Low GPU Usage in Games

[Janoti1]

Hello Hello Lovely Tech people,

 

I am troubled by my GPU and that for quite some time now.

 

My System:

Gigabyte RTX3090

Threatripper Pro 3955WX 16-Cores

64GB Ram DDR4 3200MHz ECC CL22-22-22

AX1600i Corsair

ASUS Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE

Windows 10 OS on 480GB Corsair Force Series MP510B M.2

Two More 2TB Force MP600 M2 SSDs for Programs and Storage

 

When I play Games my GPU is only rendering up to 100-150FPS in most games and that because it is usually sitting at around 30-40% usage.

However when I worrk on my PC and render videos, 3D stuff etc the GPU is fully utilised and it works as expected.

 

I updated my BIOs, Tried various GPU drivers (from various eras of the GPUs existance), Checked my thermals (partially forced all fans to run on 100% but my 20°C GPU is still only sitting on 30%), I updated the microchip systems of my Mainboard, Checked for issues through windows, Nvidia Experience and alike. My Powerplan settings in windows are set to maximum, all background programs are off in my tests and various windows optimisation things that I have seen in videos I did without any success. I also tried overclocking my ram to see if that works but also that didnt show any difference (I reset it afterwards).

 

Because normal Benchmarking through 3DMark shows normal results I used Cyberpunk and Borderlands 3 as Benchmarking Tools.

 

Here is a 3DMark Benchmark:
http://www.3dmark.com/fs/30161128

 

And Here are  a few files showing my Benchmarks in the two games:

 

In Cyberpunk my GPU utilisation was around 70-80% on average in Borderlands it was around 50% on average.

 

 

Thanks a lot for  the help

 

Janoti!

BenchmarkData_2023-11-22_20-01-19.csv BenchmarkData_2023-11-22_20-01-19.txt

[WereCat]

That's because your CPU is holding you back in games. Threadripper is a workstation monster but it's not a gaming CPU... Also that's an old threadripper and that Zen arch is already old enough to not be suited for high refresh rate gaming in modern games anyways. 

And your RAM is also very high latency so that's another performance penalty. 

[Janoti1]

2 minutes ago, WereCat said:

That's because your CPU is holding you back in games. Threadripper is a workstation monster but it's not a gaming CPU... Also that's an old threadripper and that Zen arch is already old enough to not be suited for high refresh rate gaming in modern games anyways. 

And your RAM is also very high latency so that's another performance penalty. 

I thought about that too but my CPU utilisation is also very very low. Yes single core performance  is what matters I know but none of my cores are maxed out at all when checking for my GPU. In fact there are situations where my CPU  is sitting at  around 10% usage and my GPU at 30% and they only pump out 60-100FPS...

 

My Ram isnt the  fastest thats true, thats why I tried overclocking it  but  it had exaclty 0 impact so thats why I assume even if it has any impact it must be incredibly low

[WereCat]

3 minutes ago, Janoti1 said:

I thought about that too but my CPU utilisation is also very very low. Yes single core performance  is what matters I know but none of my cores are maxed out at all when checking for my GPU. In fact there are situations where my CPU  is sitting at  around 10% usage and my GPU at 30% and they only pump out 60-100FPS...

 

My Ram isnt the  fastest thats true, thats why I tried overclocking it  but  it had exaclty 0 impact so thats why I assume even if it has any impact it must be incredibly low

CPU % usage is meaningless. Also the more cores you have the lower the usage will be in games because % wise, less cores will be in use. 

[Janoti1]

10 minutes ago, WereCat said:

CPU % usage is meaningless. Also the more cores you have the lower the usage will be in games because % wise, less cores will be in use. 

Yes the performance will inevidently be lower and my  CPU  eventually bottlenecking my GPU, however Im am quite certain this is not the case here.

 

This is a screenshot of my taskmanager when running the Borderlands test. As you can see my CPU cores are not maxed out. And at the same time my GPU is barely doing anything. Thermals are good and Im not getting power throttled.

[podkall]

17 minutes ago, Janoti1 said:

I thought about that too but my CPU utilisation is also very very low. Yes single core performance  is what matters I know but none of my cores are maxed out at all when checking for my GPU.

They're not maxed out, because out of your 16 cores and 32 threads most of the games will use only 4.

 

Usage is calculated across different CPUs, so if one core is maxed out and 15 aren't, then the usage will be like 10%,

 

also Ryzen things, old Ryzens used to, if not still do, is shift the work between each core for some reason or another...

 

2 minutes ago, Janoti1 said:

As you can see my CPU cores are not maxed out

let me ask you, do you really have 32 programs open at the same time? because that would only explain all 32 threads behind occupied,

 

also check %usage on program, maybe that will draw closer, unless the Task Manager is completely useless here..

[Janoti1]

5 minutes ago, podkall said:

They're not maxed out, because out of your 16 cores and 32 threads most of the games will use only 4.

 

Usage is calculated across different CPUs, so if one core is maxed out and 15 aren't, then the usage will be like 10%,

 

also Ryzen things, old Ryzens used to, if not still do, is shift the work between each core for some reason or another...

 

let me ask you, do you really have 32 programs open at the same time? because that would only explain all 32 threads behind occupied,

 

also check %usage on program, maybe that will draw closer, unless the Task Manager is completely useless here..

It's not that I dont believe the theory I just dont understand how the difference can be so large.
Modern ryzens have base clock speeds of 3.7 - 4.2Ghz and yes they have less cores but having more cores should not be an issue in my mind.

