I'm playing Assassin's Creed Shadows at 1440p on a laptop with an 8GB RTX 3080 and an Intel i7-11800H. My settings are mostly High/Medium, ray tracing is set to Diffuse, DLSS is on Quality, frame generation is enabled, and dynamic resolution is configured with a 100 FPS target. Despite that, the game usually stays around 50–55 FPS instead of lowering the resolution and reaching the target. The performance overlay shows the NVIDIA GPU being used, while the integrated Intel graphics is disabled. VRAM usage is also reported as 6.8 GB out of a 6.8 GB budget, even though the card has 8GB. Is this expected behavior, or is there a game or GPU issue causing the low performance?
2 Answers
It’s difficult to judge whether 50–55 FPS is normal without the full hardware details. On an RTX 3080 laptop with an i7-11800H, the game may simply be limited by the laptop GPU, thermals, or the demanding settings. Try lowering ray tracing first, then test DLSS on Balanced or Performance. Also make sure the laptop is plugged in and running its maximum-performance power profile.
There appear to be optimization problems affecting NVIDIA GPUs in this game. A GPU can report very high utilization while drawing less power than expected, which means it may not be delivering its full performance. Dynamic resolution also cannot always overcome a GPU or engine bottleneck, especially when the VRAM budget is already full. Lowering texture quality and ray tracing may help more than changing the frame-generation target.
The VRAM reading may be showing the game’s allocated budget rather than the card’s entire physical memory. Still, being at the limit can cause stutters or reduced performance, so lowering texture quality is worth testing.
The system is a laptop with an 8GB RTX 3080 and an i7-11800H. The integrated Intel graphics is disabled, and the game is definitely using the NVIDIA GPU.