I’m coming here in the hopes of catching a Blizzard Employee’s attention because I’m literaly running out of options. Been scratching my head over this for a good week and nothing seems to solve this.
My GPU usage is pretty damn low. Unless I play in the training range, my GPU usage is always limited to 40 to 70%. It often tanks in fight where it can drop lower, giving me 100 fps instead of 160. I’ve even seen drops to 70 fps. Even a drop to 110fps is perceptible to me, even through G-Sync.
Here is my complete setup:
CPU: Intel Core i7-4790K (4.4Ghz, non OC)
GPU: EVGA Nvidia GTX 1080Ti 11Gb FTW3 OC
Drivers 399.07
SSD: Samsung 840 Evo 500GB [Overwatch installed here]
RAM: Corsair Vengeance LP DDR3 1600 C9 2x8GB
MBD: Gigabyte GA-Z97X-UD3H-CF
OS: Windows 10 Pro, up to date.
Last clean install was ± 2 years ago.
Monitor: Acer XB271HU (1440p IPS G-Sync 145hz (165hz OC)
(for the links, remove the spaces, for I don’t know what reason I can’t submit the post with links included.)
Issue began when I installed my 1080ti along with it’s new PSU.
Yes, I removed old drivers using DDU before installing the new GPU
Issue is random. Some games I don’t go below 140fps, but some games it’s a constant 90 fps. GPU usage seems to drop with FPSs.
GPU temps never exceed 73°c at full load. Usually sits at 65°c or lower due to low GPU Usage.
GPU usage is at around 60/70% when at 160fps, but can drop to 40 or 50.
CPU temps never exceed 67°c at full load. CPU usage never goes above 70% for sustained period of times on the busiest core, excluding a CPU bottleneck.
No thermal throttling of any form. The only form of throttling MSI Afterburner detects is GPU Voltage throttling, which is totally normal I think.
Fortnite doesn’t experience the same drops. Lowest I’ve seen was 100 in a crowded area (Epic settings except shadows on medium). This is normal, I think.
Lowering my settings it not an option. It would be a band aid on a bigger problem.
Uncapping my FPS doesn’t push GPU usage, it just goes up by 10, maybe 20% but never hits 90% except in the firing range.
Playing on fullscreen with fullscreen optimizations disabled.
NVidia driver settings already set on “Prefer Maximum Performance” for the Overwatch executable.
GPU Clock stays at around 1900mhz usually, but it can go back to 1580mhz when the game is loading or in menus, since they’re capped at 60fps. It’s normal.
Xbox DVR disabled
Windows power plan is the high performance one.
Nvidia Share disabled
Minimal background applications running, only discord & handful of softwares.
Tried to play with Threaded optimization on/off (in Nvidia control panel) but it doesn’t change anything.
(Update): Issue is random. Sometimes I can play 3 games in a row totally fine with GPU usage maxing out, sometimes I can’t play a game at more than 120 fps. Usually 70.
Overall, benchmarks says that my computer is performing as expected, so the issue is definitely not hardware related. It’s either a RAM bottleneck (but I don’t think RAM can literaly half my FPS like that, I’ve never, ever seen that in any setup.), a driver issue or a Overwatch related issue.
Sorry if the message is a little bit long, but I want you to know as much as possible. I’m here if you have any questions.
Please help me. I don’t know what to do anymore. It’s incredibely frustrating.
Thank you very much.
UPDATES:
Just played a Competitive Game on junkertown. Uncapped, my GPU hit 95% utilization (normal) and capped it stayed at a healthy 80%, giving me around 140 to 160fps (normal numbers for the game). Really odd since my last one had the issue.
Second game without issues. It’s really weird. The issue is just competely random. This game was on Nepal
Another game on Eichenwalde was fine. GPU was hitting 90/95% uncapped (normal, I think the rest is simply RAM bottleneck or Driver issue). It seem that this whole gameplay session was fine. Weird.
Yes, I tried to follow the various guides found on this forum before posting. No dice.
Reason for FPS drops is GPU usage dropping, capping at 50 to 60% and not willing to go any higher, even on uncapped FPS.
Interestingly, pagefile usage nearly doubles when I play. http:// prntscr .com/kwsc53
You have an older hardware config. In my opinion you are limited by your CPU and/or overall bus/ram speed. I personally have 16GB 2666 RAM. For some reference values and explanation check out this thread: Low fps considering high end pc on low setting
Use an OSD software that can show both CPU and GPU usage (I use msi AfterBurner) during gameplay. Overclocking might help.
