• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

4090 Performance Loss

Hudzy

Hudzy

Hudzy

Associate
Joined
19 Mar 2004
Posts
1,503
Location
Bristol
Hi guys,

Has anybody experienced some weird inconsistency with framerates and power draw on the 4090? Or any other card I suppose.

I have two builds.

Build #1 is using a 4090 FE, 5800x3D, MSI x570 MEG Unify, and 850w Corsair PSU. It consistently achieves around 100 FPS in Cyberpunk, Star Citizen, some other titles. It consistently draws over 350w under the more demanding loads.

Build #2 is using an MSI 4090 Gaming Trio X, 5800x3D, MSI x570 Gaming Edge Wi-Fi, and 1000w Corsair PSU. It will frequently achieve only 30-60 FPS in the same scenarios, maybe 2/3 of the time, and pull only around 200w. After a reboot it will perform the same as build #1 for a while, then go back to the relatively poor performance. After other reboots the performance will not improve. It seems random.

I moved the FE into build #2 and we can see the same random performance deterioration.

The MSI card won't fit into build #1 to test that configuration.

I moved the 850w PSU into build #2 and also can still see the same poor performance.

I've tried clean driver installs, and multiple versions. I've tried a different 12vhpwr cable. I've made sure the PCI-E slot is set to gen 4. I've updated the BIOS.

Running out of ideas at this point.
 
Did you at all upgrade your GPU drivers or any drivers? I have seen very different behavior in games before on the latest drivers and I have had to roll back to an earlier version or sometimes a couple revisions earlier.
I remember this happening in cyberpunk on release for me actually. Game Ready drivers killed performance and even caused the game to just close to desktop. Rolling back a couple revisions and I had much better performance and no game closures.
 
r7slayer said:
Did you at all upgrade your GPU drivers or any drivers? I have seen very different behavior in games before on the latest drivers and I have had to roll back to an earlier version or sometimes a couple revisions earlier.
I remember this happening in cyberpunk on release for me actually. Game Ready drivers killed performance and even caused the game to just close to desktop. Rolling back a couple revisions and I had much better performance and no game closures.
Click to expand...

The latest driver was installed on build #2, then when I noticed the issues, I reinstalled that, and then rolled back to the older driver that build #1 was successfully using.

The issues were evident on both drivers.
 
This issue is going to be really hard to nail down.
The fact that you can get performance back after rebooting the system suggests to me it's likely driver related. When you said you did a clean driver install, do you mean through Nvidia's GPU driver where you can select clean driver install? Or do you mean using Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU)?
If you haven't used DDU, I would try using it and perhaps roll back a couple of driver revisions as it could be the latest driver-causing issue.
I would also try and get some performance monitoring metrics up on a second screen so you can take a look as soon as you notice any strangeness also take note of the time when you notice the issue then try checking through event viewer to see if you notice any driver-related errors.
 
stooeh said:
Have you tried re installing windows or swapping the drives over?
Click to expand...

Reinstalling Windows is today's plan.

r7slayer said:
This issue is going to be really hard to nail down.
The fact that you can get performance back after rebooting the system suggests to me it's likely driver related. When you said you did a clean driver install, do you mean through Nvidia's GPU driver where you can select clean driver install? Or do you mean using Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU)?
If you haven't used DDU, I would try using it and perhaps roll back a couple of driver revisions as it could be the latest driver-causing issue.
I would also try and get some performance monitoring metrics up on a second screen so you can take a look as soon as you notice any strangeness also take note of the time when you notice the issue then try checking through event viewer to see if you notice any driver-related errors.
Click to expand...

That was using the install option for clean install, not DDU. I forgot about DDU existing. Event viewer is worth a look definitely. I'm using Afterburner to display GPU usage and power draw on both systems.
 
You haven't mentioned what the temps are. That is the first thing I would be looking at if it is throttling.
 
muon said:
You haven't mentioned what the temps are. That is the first thing I would be looking at if it is throttling.
Click to expand...

I forgot to mention.

Both GPUs sit around 70 degrees, and the CPU in build #2 hits about 85 degrees after extended loads. Seems normal.
 
Afterburner or GPU-Z will tell you which limit it is hitting.

It's either no load, voltage, power or temp.

When the fps drops, see if there is anything shown in the log.
 
Last edited:
Load drops to about 40-50%, power drops to about 220 watts, and temperature is stable at 70 under full load, and drops when the load drops. I haven't looked at voltages yet.
 
Hudzy said:
Load drops to about 40-50%, power drops to about 220 watts, and temperature is stable at 70 under full load, and drops when the load drops. I haven't looked at voltages yet.
Click to expand...

This may give a clue. Afterburner also has it as one of the things it monitors.

Screenshot-2023-01-21-142540.png

edit:

Screenshot-2023-01-21-142836.png
 
Last edited:
Nicholas Eagle said:
i suspect that it will be bios on the motherboard tbh, is the second motherboard updated... there have been some bios releases that focus on resolving issues with 4090's
Click to expand...

Both up to date.

Reinstalling Windows does seem to have resolved it. Need to do more testing.
 
Interesting. Most times I've bought a new GPU I've had to reinstall Windows to get the best performance or overcome minor issues, not really a biggie with a roughly 2 yearly upgrade cycle as the OS could do with a fresh start after that amount of time.
 
Damn, sounds like a very frustrating situation! Reinstalling windows definitely the right next step, if that doesn't resolve it then I would suspect the motherboard, however that's going to be a pain to swap out.

It might be worth swapping over the CPU's between the systems. Reseating the CPU might even resolve the problem (heat leading to some pcie lanes disconnecting and the card going in to a backup mode).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom