I recently bought a PC with an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X, 32 GB of RAM, a GeForce RTX 5080, and 2 TB of storage. I'm playing Wardogs at 2560×1440 on the lowest graphics settings with a 280 Hz monitor, but the GPU stays above 90% usage and the game won't go higher than roughly 150 FPS. I've already tried the usual troubleshooting steps, so I'm wondering whether this indicates a hardware problem or if the game is simply limited by the CPU or its optimization.
3 Answers
There may not be anything wrong with your system. Wardogs is still in early access, so optimization and frame-rate limits could be playing a major role. A 150 FPS result can be normal if the game has an engine bottleneck or a cap, and high GPU usage simply means the graphics card is doing its job.
High GPU usage isn’t automatically a problem—in fact, close to 100% usually means the GPU is being fully utilized. The more important question is what is limiting your frame rate. Try lowering the resolution from 2560×1440 to 1920×1080. If the frame rate barely changes, the game is probably CPU-limited, potentially by the performance of a single CPU core rather than total CPU usage.
Based on that resolution test, the CPU or the game’s engine is likely limiting performance. A game can be CPU-bound even when overall CPU usage looks fairly low, because one or two cores may be working much harder than the others. Check per-core CPU usage and frame-time graphs rather than only the total CPU percentage.
I tested 1920×1080 and gained around 35–40 FPS, so it does improve, but the GPU still doesn’t seem to produce anything close to 280 FPS.