I’ve indeed just had a quick look and run through that list hastily. Sorry for that.
Seemingly the only significant difference between your setup and the ones mentioned in the linked topic is the supported bus speed of the CPUs (5 GT/s vs 8 GT/s) which is somewhat related to memory speed.
Memory speed related issues and the severity of the problems are often dependent on cache memory size and the data access pattern of the software (which is usually unknown for the user) and can be difficult to debug even for the software engineers who develop it. If an algorithm has cache-unfriendly access pattern or doesn’t have enough cache for some reason (e.g.: competing background processes) then its execution can be several times slower because it has to access memory much more often instead of using data from the significantly faster cache. If cache is utilised well and there is enough cache then the software can be much less sensitive to actual memory speed.
Active background processes and services can also compete for cache and memory bandwidth so excluding that possibility would be great. (This could explain unpredictable performance issues too.) On some (closed) gaming platforms (e.g.: consoles) this is usually not an issue because people often can’t install custom software/services like on windows.
Have you had a lucky high FPS round and also an unlucky low FPS round on the exact same map? If so then it would prove that your hardware is capable of getting the job done but sometimes something gets in the way.
Have you changed your video settings too? In many games some settings affect not only GPU usage but higher quality settings can result in more calculations on more data. Do you have the same issues with relatively low video settings?
I’ve got a good, no issues round on Junkertown as well as a terrible, barely playable one. Same video settings, same background processes running.
Don’t forget that benchmarks run absolutely fine, even beefy ones such as Superposition. I get scores above my expectations.
To be honest I highly doubt it’s hardware related. If it was, I’d get low performance all in every game/bench, not just randomly in one game. The randomness of the issue makes me think it’s software.
It doesn’t necessarily mean that the activity of the background processes is the same during good and bad FPS matches.
This isn’t always a good explanation because benchmarks are very likely to use the CPU/GPU/memory system resources in a different way than various games. In my opinion benchmarks are better used to compare systems.
Not necessarily. Hardware can be bottleneck only for one game while not for the others.
If nothing else works then trying a fresh windows install might worth a try.
The activity is probably the exact same since my GPU/CPU usage doesn’t spike, it lowers during the fps drops.
I’m pretty sure that a benchmark would detect most bottlenecks. My 4790k would probably give me issues only in very cpu intensive games, and overwatch isn’t one of them.
Check if it’s a CPU bottleneck by playing it on the lowest graphics settings for a while. If you still get strange FPS drops then it’s most likely an issue having to deal with something in relation to the CPU usage (if that issue is a software or hardware thing I’m not sure).
I just know that I had the exact same CPU as you for my last build and even with the lowest settings see drops to 150 or 140 from 250fps. The usage of the CPU doesn’t really matter because OW will only use a select amount of cores/threads from it (since it’s 4 cores and 8 threads and you’re using around 70%, I’m assuming it’s using avg 3 of those cores).
your CPU/OW will leave other cores/threads open for other logical processes to be able to work in the background (no matter how small)
From what you’ve said I’m inclined to think it is a CPU issue, however I could be wrong. I’m no expert… in fact I’m pretty far from it, I’m a widow one trick
As of 10/8/2018, I can confirm that the low GPU and CPU clocks/usage issue is still happenning. It is all the more strange since it EXCLUSIVELY happens with Overwatch .
CPU: i7 7700K
Motherboard: Asus Maximus Formula IX
RAM: HyperX Predator DDR4 3000Mhz (16GB)
GPU: 2 x Asus GTX 1080ti Poseidon
The game is installed on a SSD with plenty of room to spare. Playing on a 144Hz monitor.
I have noted that the issues have started appearing somewhere around this time last year with a Windows 10 update. Ever since, the game would act completely randomly. Sometimes, it would run just fine during the course of the entire gaming session. GPU clocks would be in their normal range and I am able to maintain a stable 144 fps without any problem. HOWEVER, other times, the game would throttle at 100 fps and when I look at the hardware monitoring software, I can see that my CPU is used at 30% and that my GPU clocks go from 1500Mhz+ to 300/500Mhz. The shift usually happens in a transition phase such as going from the main menu into a game, going from the character selection screen into the game, or even, sometimes, respawning.
The temporary fix I have found that SOMETIMES works, is to exit the game, disable and re-enable SLI. Sometimes it fixes the problem for the entire session, sometimes it doesn’t.
