to check your CPU/GPU temps, clocks and load while playing.
If you see sudden drops in clock then it might be cause those issues, but unless your cooling is lacking there shouldn't be anything like that happening.
Also worth checking your RAM usage while at it.

 

[sizzling]

Monitor all cpu cores/threads. Total cpu usage is fairly meaningless, it is possible for 1 core hitting 100% to limit performance and the single core performance of first gen Ryzen wasn’t the best especially as you are not overclocking it.

Not saying the cpu is the limiting factor but I could easily believe it was.

 

[GloriousKev]

Use something like Afterburner or similar to check your CPU/GPU temps, clocks and load while playing.
If you see sudden drops in clock then it might be cause those issues, but unless your cooling is lacking there shouldn't be anything like that happening.
Also worth checking your RAM usage while at it.

Thanks, I am just seeing this. I was doing this and my temps seem good. 53 degrees c on each core. I am using the stock cooler and no over clocks ram usage is not at 100% either. Ram usage never went beyond 10 of my 16 gigs. Its strange the only thing I can think it may be is Im fully utilizing my gpu on my most recent test.

 

[drivinfast247]

Thanks, I am just seeing this. I was doing this and my temps seem good. 53 degrees c on each core. I am using the stock cooler and no over clocks ram usage is not at 100% either. Ram usage never went beyond 10 of my 16 gigs. Its strange the only thing I can think it may be is Im fully utilizing my gpu on my most recent test.

Doesn't get much better than that.