I upgraded from an RTX 3060 Ti 8GB to a Radeon RX 9070 after the old card started crashing and shutting down during Helldivers 2. I expected my older i5-11400F to limit the new GPU, but I'm getting much worse performance instead. With the 3060 Ti, I usually saw a stable 60–80 FPS, while the RX 9070 drops to around 30–50 FPS and sometimes feels even worse. I can't afford to replace the rest of my system right now, so I'm trying to figure out whether I missed a driver, chipset, or configuration issue. I've already used DDU once, but I'm willing to troubleshoot further. What should I check?
3 Answers
The CPU shouldn’t automatically make the new card perform worse than the old one. Check that the previous NVIDIA drivers were completely removed, then install the latest AMD Adrenalin drivers with a clean installation. It’s also worth installing the latest motherboard chipset drivers.
Use an overlay or monitoring tool while playing and compare GPU usage, CPU usage, temperatures, clock speeds, and VRAM usage. If GPU usage is low while one or more CPU cores are maxed out, the 11400F may be limiting Helldivers 2. If GPU usage, clocks, or power draw are unusually low, the problem is more likely drivers, power, or configuration.
Confirm the monitor cable is connected to the RX 9070 rather than the motherboard, and check that the card is fully seated with its power connectors firmly attached. Also verify that the game is using the intended resolution and rendering scale. If driver cleanup and hardware checks don’t help, backing up important files and reinstalling Windows could rule out a badly corrupted driver setup.
I already ran DDU, but I’ll check the AMD driver installation, chipset drivers, cable, and usage graphs before considering a full Windows reinstall.