100% CPU usage for 1-3mins after game startup only on NVIDIA drivers, AMD seems to be unaffected

Bug Report
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Thought I’d link this older thread as well, as someone else a few months back was having the opposite issue. (On AMD, it only does it once anyway, I think it’s to do with the shader cache filling up)

Basically, if I swap in my GTX 760, for usually about a minute after starting Overwatch, my framerate flicks between whatever my frame cap is and some number far below it, with a lot of stuttering. This occurs on every game start, but obviously once a minute passes, the CPU usage goes down to the normal usage in the menu. (12-20%)

This does also occur on AMD, (tested with both an R7 260X and an RX 550 on drivers 17.7.1, 17.12.1, 18.5.2, and 18.6.1) but only once after a new driver is installed, pointing to a shader cache issue with NVIDIA drivers and Overwatch. (tested with NVIDIA driver 384.xx, 388.xx, 398.xx)

Disabling shader cache in the AMD control panel has the same effect; it does the same thing but for 3 mins instead)

On both GPUs, once the game’s finished “compiling shaders” (I think that’s where the high CPU load is coming from) the game runs normally at a good framerate. (well, except on my AMD card, teamfights murder the frames, but that’s mostly due to AMD’s DX11 driver overhead + my testing rig’s CPU)

Not sure if it’s entirely Overwatch or if the NVIDIA driver is just derping out with Overwatch on startup, but if you can look into this Blizzard, that would be great. :slight_smile: If it is indeed an issue with NVIDIA, I’m happy to cross-post this to NVIDIA’s forums.

All testing was conducted at either low, medium or high settings, it didn’t seem to alter the behaviour much at all.

Although my rig is technically under the min reqs, here it is for reference:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9505S, 2.83GHz, 6MB cache, 1333MHz FSB, 65W TDP
Tested GPUs: EVGA GeForce GTX 760 SC, Gigabyte Radeon RX 550, Sapphire R7 260X
RAM: 4x 2GB Kingmax (Micron-based) DDR2-1066
Motherboard: ASUS P5QL PRO (Intel P43 chipset + ICH10 southbridge)
Overwatch running off a Samsung SSD 840 128GB

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The problem is that the cpu your using is 10 years old. I have several nvidia and amd cards and no such thing happens. The ddr2 memory your using in the system also can cause sever cpu overload as it has to frequently rewrite the data to the disk and back to the ram. The reason the amd you tried dont do it as often is due to them having more and faster VRAM.
Honestly if it wasn’t for the ssd overwatch would be unplayable on your rig.

Your biggest problem is the DDR2 ram though. Couple that with that 10 year old processor and it is honestly a miracle you can even boot the game up.

If your strapped for cash I recommend going with a ddr 3 motherboard with one of the older i7’s that can be picked up for $20 or so USD. The graphics cards you have are fine, but god that ram and CPU need to be replaced ASAP.

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I would upgrade, but being as this was a system sitting on the side of the road I rebuilt, and being my only PC it works fine, I’m not touching it for a long time.

That and until maybe next year, I’m still a student, I can’t afford new hardware just yet. (Or even if I could, my family aren’t too fond of me spending money on tech)

Plus, what are you on when you say “keeps swapping back to the disk?” I don’t get any swapping at all on this rig, there’s 8GB of RAM in there.

Fyi both video cards have the same VRAM capacity, and both don’t even peak 1GB of VRAM usage when I tested.

Then again DVA, I’m going to guess you’re using a Kaby Lake i7… I did also once test a friends system and it did the same thing, but only for like 3 or 4 seconds.

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I have had this issue for some time as well and could just not figure out what caused it. I upgraded my screen and the problem started soon after. I re-installed OverWatch, but this did not solve the problem. I then started looking at all the NVidia folders and found a large amount of additional files, some of which were fairly old. I then re-installed the latest NVidia Geforce drivers but with the clean install option selected. The problem went away.

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Nowadays I have a far better system, this definitely seems to be more of an issue with older systems. Thankfully both GPU manufacturers have since patched their drivers since I made this post and it usually only happens after an Overwatch or GPU driver update for me now.

Your reinstall likely cleaned out the shader cache as well, which will have helped if somehow the older shader cache files were invalid for some reason.