What is hampering my system's FPS right now?

[ShadowRohas]

Right now I am struggling to consistently stay above 100 FPS in Overwatch, when my goal was over 144FPS at all times on 1080p. Changing my graphics settings in game seems to have no effect on my FPS at all. When I run the game, I only have open Battle.net, the game itself, and Discord. Here are my system specs:

Nvidia 1070 (Zotac Mini version)
i5 6400 Processor @2.7ghz
8GB of Ram (I'm actually unsure of the brand, but I can open up my PC to look if it's needed)
Z170A PC MATE motherboard
Corsair CX500 PSU

I'm running Widows 7 as my OS. As I said, I struggle to maintain high frames, and I'm wondering what part of my PC I need to improve to see better framerates. When I run CPU-Z, it says that my memory usage is around 6900 when running Overwatch, so I think it may be that, but I'm new to PC building and I'm not sure if there's some other factor I'm overlooking. Any help would be appreciated.

[DrMacintosh]

What is the games fps limit? I bet it has one. 

[ShadowRohas]

Goes up to 300, which is what I have it set to go up to. 

[Trulop]

is your monitor a 100Hz panel? if so your max FPS can only get to 100 anyways (or at least thats all you can see out of it). Do you have Vsync on?

[ShadowRohas]

I don't have Vsync enabled, and my monitor is capable of 144hz. It's this one specifically: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00B2HH7G0/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

[WereCat]

What's your CPU usage?

[ShadowRohas]

Sits anywhere between 50%-80%, it moves around a bunch. 

[itsthewizz]

34 minutes ago, ShadowRohas said:

Right now I am struggling to consistently stay above 100 FPS in Overwatch, when my goal was over 144FPS at all times on 1080p. Changing my graphics settings in game seems to have no effect on my FPS at all. When I run the game, I only have open Battle.net, the game itself, and Discord. Here are my system specs:

Nvidia 1070 (Zotac Mini version)
i5 6400 Processor @2.7ghz
8GB of Ram (I'm actually unsure of the brand, but I can open up my PC to look if it's needed)
Z170A PC MATE motherboard
Corsair CX500 PSU

I'm running Widows 7 as my OS. As I said, I struggle to maintain high frames, and I'm wondering what part of my PC I need to improve to see better framerates. When I run CPU-Z, it says that my memory usage is around 6900 when running Overwatch, so I think it may be that, but I'm new to PC building and I'm not sure if there's some other factor I'm overlooking. Any help would be appreciated.

About how much RAM are you using?

Remember that you won't use all 8GB because windows needs to use some.

[ShadowRohas]

1 minute ago, itsthewizz said:

About how much RAM are you using?

Remember that you won't use all 8GB because windows needs to use some.

I'm testing the game right now, and now I'm all the way up to 7.4 for memory usage. Is that the problem?

[itsthewizz]

Just now, ShadowRohas said:

I'm testing the game right now, and now I'm all the way up to 7.4 for memory usage. Is that the problem?

Yeah, in order to push higher FPS that requires a decent amount of RAM.

[onemanarmy720]

you have 8gb, do you have any ram slots open?

[ShadowRohas]

Yeah, I have plenty of slots open for RAM. I just didn't know if it was required or not. I read a lot of stuff about how RAM doesn't do much for the PC in terms of frames, and kind of assumed it was another part of my PC, like the processor. 

[onemanarmy720]

1 minute ago, ShadowRohas said:

Yeah, I have plenty of slots open for RAM. I just didn't know if it was required or not. I read a lot of stuff about how RAM doesn't do much for the PC in terms of frames, and kind of assumed it was another part of my PC, like the processor. 

it doesn't do much for frames, but if you are hitting your ram limit, than it will affect fps dramatically. sadly ram prices are ridiculous right now.

[ShadowRohas]

Yeah, I'm still in-game and I'm hitting over 7000 memory usage constantly. I'll upgrade my ram this week. Thanks, guys. 

[Sfekke]

8 minutes ago, onemanarmy720 said:

it doesn't do much for frames, but if you are hitting your ram limit, than it will affect fps dramatically. sadly ram prices are ridiculous right now.

At a certain point it indeed doesn't affect frame rates.

But running 4GB of memory wouldn't be a smart idea, imagine that with a GTX1080Ti and i7 7700K.

For the best gaming experience 16GB's seems to be that sweetspot, it used to be 8GB. While that'll still get it done, higher refresh rates & resolutions make it harder on the memory.

Just keep in mind, running 64GB's has no reason for gaming.

You could, but you shouldn't.