I recently upgraded from a 3060TI to a 3090, thinking I'd see a significant performance increase. I found a good deal on the 3090 and tested it out with my setup, which includes an 850W Lian Li Edge PSU. The temperatures seem fine, but I'm not noticing as big of a difference as I expected. I'm wondering if my Ryzen 5 9600X CPU might be limiting its performance, especially since I'm currently running games at 1080p and haven't upgraded to a 1440p monitor yet. When I ran FurMark, I only scored around 11k, while most 3090s are getting close to 15k. I've made sure my RAM is installed correctly, and it's 16GB of DDR5 at 6000MT/s. I've also used DDU to reinstall my drivers. Is there a way to fix this underperformance, or were my expectations just too high?
2 Answers
Definitely run more benchmarks! Try using 3D Mark and see what scores you get. Make sure to check the temperature, power draw, and frequency while you test. This info will help narrow down the issue.
It sounds like you're likely facing a CPU bottleneck. A quick way to check is by looking at your CPU and GPU usage while gaming. If your CPU usage is above 80% but your GPU is below 95%, then it's probably your CPU holding things back. Try to monitor that!
I'll keep an eye on that. I remember checking in FurMark where the GPU was maxed out and the CPU was kind of lagging behind. Might have to dig deeper into my setup.

That's not quite right, though! The GPU usage is the main indicator. Even if the CPU is only at 20% usage, you can still be bottlenecked in games that aren't using multiple threads effectively.