Gpu not ever fully utilised

[baritonejohann]

This has been a bafflement for me.

Running a rtx2080 with a 5600x on a msi tomahawk with corsair vengeance 3000mhz ram, installed on a Samsung nvme and powered by a Corsair 750e.

My concern is that nothing I run really seems to max out my gpu. It sits between 50-70% utilisation on every game, with settings maxed out to the point of visible performance loss, it still doesn’t seem to really be taxed.

Gaming at 1920/1200 60hz because that’s what I have to work with rn.

Cyberpunk without ray tracing happily can do 120 fps without maxing out the gpu.

Stalker 2 mostly set to high sits around 50-55 fps

Spiderman 2 sits nicely at 60fps but visibly stutters and tears at times, gpu sitting around 60%

I did not do a fresh install when switching mobo and cpu from an intel 6700 that was holding back my gpu previously. now on win 11. Power setting set to best performance.

What could be the issue? Is there an issue? I do feel like this setup should be stomping all over 1080p at high, without rt. am I hoping for too much?

Cheers all

 

[baritonejohann]

If your monitor is only capable of displaying 60hz, are you by any chance capping your refresh rate to this or slightly below with Gsync / FreeSync?

If I artificially cap my FPS to a limit, below what my GPU is capable of, I would expect the GPU usage to be below 100%*.

*assuming that I’m not running settings that max out the GPU regardless.

That makes sense than you but this happens without frame rate cap. I’ve not really noticed much of a change when v-sync is on either.

 

[baritonejohann]

In addition to the above have you monitored per core usage of your CPU (MSI Afterburner can do this with its overlay) whilst gaming. The CPU may not look like its bottlenecking (I wouldn't expect a great deal with a 2080 and 5600x) but one or more cores may be maxing out causing effectively a bottleneck. This could be exacerbated if you are running any form of DLSS or FSR as in effect they are reducing the render resolution thus putting more load on the CPU.

I’ll have a look into this a bit more thanks. Although I have checked this and I don’t seem to be bottlenecking the cpu.

What do you mean about not expecting much from that hardware. I thought it would be plenty for 1080p and not expecting insane fps.

 

[baritonejohann]

Thanks all. Got some great suggestions to look into. I’ll report back after some tinkering.

 

[baritonejohann]

A 2080ti still has plenty of power but does get slammed by modern RT games especially. Mine was pegged at 100% constantly at 1440p ultra wide.

A 5600X is more than enough to avoid cpu bottlenecks (although some modern games are cpu heavy)

To test I’d do this:
Install MSI afterburner and configure riva tuner osd to show all cpu cores %, temps, ram, vram, gpu usage, clocks, power limits

Remove any vsync or frame limits from drivers and game.

Run Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark mode at RT high, DLSS off

Watch gpu melt.

You can also try running 3d mark steel nomad or timespy extreme. Both render at 4k then downsample to your display res. So should max a 2080ti easily.

Spot on I’ll give that a bash thanks.

 

[baritonejohann]

A 2080ti still has plenty of power but does get slammed by modern RT games especially. Mine was pegged at 100% constantly at 1440p ultra wide.

A 5600X is more than enough to avoid cpu bottlenecks (although some modern games are cpu heavy)

To test I’d do this:
Install MSI afterburner and configure riva tuner osd to show all cpu cores %, temps, ram, vram, gpu usage, clocks, power limits

Remove any vsync or frame limits from drivers and game.

Run Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark mode at RT high, DLSS off

Watch gpu melt.

You can also try running 3d mark steel nomad or timespy extreme. Both render at 4k then downsample to your display res. So should max a 2080ti easily.

Frame rate dropped to 22fps but gpu still sat at 1000-1400 mhz wtf

 

[baritonejohann]

I feel like trying a fresh os is that a waste of time?

 

[baritonejohann]

Yes as inferred above, if you are running graphic settings that are crushing the CPU this could be causing a CPU bottleneck.

Your GPU should still be hitting the same boost clocks even if not maxed out. A 5090 being 10% utilised would not be hittting 260hz clock speed.

1200-1400hz looks about right for a 2080ti.

thanks for the help. Is my issue then most likely expecting afterburner to show my GPU chip utilisation to be at 100% under heavy working load rather than the 50-75% full graph i see?

For context im relatively computer literate but new to really tinkering with gaming hardware beyond fitting and forgetting. Im very keen to learn though, im mostly messing around with parts to get a deeper unstanding of gaming PC's idiosyncrasies and foibles before embarking on something requiring significant investment. Id like to be able to mess with overclocking and such with confidence but I dont want to go diving in before understading all the whats and whys.

 

[baritonejohann]

You can use afterburner to view utilisation in games, I'm guessing cyberpunk with rt etc at only 22fps was probably showing near 100% usage?
But also if you run some benchmarks you can see how the card is performing and should be able to see if it's not working properly.

No it was showing barely 75% in afterburner this is my confusion.
Card seems to be working fine as far as my limited experience can tell, i just dont understand the metrics im seeing.

 

[baritonejohann]

im installing a fresh OS on a spare NVME drive, lets see what happens.

 

[baritonejohann]

Fresh install oddly showed a boost to 1800mhz utilisation on the gpu running cyberpunk benchmark. Still didnt max out the bar in afterburner though.

 

[baritonejohann]

@baritonejohann Just to be clear the following are very distinct things:

- your GPU utilisation (%)
- you GPU clock boosts (MHz)

Afterburner doesn't show % GPU utilisation unless you specifically ask this to be displayed in the in-game stats. screen (which requires Rivatuner to work).

For example, I just fire-up RE4 in a window to show what I'm talking about:

(Ignore the CPU info as I haven't updated afterburnerto the new version compatible with a 9800X3D)

My GPU utilisation: 79%
Clock speed: 1980Mhz
Frames are capped to 140fps.

Amazing info thank you very much. This just might be my issue.

 

[baritonejohann]

Yeah it was that. I see 100% utilisation now. Thanks everyone!