Hey folks, I'm facing a weird issue while playing The Last of Us Part II on my PC, and it's also happening in other games. Here's my setup: I've got an RTX 5070, a Ryzen 7 5700X3D, and 32 GB of DDR4 3200 MHz RAM. I've made sure that Resizable BAR is active, I'm running the latest NVIDIA Game Ready drivers, and I'm on Windows 11 with the 'Maximum Performance' power plan.
When I play at 4K Ultra settings, with no FPS cap, V-Sync off, and G-Sync on, I'm seeing some strange metrics. My GPU is only running at around 40-50% usage while my CPU is hitting 75-85%. I've tried all sorts of fixes: turning DLSS off and on, switching between TAA and FSR, toggling ray tracing, disabling G-Sync and V-Sync, closing background programs, playing in exclusive fullscreen, clearing the shader cache, and updating both drivers and BIOS. Yet, my CPU usage stays high while the GPU doesn't seem to be utilized like it should be. I've seen others run the game at 90-99% GPU usage in similar scenes. Anyone got any clues on why this is happening and how I might fix it? Thanks!
4 Answers
It sounds like you might be running out of VRAM, especially at 4K settings. Have you monitored your VRAM usage while playing? Sometimes, low GPU usage can be a byproduct of VRAM limits.
Yeah, do you have a way to check your VRAM usage? At 1440p, I noticed my GPU usage was around 33% and power consumption was just 67.9W, with CPU usage at around 88%, which suggests a CPU bottleneck.
First off, what power supply are you using? An underpowered PSU can definitely lead to issues. Also, are you experiencing any frame rate drops? It sounds like your game might be CPU-bound at times, which means the CPU is hitting its limit and the GPU isn't being maximized for performance, especially if things are running smooth enough without stuttering.
It could be that some background processes are using up your CPU resources, or your CPU is just not performing as it should. What's your CPU clock speed during gameplay? Also, make sure you have Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) enabled if your motherboard supports it. Have you checked if you’re using any special modes like 'kombo strike' or 'x3D turbo' on your motherboard?
During gameplay, my CPU runs at about 4050 MHz, and I am using PBO with an Asus B550M Plus Wi-Fi motherboard.
No stutter, but I definitely experience framerate drops below 60 fps, which I thought was unusual because I've seen benchmarks showing way better results.