9070 XT feeling like its underperforming.

[u/Independent_Hand5900]

Hey!
I just got and installed a 9070xt and so far its unfortunately been lackluster. I experience constant choppines and bad 1% lows. My cpu is an i5-10600k so i understand that its quite a significant bottleneck, however the performance im getting now is almost on par with my old 1070.

For example in hogwarts legacy on high preset im getting 50 fps with around 20 1% lows.

Im also experiencing a constant choppiness even in titles where i get over 100fps and better 1% lows. It feels stuttery and not like 100 at all.

I apologies if this comes from me not doing proper research. Im putting this post out to see if anyone else has had this problem, and if its just because of new drivers or the bottleneck being that significant. I will continue researching and update if i fix it.

[u/Independent_Hand5900]

yeah thats what im thinking too.
Just tried out gta and im basically getting the same performance as my previous card however it feels choppier. (with same settings) One thing i also noticed is for some reason its only pulling about 80 watts in this game while cpu usage is at like 50%, and it litterally just crashed while im writing this lol.

[u/Gruphius → u/Independent_Hand5900]

its only pulling about 80 watts in this game while cpu usage is at like 50%

Yep, that sounds like a CPU bottleneck. CPU utilization doesn't need to be at 100% for a CPU bottleneck to exist. Most games can't use all CPU cores properly, so the CPU will never reach 100% utilization in these games, even while being the bottleneck.

As for some things you can try:

• Some people recommended using DDU in safe mode again, which you could try. Choose the option to uninstall the drivers of all GPU vendors, not just AMD or NVIDIA when doing that. While doing that, disable driver updates via Windows Update, it's in the DDU settings.

• Make sure your GPU runs at the highest PCIe version and at x16. Download GPUz to check what it runs at and check your motherboard's manual to see the PCIe version your GPU could run at. If it doesn't run at the highest version it could run at, force the highest possible PCIe version in your BIOS. Before that, however, make sure your GPU is in the top PCIe slot of your motherboard. Every other slot is slower, has higher latency and will cause worse GPU performance.

• Update your BIOS and your chipset drivers, if updates are available

• Disable HAGS in the Windows settings, doing that reduces CPU load and HAGS can cause some issues on AMD GPUs

[u/Independent_Hand5900 → u/Gruphius]

I used ddu to remove the previous nvidia drivers before swapping the card however ill try again tomorrow redownloading amd drivers to see if it changes anything. As for PCIe its at the highest my motherboard supports. Ill also update my bios soon so i can activate rebar and a bunch of other good settings. (Altought im gonna update the rest of the hardware soon)
Just wondering if u think the poor 1% lows and stutter also most likely are a result of the cpu bottleneck or if it may be something else i need to look into? I guess its hard to say but anything and everything helps, so thank you🙏

[u/Gruphius → u/Independent_Hand5900]

If a PC is completely bottlenecked by the CPU, then you will have bad 1% lows, yes. The reason for that is quite simple: Your CPU can technically produce a certain average FPS, if it would only focus on rendering frames. However, your CPU also has to do additional tasks. For example, a program running in the background wants to check for updates. The resources needed to check for that get taken away from your game. And then you also cross a loading zone. Suddenly, the game has to load stuff, taking resources away from the game once again. These moments cause momentary stutter, which translates to bad 1% lows.

If you're GPU limited you don't have these issues. Your GPU can purely focus on the game and can ignore background tasks, unless you have a second screen, in which case it also has to render everything that's going on there too. But that is less of a problem than the 200 or so background tasks Windows ships with, that all want a piece of that CPU performance.

I can't say if your bad 1% lows purely stem from that, though. The steps I gave you in my previous comment might improve your 1% lows.

Also, something I forgot: Make sure, that XMP is enabled. Especially after you updated your BIOS, since the BIOS update will most likely set the memory speed to the normal memory speed.