I am also playing games such as Rainbow Six: Siege, The Division, Watch Dogs, or Agents of Mayhem, and they do not present the “symptoms” as described above. GPU and CPU clocks are in their normal range and they never, NEVER drop.
This issue with Overwatch has made me format my computer multiple times in the hopes of fixing this issue permanently, but it keeps happening.
While I understand that the problem might not come exclusively from Blizzard, there is a pretty good chance that some mix of coding between Nvidia, Microsoft, and Blizzard might be at the source of creating such poor performance issue.
I would be very grateful for a reply from a technical agent from Blizzard on the issue.
Addendum: The whole system is running on a watercooling loop, and neither the GPU, nor the CPU ever exceeds 70°C (as a matter of fact, the GPU rarely ever reaches 50°C). This excludes any thermal-related limitations that could impact overall performance.
A few weeks ago I measured my per-core usage and OW seemed to use all of my 6 cores (i5 8600k) quite evenly. 1-2 cores had a bit higher (5-10%) usage than the rest. My total CPU usage is around 40-50% with my settings (constant 120 fps).
Update (post-Halloween event launch)
After a few games of the Junkenstein’s Revenge PVE mode, I noticed that given the servers were overloaded (players needed to queue to get into their game), the fps drops have been happening again. This time, it would be in the middle of a game: fps count went from a stable and solid 153, to 60, even dipping down to 40, and it would remain so for the rest of the game, making it impossible to play. The framerate drop would also be accompanied by (significant) increase of input lag, as well as lag spikes ( I am using a 300mbps WIRED fiber optic connection - so, it is safe to say the network is not at fault here).
Can someone from the technical team at least acknowledge that there is an issue regarding framerate, at the very least?
If they don’t know what the problem is then there is nothing to acknowledge. If they know what it is then they’ll release a fix.
Acknowledging something makes sense only in exceptional cases: when they know what the problem is but fixing it is nontrivial and might require a lot of time.
While I see and concede your point, I am not the only one complaining about this very specific issue. Moreover, there really was a “before” and an “after”. Going by memory, the game was running perfectly before last year’s Windows 10 Creator’s fall update. I had resigned myself to thinking I had faulty hardware and that I would have to resort to “DIY temporary fixes” to enjoy the game, but then I randomly went browsing the forums, and stumbled reports of this issue as recent as 23 days ago. In addition, I have always found it peculiar that framerate would behave in such an erratic way only, AND EXCLUSIVELY with Overwatch.
This comes from a place of appreciation of Overwatch, and from wanting to enjoy the game without such “unexplained hinderances”, if you will.
Maybe it hasn’t been fixed? But I’ll let you know that the current 416 NVIDIA drivers have been absolute garbage. On previous drivers I had consistent FPS and normal GPU usage. Even on other games, I’m getting low GPU usage, like BO4. I played BO4 beta with old drivers back then and had great performance, now I have similar to OW performance with low usages on GPU.
Apparently driver 390.65 was golden for OW. You DDU and install that driver and see.
In this case I don’t think it’s Blizzard. If it was I believe it would have at least been acknowledged by now.
It’s not uncommon for some NVIDIA drivers to be unforgettably bad every now and then.
Hey. I have same issues S you but with 1800x 2x8 Gb 3000mhz and a 1080ti. I also have a i74930k with a 980ti that plays it so much better. I have 240hz and play on low settings. Gpu usage is like 34% cpu 40-60 I forget. I have to go through a ritual when I play it on overwatch. Turn off all non Microsoft services. And so on. Had multiple reinstalls swapped hardware.
By right we should be able to max 300 FPS with ease. But this isn’t the case. I found overclocking my memory to help, but I’m a nob at that and it’s not to stable. Also what helps keep it from spacing out is turning off multi threading and hpet also turn off sli. The game is just broken somewhere . There’s loads of posts like this.
That’s also an unsupported procedure for our games and tends to cause a lot of issues, Gibby. I strongly recommend you return all components to their default settings.
This said, this thread was created several months ago - if you are experiencing issues, please open your own, describe with as much accuracy as possible what happens, list all troubleshooting steps you already tried (make sure you follow the ones listed here), and add a link to your DxDiag and MSInfo files. You can upload them to a third-party website like Pastebin.
![:frowning:](https://d1kzxbyyijk9k6.cloudfront.net/en/overwatch/images/emoji/twitter/frowning.png?v=6" ":frowning:")
