I built my PC in November 2025 with a Ryzen 7 9800X3D, Radeon RX 9070 XT, Samsung 990 PRO 2TB SSD, 32 GB of RAM, and an AORUS Elite WiFi 7 motherboard. Recently, I noticed that Palia uses nearly 100% GPU usage at about 200 FPS. When I cap it at 120 FPS, usage drops to roughly 70%. A friend's system with an RTX 5070 Ti uses only 40–50% at the same frame rate, so I'm unsure whether my system is behaving normally.
Assassin's Creed Odyssey runs well at Ultra settings, but I sometimes notice stuttering while moving the camera. I also get severe YouTube playback lag on my second monitor while gaming. Should I update or check the BIOS, graphics drivers, or other settings, or are these symptoms expected?
4 Answers
Try capping the frame rate to your monitor’s refresh rate, or slightly below it. An external limiter such as RTSS can sometimes provide smoother frame pacing than an in-game limiter and may help with the Odyssey stutter. Uncapped FPS just makes the GPU render frames you may never see.
The comparison with your friend doesn’t necessarily indicate a problem. GPU usage percentages depend on resolution, graphics settings, upscaling, frame caps, and the game itself. A 40–50% reading at 120 FPS may simply mean the other system is capped or has performance headroom. AMD cards can also lower clock speeds when they aren’t fully loaded, so the percentage alone can be misleading.
100% GPU usage is normally a good sign. It means the GPU is the component limiting performance and is being used fully, especially when the frame rate is uncapped. If the game is rendering around 200 FPS, there’s no reason for the GPU not to work toward that target.
For the second-monitor YouTube problem, check that both displays are connected directly to the graphics card rather than one being connected to the motherboard’s video output. Also verify that your Radeon driver and motherboard BIOS are current. If it still happens, testing the browser’s hardware-acceleration setting can help identify whether the issue is related to video decoding or multi-monitor behavior.
Make sure you’re comparing the exact same resolution, settings, and upscaling mode. Native rendering versus FSR, or 1440p versus 1080p, can produce very different results.