EVGA RTX 2080 at 100% usage for unknown reasons - HELP!

[Shagger]

Hey guys,

 

So I've been trying to diagnose the massive drop in performance and FPS over the last couple days. And finally narrowed it to the GPU. When playing Vermintide 2 my usage goes from <10% up to 100% and stays there. 
This has never happened before. And a friend who is has a 2070, running the game at the same settings, and has a older CPU than me, his load is only 20%!
I have no idea what's going on or how to fix it.

My rig:

• EVGA RTX 2080
• Corsair Vengeance 32GB DDR4 3600Mhz
• AMD Ryzen 3900X
• MSI Mortar Max Mobo
• Corsair H100i CPU cooler

As you can see below, whilst in game it's holding anywhere from 90-100%. Which is totally abnormal for a low demanding game like this on a system like mine.

 

 

Steps already taken:
 

• Uninstall GPU drivers and reinstall
• Update BIOS and CPU chipset drivers
• Roll back windows update
• Clear Mobo CMOS (removed battery)
• Formatted windows, fresh install
• Removed GPU, cleaned and reseated in different PCIe x16 slots

 

If anyone has any suggestions, please send them my way!

[BetteBalterZen]

First of all, you have misunderstood what is good and what is not good, when it comes to GPU usage. 
Having 100% GPU usage is a good thing - it means there's no bottleneck from the CPU. 
But you're more likely to see low GPU usage, because of CPU bottleneck, when running in a low resolution or if you cap the FPS to fx 60 via Vsync. 

IMO, you should instead look for thermal throttling as the first thing. I'd recommend you use HWiNFO here. 

[Hairless Monkey Boy]

• 100% load is normal behavior if you are not using vsync or some other frame rate cap.
• Task Manager is not a reliable source for GPU related stats, I'd recommend GPUZ or HWINFO64 instead.
• You have not told us the before and after performance. Do you monitor your frame rate?
• You friend's results may not be relevant here. What resolution and refresh rate is his monitor? How about yours? Are either of you using vsync or a frame rate cap?

[Shagger]

Thanks for the speedy replies guys. Previous load on the GPU was probably around 20%. Frame rate wise I have gone from 144(max to my refresh rate) down to around 40FPS.

My friend and I actually have the same monitor, so we're both using 1440p at 144hz. 

 

I don't think 100% load is normal IMO. A 2080 shouldn't be working this hard for the performance it's chucking out.

 

I've downloaded HWiNFO but I'm not sure what you want me to do with it?

 

[Chris Pratt]

2 minutes ago, Shagger said:

I don't think 100% load is normal IMO. A 2080 shouldn't be working this hard for the performance it's chucking out.

 

100% utilization is normal. The graphics card will *always* use as much as it can. If it has leftover performance given the resolution and quality settings, it dumps the rest into just rendering as many frames as possible.

 

The only time utilization wouldn't be 100% is if you're running at a resolution and quality that is a cakewalk for the GPU *and* you've capped the frames in some way. That could be an actual frame cap in game, vsync, or just hitting the upward refresh rate of an adaptive sync display.

 

In any case, at 1440p, utilization would never be 20%, unless it's like an eSports title, on the lowest quality settings and you capped the frame rate at around 40 FPS. The 2080 is a powerful card, relatively speaking, but it's not so powerful that a full 80% of the performance is unnecessary at 1440p, without some other limiting factor.

[Shagger]

3 minutes ago, Chris Pratt said:

 

100% utilization is normal. The graphics card will *always* use as much as it can. If it has leftover performance given the resolution and quality settings, it dumps the rest into just rendering as many frames as possible.

 

The only time utilization wouldn't be 100% is if you're running at a resolution and quality that is a cakewalk for the GPU *and* you've capped the frames in some way. That could be an actual frame cap in game, vsync, or just hitting the upward refresh rate of an adaptive sync display.

 

In any case, at 1440p, utilization would never be 20%, unless it's like an eSports title, on the lowest quality settings and you capped the frame rate at around 40 FPS. The 2080 is a powerful card, relatively speaking, but it's not so powerful that a full 80% of the performance is unnecessary at 1440p, without some other limiting factor.

 

What do you think has caused the 100FPS drop? If not the GPU usage being at 100%? I have no idea where to even look anymore after everything I've already tried.

[Hairless Monkey Boy]

7 minutes ago, Shagger said:

I've downloaded HWiNFO but I'm not sure what you want me to do with it?

HWiNFO provides quite a lot of information. Try to find the section with GPU stats, or use GPUZ instead which will show you only GPU stats.

 

You should be looking for temperatures and clock speeds while idle and while gaming for a period of time.

 

Based on what you have said, it is likely that you have a thermal throttle, or for some other reason your GPU is not boosting to it's full speed, which would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 1800-2000MHz.

[Shagger]

10 minutes ago, HairlessMonkeyBoy said:

HWiNFO provides quite a lot of information. Try to find the section with GPU stats, or use GPUZ instead which will show you only GPU stats.

 

You should be looking for temperatures and clock speeds while idle and while gaming for a period of time.

 

Based on what you have said, it is likely that you have a thermal throttle, or for some other reason your GPU is not boosting to it's full speed, which would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 1800-2000MHz.

So the first image is when running the game for approx 5 minutes and the second when idle. Can you see anything wrong?

