[BUG?] Low GPU usage

+
[BUG?] Low GPU usage

So. I've played Witcher 3 for around 500+ hrs. And then made a break. After reinstalling the Witcher for my NG+ run I decided that I need to re-allocate my skill points before starting and went to Novigrad, and noticed that my FPS are in mid 30/40 (before that i have almost never once dipped bellow 60 (play on mostly high settings, w/o HW).




**Rig:**




* 970 g1 (w/o OC runs at 1380 mhz max 65c.; w/ OC i get 1458 mhz heats up to 70c. and +500 mhz to memory;

* i7 6700 K, never OC'd, runs under 65 (AIO liquid cooler).

* 16 GB of ram (dual chanel) at 2133.

* Samsungs 950 pro m.2 ssd.

* Silverstones 600w PSU.

* 1080p monitor.




The problem is low GPU (15-50%) usage in the whole game, but in more intense areas like Hierarch SQ. it just gets very obvious. It does not matter if vertical synchronisation is on or off, or settings preset is low or high or that resolution is 1024x768 or 1080p.




Yes, I googled the sh*t out of this problem. I did every variation of Power settings adjustments in OS (windows 10 x64 by the way), in NVidia settings too. I reinstalled Windows, and redownloaded the game. Tried it in the build which comes from the Windows USB, than with anniversary edition, than creators update. Tried latest NVidia drivers, and oldest ones i could access from NVidia drivers section at NVidia.com. Basically i covered all possible solutions that google or my own 15 years gaming w/ PC tought me. Tried playng w/ and w/o OC. Nothing seems to make any difference whatsoever.




So it's probably GPU...? No not really, because e.g. Fallout 4 has normal GPU utilisation, on ultra settings, w/ godrays on low (i'm mostly indie player, other games I play wont stress neither GPU nor any other part of PC, so testing in this regard is limited).




Also, probably worth mentioning that when gpu is active in witcher 3 it makes this choppy coil whine sound, than i thought that maybe CPU is somehow not feeding GPU somehow? But CPU utilisation on all 8 threads seem normal 30-60%.




**Maybe anyone had a similar problem, and could give advise in solving it.**
 
That's odd, the usage and framerate goes up when opening the menu. It only goes up to 60% usage, but the framerate doubles anyways. What other applications do you have running and what tweaks have you applied to your Nvidia control settings?
 
Last edited:
Yeah exactly.

Steam (tryed turning the overlay off - does nothing) and MSI afterburner.

No tweaks. Tried altering the perdormance/adaptive power mode (which also produced no results). Other thant that nothing.
 
I had a similar problem with my 970 a few weeks ago. What worked for me was disabling the video card device at Windows Device Manager, rebooted the PC and reenabled it.
 
PeLLeT_RSD;n8403410 said:
I had a similar problem with my 970 a few weeks ago. What worked for me was disabling the video card device at Windows Device Manager, rebooted the PC and reenabled it.

Just tried it. Nope, same as before. Thanks for sharing though.

Also another video showing FO4, w/ evga's precision OSD.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBMTlpD2CMg

Basically works just like Witcher once did.
 
Last edited:
If setting everything to maximum power doesn't work, try rolling back a few driver versions. See if that gets it working correctly. Generally, it's GOOD if you are not using 100% of your GPU -- but it should also be maintaining steady performance if it drops off.

While the problem could be inadequate power (the 600 watts doesn't leave a lot of overhead for your system), it still seems funny that it would jump up in the menus. That's screaming "bottleneck" to me. Try the following:

1.) Remove any mods, if using any.

2.) It's not a great idea to use overclocking or underclocking as solutions or workarounds to performance issues. Return everything to default clock speeds (while troubleshooting, at least).

3.) Follow these steps to un-park your CPU's cores. You can download the utility in the descriptions he links to as well. Either will do.

4.) If using Geforce Experience, I recommend completely uninstalling it. At the least, run services.msc and "Disable" everything related to Nvidia Shield.

Let us know how that goes!
 
I tried more then a frew versions of drivers... for example, 352.84 (352.86 were so called ''Witcher wild Hunt drivers'' so I thought lets try these), 373.06, 381.65, and more than a few other, just randomly selected... Always uninstall with DDU via safe mode, latest version, etc. etc.

About the PSU, it did fine for now almost a year, I guess... still does elsewhere.

1) No mods.

2) Most of those 500 hrs, were OC'd gameplay. 1454/8000, there were no issues, whatsoever. GPU is 1 year old. But for testing (for example in the above video) nothing was OC'd; thats just default boost clock of my 970.

3) Did the unparking, via registry as shown in the video. Even re-tested game after restarting, even though the guy said it does not matter... no results. Everything is exactly the same.

4) I never install geforce experience, apart from when I needed to record the gameplay for bug report just the other day (shadowplay only available via gf experience afaik), but w/ or w/o it , it does not, however, make any difference, in my case. Even the fact that I start recording does not make any impact on GPU usage or fps.

The other day found one sad sad thread in nvidia forums, Maxwell seem to be famous w/ this kind of stuff. And its either fixed by tinkering in power settings, or its not solved at all. That thread goes way back too...
 
Last edited:
Hi all,

I had the same problem like you Szurkus, with Witcher 3 GOTY, my PC is i3 6100, 8GB DDR3 1600 CL9, Windows 10 64bit build 10.0.14393, SSD, but GPU is AMD RX470 4GB.

This begins for me maybe 2 days ago (24.04.17) earlier game was working fine, in worst case i had 44-45 FPS in center Novigrad with HIGH settings.

