I upgraded from a GTX 1660 Ti 6GB to an RX 9060 XT 16GB because I wanted better performance in Helldivers 2 at 1080p Ultra. With my old card, I was getting around 35 FPS even when nothing was happening, so I expected the new card to reach close to 100 FPS. Instead, I'm seeing roughly 60–70 FPS, and the GPU usage stays below 50%. Task Manager shows about 70% CPU usage and 60% memory usage. My system has a Ryzen 5 4600G, 32GB of DDR4-2666 RAM, and a 500W power supply. Could the relatively slow memory be limiting the CPU, or is something else preventing the graphics card from being fully utilized?
3 Answers
Before buying anything, verify that the monitor cable is plugged into the RX 9060 XT rather than the motherboard, enable Resizable BAR if your BIOS supports it, and perform a clean graphics-driver installation with DDU if the old NVIDIA drivers were not removed. Also compare benchmarks using the same resolution, preset, and upscaling settings—100 FPS results may come from a stronger CPU or different settings. The 500W power supply should be checked for quality and headroom, but low GPU usage by itself points more toward the CPU or game engine than insufficient RAM capacity.
This is almost certainly a CPU bottleneck. Helldivers 2 is fairly CPU-heavy, and overall CPU usage can be misleading because the game may heavily load only a few cores while the others are mostly idle. Check usage per core rather than relying on the single average percentage. When the CPU can’t prepare frames quickly enough, the GPU sits at low utilization like you’re seeing.
The Ryzen 5 4600G is a relatively weak Zen 2 APU for pairing with a modern card, especially at 1080p. A Ryzen 5 5600 or 5600X would be a much better match if your motherboard supports it, though you may need a BIOS update first. Your DDR4-2666 memory is also slower than ideal, but upgrading the CPU will likely make a much bigger difference than changing the RAM alone.
That makes sense. I’ll check the individual core graphs instead of just the overall CPU percentage.