Okay, to preface this issue, I'm using a Gigabyte 3080 Gamers OC Edition and I have the latest drivers installed. I started up the game, went into graphics settings and maxed out all the settings to Ultra. I finished creating my character and chose the Nomad path. As soon as I load into the game world, my FPS is a firm 30FPS. Ok, that kind of sucks. So I go back to settings and lower it all to LOW, turn off RTX and DLSS. Firm 30FPS, not budging at all. I turn ON DLSS, nothing. Still 30FPS fixed. Ok, something's fishy going on right? I did some more testing and found out to definitely be a GPU related optimization issue. It's the most bizarre thing.
Okay, so I continue through the Nomad playthrough. I played through the whole first 20 minute sequence all in locked 30 FPS. It just wouldn't budge no matter what graphics I tweaked. Then, I went through that opening prologue cinematic and after that, Jackie asked me to do some tutorial stuff, and I accepted it. So once I go into the tutorial world space, I take 10 steps forward toward the bald-headed cyber-chick and my FPS shoots up to 90. And I'm like, "ok what just happened?" So, I opened up GPU-Z to see what's going on with my graphics card.
I accepted the first tutorial mission, the firing range, and immediately, my FPS drops to 17 and firmly stays there. I check the GPU-Z charts, and it's like my GPU just died, or went to sleep. Either, way, it might as well be powered off completely. Clocks are at base 1800, no voltage coming out of it, no power, no load, nothing. I finish the shooting tutorial and go back to talking to the chick, and GPU turns on again, hitting 90-100 fps, this is with totally Ultra settings and DLSS set to Performance mode. I play around with the graphics settings in this mode and notice that it's all working, meaning my FPS goes up and down as I tweak the settings. So for some reason, in this certain space, the GPU works as intended, and once I leave it, it dies again. Either there's something wrong with my hardware, which I highly doubt because it's happening consistently at this part in the game like clockwork, which means it's not a random issue. So the only possible reason is poor driver optimization from Nvidia's or from CDPR's side. I've perfectly cleaned and uninstalled all my graphics drivers and reinstalled the latest one, but to no avail.
I hope this gets fixed soon, because no other game is killing my GPU like this, just literally putting it to sleep when it's supposed to be running.
I've taken a short video showing the huge gap in FPS from taking the first 10 steps in the tutorial space and uploaded it showing what I mean.