I had same game behaviour like Szurkus shows on video, FPS drops to 20-30 in Novigrad market, no matter what graphics setting I used, LOW, UBER the same low FPS. But when I entered to the menu it rises to ~130 on low and ~90 on high. Back to game, and drops to 30..
Very little help was changing witcher3.exe priority in windows task manager to highest, somethig like 2-4 FPS more. CPU usage at all time was max at ~75%

I also tried all steps which you all have mentioned, drivers etc (w/o Win reinstall).. No result. Of course benchmark (Unigine Heaven) works normally but it doesn't use much CPU, so I was sure the problem is somewhere in CPU / threads. Witcher performance was almost the same with 4 threads and 3 threads (task manager afinity settings) with one excpetion, when on 3 thr. it was freezing every few seconds, but FPS was the same.

What helped? Installing Windows Creators Update (build 15063). Now game is working fine all have back to normal. CPU usage in Novigrad is almost 100%.

I also tested BioShock Infinite, before update I had drops below 60 fps even on LOW settings, now it stays above 100 fps in the same location but on HIGHEST settings. It seem it was caused by Windows... In my opinion, my problem was not caused by graphics drivers (tested few) or game(s) but by Windows.

I know the topic GPU is GTX 970, I have RX 470, but problem looks so similiar.. Hope this will help somebody :)

Greetings, Piotrek.
 
Thanks for sharing.

I've tested few more games. Alien isolation, Heroes of the Storm, Crysis 2. All run fine. Idk. My GPU just decided not to work with Witcher for some reason.
 
I really wish I could offer anything more, but aside from a power issue, a driver issue, or some wonky setting in Windows...I really have no idea what could be causing it. Have you tried completely uninstalling and re-installing the game to a different path? If you try, be sure not to install anywhere under Program Files or Program Files(x86).

Be sure to run in Fullscreen, Vsync ON, and Frame Limit = 60 to troubleshoot. Do you have a G-Sync monitor, by any chance?
 
Yeah, I did reinstall, more than once. Even tho install directory always was c:/Steam/ etc. etc., not in any of program files directories.

Vsync on/off; Frame Limit unimited/60, makes no difference.

I'm pretty sure, its something w/ the GPU, even though it runs, other games just fine, synthetic bencmarks like Valey or Furmark too.

In a month or so I'll change GPU and PSU (I have Mini ITX PC with this annoying as hell whiney Silverstone PSU, which I could not RMA, because it's fine, etc., just that the damned fan is piece of garbage, but it works so...). I'll update this thread after that.

Thanks for all the help :)
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I have the exact same problem, but with a fully watercooled i7-7700K and a GTX 1080. Nothing helps. I'm not sure, but the problems showed up after I installed the Windows 10 Creator's Update.

The game runs in 1440p on Ultra, HBAO+, HairWorks off. 1080p with minium details does not help at all. Windows 10 Game Mode off or disabled fullscreen optimizations also won't help.

The GPU usage in Novigrad is about 40%, CPU usage between 40 and 50%: 35 - 40 fps. Before this "incident" everything was smoothly running on 60 fps nearly all the time.
 
Last edited:
Thank you for your reply. I can now confirm that at least my issues were caused by the Creator's Update. I went back to the Anniversary Update and the game runs as intended. It seems the CU somehow restricts the CPU usage. At least what Afterburner shows in the overlay suggests that. I'm getting now between 85 - 100 fps in Novigrad.

See the post below.
 
Last edited:
Sorry for the new post, but this is important:

The problem was not Windows at all. As soon as I installed the GigaByte App Center on the new Windows installation the problem re-appeared immediately. Must be the newest update from GigaByte. I use the software to control my fans. Well, not anymore.

I have you have installed the App Center and the same problems, try uninstalling the GigaByte App Center, EasyManagementService and GService.
 
It affects other games as well, but not CPU benchmarks like CineBench. What a nasty little piece of software and it even leaves no clue at all ... no processes with extremely high usage or else.

And I have wondered for weeks why Relic released such poorly optimized version of Dawn of War III, lol. Runs absolutely smooth now.
 
What exactly does the GigaByte App Center thing do?

I use MSI Afterburner to define my own fan speed curves; no issues there. Wasn't a fan [<---pun] of the 980 ti's habit of waiting until the card hit 80°C+ before spinning up the fans...at which point they'd go into "panic mode" while the card just baked at 83°C for minutes afterward. I now get solid performance, card rarely gets to 75°C under full load, and all with default fans.

You can try that as an alternative, maybe.
 
There is this SIV app, which controls mostly CPU fans, which I use same as MadCat_me (probably because there were no way to control fans in BIOS, until quite recently, which was added with BIOS update), which can only be installed if you install Gigabyte App center, which from what I've now noticed have all kind of crap like "GPUengine service process", "CPUservice process" etc. Also w/o gigabytes App Center you can't install EasyTune CPU overclocking tools, motherboard's LED control app, BIOS update tool, etc. etc.




For the most part it's basically bloatware type of thing. At the least it feels like it at this point.




And man am I annoyed at gigabyte for this kind of crap. First they overvolt my CPU (to v1.34 on vcore) with f20 BIOS update (the whole BIOS was rewamped too, added BIOS precision fan management to BIOS level, which was the only reason for me to update, which they only fixed with f22 (which dovnvolted the CPU vcore back to v1.24, even the f22 BIOS update was with w/ footnote - "CPU vCore adjust", which is just laughable, for two months or so (thats how much time it took them to adress it) all Skylake CPU's were overvolted if they were on f20), and until that I had to manualy downvolt CPU with the aforementioned EasyTune app because CPU started to hit high temps… this was some time ago. But still. Their QA is not great when it comes too updating stuff.




Havent tested Witcher yet. Maybe i'll have a chance this evening.
 
Last edited:
Top Bottom