My base clock speed is at 3.9 Ghz with a boost speed of 4.3Ghz the discrepancy should be maybe 5-10%. Not almost 100% difference in Frame generation.

Also I redid this test just now for the task manager screenshot and I had steam and this exact browser window running in the background nothing else.

[Jeppes]

3 minutes ago, Janoti1 said:

It's not that I dont believe the theory I just dont understand how the difference can be so large.
Modern ryzens have base clock speeds of 3.7 - 4.2Ghz and yes they have less cores but having more cores should not be an issue in my mind.

My base clock speed is at 3.9 Ghz with a boost speed of 4.3Ghz the discrepancy should be maybe 5-10%. Not almost 100% difference in Frame generation.

Also I redid this test just now for the task manager screenshot and I had steam and this exact browser window running in the background nothing else.

Base clocks dont mean anything as most cpu:s boost much higher in games. Older zen also has 2x ccd:s per ccx unlike the newer ones so that hurts 1% lows in games that utilize more than 4 cores like CB with Phantom Liberty patch. And that slow memory is not helping you either when cpu bottlenecked.

[Eigenvektor]

9 minutes ago, Janoti1 said:

Modern ryzens have base clock speeds of 3.7 - 4.2Ghz and yes they have less cores but having more cores should not be an issue in my mind.

My base clock speed is at 3.9 Ghz with a boost speed of 4.3Ghz the discrepancy should be maybe 5-10%. Not almost 100% difference in Frame generation.

You can't compare raw clock speed between generations. Newer generations typically can do more work at the same speed (IPC - Instructions Per Clock)

 

You could try running the game with Afterburner's performance overlay enabled, so you can see per core usage while in game. Recent versions should include a metric that gives a hint what is blocking the GPU.

[Janoti1]

Ok I didnt know that the architecture differences have such big impact and make clock speeds not comparable, that is good to know.

 

I tried that Borderlands 3 Benchmark again with the afterburner overlay with all cores monitored but again none of my cores were hitting 100% usage once. Not even 90%

 

At this point I am assuming it is my Ram? I dont know how big the role of my ram could be in this context but I do only have two Ram Slots  occupied by each 32GB sticks.

[191x7]

It is the CPU bottlenecking the GPU.

 

Try using the GAME mode in AMD Ryzen Master. You'll see a small improvement.

 

If you want a higher GPU usage but won't upgrade the platform - get a 4K monitor.

 

 

[DeathRabit]

This can be communication delay between CCX and if games try run on both of them you get poor performance, force game to use only one CCX.

Use processor affinity or simply turn off one CCX in bios.

[WereCat]

48 minutes ago, Janoti1 said:

Ok I didnt know that the architecture differences have such big impact and make clock speeds not comparable, that is good to know.

 

I tried that Borderlands 3 Benchmark again with the afterburner overlay with all cores monitored but again none of my cores were hitting 100% usage once. Not even 90%

 

At this point I am assuming it is my Ram? I dont know how big the role of my ram could be in this context but I do only have two Ram Slots  occupied by each 32GB sticks.

Better faster lower latency RAM could give you 10-15% bump in performance but you would be still CPU limited. 

[Janoti1]

4 hours ago, DeathRabit said:

This can be communication delay between CCX and if games try run on both of them you get poor performance, force game to use only one CCX.

Use processor affinity or simply turn off one CCX in bios.

Ok I tried to have the game only use 6 threads because thats what it looked like is the maximum the game can utilize anyways.

However that didnt really show a difference. On a few occasions I had 1 FPS more but I dont know if that is actually an improvement or rather just some tolerance one should keep in mind. 
I assume in my case it didnt help.

[Janoti1]

5 hours ago, 191x7 said:

It is the CPU bottlenecking the GPU.

 

Try using the GAME mode in AMD Ryzen Master. You'll see a small improvement.

 

If you want a higher GPU usage but won't upgrade the platform - get a 4K monitor.

 

 

A 4k monitor isnt really anything Im looking forward to, Im more interested in more frames rather than a a higher resolution.

Unfortunately the AMD Ryzen Master Program doesnt work with my CPU but was worth a shot.

[191x7]

4 hours ago, Janoti1 said:

A 4k monitor isnt really anything Im looking forward to, Im more interested in more frames rather than a a higher resolution.

Unfortunately the AMD Ryzen Master Program doesnt work with my CPU but was worth a shot.

Well, you can replace your GPU with one which is easier to run/feed, maybe a Radeon 6950XT, 7800XT, 7900XT.

[DeathRabit]

10 hours ago, Janoti1 said:

Ok I tried to have the game only use 6 threads because thats what it looked like is the maximum the game can utilize anyways.

However that didnt really show a difference. On a few occasions I had 1 FPS more but I dont know if that is actually an improvement or rather just some tolerance one should keep in mind. 
I assume in my case it didnt help.

Give game first 16 threads = one CCX,  cyberpunk 2077 use on my R5 7600 7 threads heavily and next 5 in 30-40%

[podkall]

You can easily check if it's CPU bottleneck, by comparing FPS of Medium settings and Low settings on games, because if the FPS doesn't change to more at Low settings, it's 100% CPU bottleneck

[DeathRabit]

Small update on Am5 platform with new bios I can select gpu hybrid mode from bios iGPU sub menu no longer require registry scripts or modded drivers. tested on MSI B650 with R5 7600 Windows 10