My parents recently bought my sister and me a prebuilt PC with a Ryzen 7 7800X3D, Radeon RX 9070, 32GB of DDR5 RAM, and 2TB of storage. It should be far more than enough for the games I play, such as Geometry Dash, osu!, and Roblox.
However, Geometry Dash drops from 180 FPS to around 150 and fluctuates heavily when V-Sync is enabled. After a while, the GPU produces a timeout crash. Roblox also runs at only about 45 FPS on automatic graphics settings. I have already tried basic Windows optimizations and started with a clean system. My monitor is 180Hz, and I would like games to run smoothly at or near that refresh rate. What could be causing this?
3 Answers
If the problem continues after moving the cable, watch Task Manager or AMD Adrenalin while a game is running. Check GPU usage, temperatures, clock speeds, and memory usage. A driver timeout can come from a bad driver installation, overheating, unstable factory settings, or a hardware problem, but the display being connected to the wrong port is the first thing to fix.
First, check where the monitor cable is connected. It needs to be plugged into one of the video ports on the dedicated Radeon graphics card, which is usually lower down on the back of the case—not into the motherboard’s ports near the USB connectors. If it is connected to the motherboard, the PC may be using the processor’s integrated graphics instead of the RX 9070, which would explain the extremely low performance.
Once the cable is connected to the dedicated GPU, install or update the AMD graphics drivers and check that the game is using the RX 9070. For a stable 180Hz experience, you can also use AMD Adrenalin’s frame limiter and configure FreeSync if your monitor supports it. That is often more consistent than relying only on in-game V-Sync.
I’m using DisplayPort, but I just realized it may be connected to the integrated-graphics port. This is my first desktop, so I didn’t know there was a difference.