 

 

[Hairless Monkey Boy]

That looks perfectly ordinary.

[Shagger]

8 minutes ago, HairlessMonkeyBoy said:

That looks perfectly ordinary.

What could be causing a 100FPS drop then? My CPU barely crossed 17% load?

[Mark Kaine]

32 minutes ago, Shagger said:

So the first image is when running the game for approx 5 minutes and the second when idle. Can you see anything wrong?

 

 

make the same screenshots with CPU usage also please.

 

29 minutes ago, HairlessMonkeyBoy said:

That looks perfectly ordinary.

Is the performance limit "yes" thing normal? I usually dont get this , unless "idle"

 

[Hairless Monkey Boy]

2 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

Is the performance limit "yes" thing normal? I usually dont get this , unless "idle"

Yes, there is always a performance limit. Usually it is power, temperature, and/or voltage related when in-game. The default behavior for the card is to boost as high as possible until it hits one of these limits. When idle, or when in a very undemanding game, the performance limit will be "idle".

 

25 minutes ago, Shagger said:

What could be causing a 100FPS drop then? My CPU barely crossed 17% load?

I don't know. There remains some missing information.

[Shagger]

8 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

make the same screenshots with CPU usage also please.

 

Is the performance limit "yes" thing normal? I usually dont get this , unless "idle"

 

This is when sitting idle

 

 

This is approx 5 minutes in game

 

[Mister Woof]

46 minutes ago, Shagger said:

So the first image is when running the game for approx 5 minutes and the second when idle. Can you see anything wrong?

 

 

Thermals seem a bit bad. IIRC cards start to throttle at 83c core. Your hotspot is over 100, and in these cards there's no VRAM sensor so it's possible your memory is hot and throttling as well.

 

When's the last time you cleaned it out?

[Mister Woof]

6 minutes ago, Shagger said:

This is when sitting idle

 

 

This is approx 5 minutes in game

 

Well for one your CPU isn't going past 2.4ghz, which isn't a good thing. Thermals seem fine but it's not boosting.

[Shagger]

1 minute ago, Mister Woof said:

Well for one your CPU isn't going past 2.4ghz, which isn't a good thing. Thermals seem fine but it's not boosting.

 

Is that a bad thing? I assumed that there was no need for the CPU to boost itself, so it's just sitting at 2.4 instead of it's base clock of 3.8 or something?

Also regards the GPU, I haven't touched it since I bought it. Tbh I don't even know how to take it apart without breaking it

[Guest]

Is the performance drop only in Vermintide? Have you tried other games/benchmarks?

[Shagger]

1 minute ago, JohnRogers said:

Is the performance drop only in Vermintide? Have you tried other games/benchmarks?

 

The main problem is in Squad, where it's gone from over 140FPS down to 37FPS on average. It's where I first noticed the problem :\.

[Mister Woof]

5 minutes ago, Shagger said:

 

Is that a bad thing? I assumed that there was no need for the CPU to boost itself, so it's just sitting at 2.4 instead of it's base clock of 3.8 or something?

Also regards the GPU, I haven't touched it since I bought it. Tbh I don't even know how to take it apart without breaking it

well you said that was while gaming. If it's at 2.4ghz while gaming, that's not good. The boost clock is 4.6ghz, and I'd expect it to hover closer to 4.3-4.4ghz while gaming. Not 2.4ghz.

 

That could account for poor performance, but not GPU usage really.

 

Take the care out and blow the dust out of it at the very least, if you aren't comfortable with a takedown/repaste.

[Mark Kaine]

16 minutes ago, Shagger said:

24 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

make the same screenshots with CPU usage also please.

 

Is the performance limit "yes" thing normal? I usually dont get this , unless "idle"

 

This is when sitting idle

 

 

This is approx 5 minutes in game

Someone correct me if Im wrong, but your CPU doesnt boost , hence, low FPS.

 

as for why, no idea, certainly weird.

[Shagger]

3 minutes ago, Mister Woof said:

well you said that was while gaming. If it's at 2.4ghz while gaming, that's not good. The boost clock is 4.6ghz, and I'd expect it to hover closer to 4.3-4.4ghz while gaming. Not 2.4ghz.

 

That could account for poor performance, but not GPU usage really.

 

Take the care out and blow the dust out of it at the very least, if you aren't comfortable with a takedown/repaste.

I went into windows power management and changed it from power saver to Amd Ryzen High performance. So now the CPU is running at 4.21Ghz.

 

 

But when entering game, my GPU usage is still at 90-100% and no improvement on FPS.

[Mister Woof]

Run cinebench for us and post results

[Mister Woof]

Just now, Shagger said:

I went into windows power management and changed it from power saver to Amd Ryzen High performance. So now the CPU is running at 4.21Ghz.

 

 

But when entering game, my GPU usage is still at 90-100% and no improvement on FPS.

Clean out the GPU, use DDU to remove/reinstall drivers to make sure nothing went wrong there

[Mister Woof]

Also go into nvidia settings and make sure power is on normal, not prefer maximum performance

[Mark Kaine]

10 minutes ago, Mister Woof said:

Also go into nvidia settings and make sure power is on normal, not prefer maximum performance

Something is definitely weird, the CPU should have boosted in game even with balanced settings.

 

DDU is actually a good idea though !