Lower GPU performance than usual

[Apollo8]

Hi there,

 

a friend of mine has a problem with his system. He’s experienced a performance drop by 20-30 % in the last few days. His specs are:

OS: Windows 10

CPU: Intel i7-10700K

GPU: ASUS TUF RTX 3080

MB: ASUS ROG STRIX B460-H (not sure of BIOS firmware, but it hasn’t been updated in the last few days)

PSU: Corsair RM850x

RAM: HyperX Fury Black 32 GB, 2666 MHz

 

Recently the FPS and performance in general has dropped by the 20-30 %. Drop in 3D Mark from 15 500 to 13 200 points. Cyberpunk (itself installed on a Samsung 970 EVO PLUS) started dropping FPS. The PC case is clean, dust free.
We’ve tried installing older GPU drivers (DDUing in safe mode the newer ones), with no effect.

Also tried swapping GPUs for mine. (I have almost the same specs except for GPU, I have RTX 3070) That did not help either, since the performance was worse on his system with the RTX 3070 than on my system with the same GPU, CPU and RAM.

Also tried reinstalling Windows, no effect as well unfortunately.

The temps are not higher than before (the 3080 sitting around 65 degrees Celsius, the Intel with Noctua NH-U12A around 70-80 in high workload.

We’ve tried OCCT power test for the PSU, but it seems ok (no crashing, nor low power delivery to CPU/GPU).

 

We’ve run out of ideas, could anyone please help us resolve this issue? Thanks in advance.

[Bjoolz]

In the GeForce Experience overlay, go to Settings → HUD layout, select Performance and set it to Advanced. Then go ingame and press Alt + R, wait for the overlay to populate and screenshot. 

[Apollo8]

1 hour ago, Bjoolz said:

In the GeForce Experience overlay, go to Settings → HUD layout, select Performance and set it to Advanced. Then go ingame and press Alt + R, wait for the overlay to populate and screenshot. 

Here are the screenshots from Cyberpunk on 3070, game is set to ultra on FHD.

[Bjoolz]

11 minutes ago, Apollo8 said:

Here are the screenshots from Cyberpunk on 3070, game is set to ultra on FHD.

The power draw looks too low. Could you follow this guide on logging with HWiNFO and then just run Prime95 and Furmark for a stress test? This logs a lot more sensors so we might spot something. Attach the .csv here. 

[leclod]

You added an ssd ?

Maybe this  reduced 16 pcie lanes to 8 pcie lanes dedicated to gpu.

Even this shouldn't bottleneck your gpu, but anyway, just an idea

Edited August 27, 2023 by leclod

[Apollo8]

10 hours ago, Bjoolz said:

The power draw looks too low. Could you follow this guide on logging with HWiNFO and then just run Prime95 and Furmark for a stress test? This logs a lot more sensors so we might spot something. Attach the .csv here. 

I did the test following the guide and here is the .csv file

logging.CSV

[Apollo8]

10 hours ago, leclod said:

You added an ssd ?

Maybe this  reduced 16 pcie lanes to 8 pcie lanes dedicated to gpu.

Even this shouldn't bottleneck your gpu but anyway, just an idea

An NVMe drive was added a few weeks back (the 970 EVO PLUS), but I’ve added the same SSD to my system, but without performance drops. (I have same CPU, but only the MB is a bit different - B460-F instead of friend’s B460-H)

[leclod]

50 minutes ago, Apollo8 said:

An NVMe drive was added a few weeks back (the 970 EVO PLUS), but I’ve added the same SSD to my system, but without performance drops. (I have same CPU, but only the MB is a bit different - B460-F instead of friend’s B460-H)

Take the ssd out and you'll know

(I checked your mb, this shouldn't be the case. That bandwidth isn't shared)

Update the bios

Edited August 27, 2023 by leclod

[Apollo8]

3 hours ago, leclod said:

Take the ssd out and you'll know

(I checked your mb, this shouldn't be the case. That bandwidth isn't shared)

Update the bios

Checked for update for the BIOS, found out that the latest BIOS is installed. (version 1620)

[Bjoolz]

11 hours ago, Apollo8 said:

I did the test following the guide and here is the .csv file

logging.CSV 4.39 MB · 2 downloads

During the stress test everything is looking beautiful. Voltages, temps, power usage, ability to sustain loads, clock speeds, it looks great. Looked other components as well and everything looks great. It's drawing way more power than the overlay showed during gameplay, it's looking normal now. And I noticed in the screenshots that you have a 3070, not a 3080 that you said in the post so it's still low ingame, but not as horribly low as I initially though. During Furmark it's drawing the expected ~230W (To anyone reading, yes, I know, software readings are not that accurate, but we are comparing software to software which should read off the same sensors). And it's going to draw more power during Furmark than gameplay, but not as little as shown in the screenshots when the GPU is maxed.

 

I wonder if it's a power state bug in the driver. With a power state issue it would limit the GPU by feeding it less power so it would look like it's working at max load, but it would work at the % that the power limit limits it to. DDU should have dealt with that though. 

 

Could you DDU again and try this driver? 

 

Also perhaps check the Nvidia overlay during Furmark to see if it reports about 210-230W usage in the overlay as well just so we aren't getting tricked by different measurements. 

[Apollo8]

18 hours ago, Bjoolz said:

During the stress test everything is looking beautiful. Voltages, temps, power usage, ability to sustain loads, clock speeds, it looks great. Looked other components as well and everything looks great. It's drawing way more power than the overlay showed during gameplay, it's looking normal now. And I noticed in the screenshots that you have a 3070, not a 3080 that you said in the post so it's still low ingame, but not as horribly low as I initially though. During Furmark it's drawing the expected ~230W (To anyone reading, yes, I know, software readings are not that accurate, but we are comparing software to software which should read off the same sensors). And it's going to draw more power during Furmark than gameplay, but not as little as shown in the screenshots when the GPU is maxed.

 

I wonder if it's a power state bug in the driver. With a power state issue it would limit the GPU by feeding it less power so it would look like it's working at max load, but it would work at the % that the power limit limits it to. DDU should have dealt with that though. 

 

Could you DDU again and try this driver? 

 

Also perhaps check the Nvidia overlay during Furmark to see if it reports about 210-230W usage in the overlay as well just so we aren't getting tricked by different measurements. 

So we've tried DDU and installing this driver, but it did not help. Afterwards, as leclod suggested, we tried to take out the M.2 SSD and mystery was probably solved. Game started to behave normally and GPU power in game was around 230 W on RTX 3070 (since it's in the PC atm because we tried to eliminate one of the possibilities). I still don't know, why it happens, because on a very similar setup (with the only difference being B460-F MB - my friend has B460-H) it doesn't affect performance at all.

[Bjoolz]

1 hour ago, Apollo8 said:

So we've tried DDU and installing this driver, but it did not help. Afterwards, as leclod suggested, we tried to take out the M.2 SSD and mystery was probably solved. Game started to behave normally and GPU power in game was around 230 W on RTX 3070 (since it's in the PC atm because we tried to eliminate one of the possibilities). I still don't know, why it happens, because on a very similar setup (with the only difference being B460-F MB - my friend has B460-H) it doesn't affect performance at all.

It's really weird if it's the M.2 when it performed fine in stress tests.