Hey guys, what’s up?
I’m trying to help my non English speaking friend here, he was playing with an apu (in other words, he didn’t have a graphics card installed) and recently added a gpu to his pc, but he is getting lower frame rates than when he only had the apu. Here’s his setup:
a10 9700
rx 580
8gb of ram
Before adding the 580, his fps varied between 40-60 in the lowest settings. Now he says that when he begins playing, in the highest settings, he gets around 90 fps, but around 2 minutes of playing his fps drops bellow 30 and stays there. This pattern repeats even if he is using the lowest settings, after a couple of minutes playing his fps will drop bellow 30. Things that we tried:
Checked all motherboard and gpu connectors;
Updated the gpu driver;
Performed a clean install of the gpu driver;
Messed around with all the possible setups in the Radeon settings;
Changed all the energy options in windows to prioritize high performance;
Messed with all the possible video configurations in-game (yes, the frame cap is unlimited);
Performed a gpu stress test using FurMark.
We really don’t know what else to do, and I’m feeling really bad because I was the one that recommend he got that gpu, and although I wasn’t expecting he would get extremely high frame rates (because it was going to be bottlenecked by the a10), I was expecting he could get at least a solid 60 fps.
Hi there Renan003,
In this case we have seen a few threads that say Razer Chroma is causing FPS drops. With no system files, I am just taking a shot in the dark here. We have steps on how to remove them here.
If this does not help, please get back to us with a DxDiag. It will let us see in to the system and maybe spot something else that could cause this issue.
DxDiag:
- Press Windows Key + R.
- Type DxDiag and press Enter.
- In the DxDiag window, click Save All Information.
- Name the file “dxdiag” and click Save
- Paste the DXdiag into the post, select and highlight everything you just pasted, and hit the “code” button (</>). That’ll make the information much more readable.
If you are unable to post this, you can use pastebin.com as It is a bunch of information.
(provide the code from the pastebin link - the bold portion of this example: https://pastebin.com/ Qk28Ed1P)
/Nathardrick
Try uninstalling Razer Synapse
The text was too long, here is the code from the pastebin: 37EWiAWq
Renan003,
Two things. First - you mentioned your friend upgraded to a discrete GPU from an integrated one. Did they also upgrade their power supply? If not, please verify that the PSU that they have is powerful enough to run the new hardware and the old hardware. You can look up their new graphics card and old CPU online to see how much wattage the chip manufacturers recommend.
Other than that, you mentioned this was time based. Can you have your friend check for overheating components while playing? Grab hwmonitor and play a game until it crashes. Once it does, check the “max” column of your test for CPU/GPU overheating. If those are getting too hot, clean the PC and take it to a PC tech if that doesn’t fix the overheating - that’d probably mean some of the heat hardware needs maintenance or replacement.
If you don’t see anything, let’s snag some screenshots:
- Maximize the HWMonitor window and expand all the nodes on the left
- Scroll all the way up
- Take a screenshot with the Print Screen (prtscn) key
- Open up the program Paint and press ctrl+v to paste in the test
- Crop the screen if you want to only show the test, then save it as Test1.JPG
- Scroll all the way down, then repeat steps 3-5.
- Upload them somewhere like imgur and link us to the results. We’ll use those to look for more options.
If you get link errors, just link it between two ` marks, it’ll break the link and let you post it. You can just copy paste everything in the box below and replace “Link goes here” with your link.
`
Link goes here
`
About the power supply, he got a 600w 80+ white from EVGA, so he’s fine on that side.
About overheating, that was not the case, he was using the MSi Afterburner while playing, and the CPU temperature peaked at around 70ºC, while the GPU peaked around 75ºC. But I can ask him to test the temps again.
Another thing I forgot to mention is that this is happening only in Overwatch, he said that he played Assassin’s Creed Unity just fine for hours long with no significant frame drop
All righty,
Let’s have them get us the screenshots of HWmonitor rather than MSI afterburner so we can check for other options as well. That’ll give us a more holistic picture of what his PC is actually doing while the FPS drops happen.
Sorry for taking so long, he didn’t get any fps drops this weekend. But today his fps wouldn’t get above 40. The temps are fine for me, but I will post them anyway.
https://imgur.com/a/yp10ynu
Overall the temperatures do look fine. Can we make sure AMD Chill is disabled? This can be found in the Radeon Settings under the Gaming tab. If there’s an Overwatch profile change the settings for that profile. If not just make sure its disabled in the Global Profile.
AMD Chill was off already, bellow is a picture he sent me (it’s in portuguese, but you can see it’s on global settings anyway)
https://imgur.com/a/IqSmghS
Heya Rennan003,
Thanks for helping your friend with all this. I’m always glad to see players helping one another!!
In the DxDiag I noticed the drivers are a 2017 version. Be sure to install the 19.4.3 version if possible.
The other major thing I’m noticing is both the CPU and GPU are hitting 100% values in the HWmonitor reports. Were y’all able to use Task Manager to verify if only the game is using these resources or if other programs are using large amounts of system resource? Such as Chrome, Steam, etc. Should look something like this minus the screenshot is for a different game.
If y’all notice any other apps taking up large amounts of resources, disabling them would be ideal.
Let us know how the drivers updates go or if there’s any identified programs causing problems. Hope the details hlep!
He updated the drivers. At first, he wasn’t even able to leave the respawn room, because his fps wouldn’t get higher than 10. But after some time, how much fps he would get was completely random. In some matches, it’s higher than 60, in others lower than 30. He checked if anything was running in the backround, but the only thing that’s running simultaneously with Overwatch is Discord.
What’s odd is that his brother has almost the same identical case, he recently added a GPU (and bear in mind, it’s also the RX 580) to his GPUless system, and he also has huge fps drops. His system is similar:
A8 7670K
8GB of RAM
600w CX Power Supply (From Corsair)
Everything we tried here we also tried with his brother, and he also reports that this only happen in Overwatch, he plays Jump Force in the highest settings with fps higher than 60.
What both of them are suspecting is that it may be a HDD problem, since theirs are pretty old. Both of them ordered SSDs to boot their systems, which should be arriving sometime next week. I asked them to install Overwatch in there, and see if we can improve their condition. But in the meantime we are open to suggestions, because personally I believe it’s hard that the problem may be the HDD and I honestly can’t think of anything else.
Thank you for the help!
Renan003,
You mentioned that Discord is running concurrently with Overwatch - did you try disabling the overlay yet? That has a known conflict with some games which may fight for control of graphics drivers. You can disable the overlay from the Discord settings.
Other than that, harddrive utilization can slow down a PC, I’d be curious how things go with the SSD. Are they going to be reinstalling windows on the SSD to use it as a boot drive?
I will ask them if the overlay is off, but I remeber suggesting that prior to everyting, so they could get the smoothest FPS without a dedicated GPU, but I will double check with them.
And yes, they plan to use the ssd as a boot drive and plan to install only Overwatch in it, keeping other games in the HDD, since Overwatch is the game they play the most.
I got word that one of them received the SSD earlier today, and will do everything this evening, so I will keep you guys posted
Thanks for the update. Posting here so you can reply later 
Yeah, we had no luck. The SSD didn’t help and he was playing with the Discord overlay on, but turning it off didn’t change anything
At this point I would have them put in a ticket here making sure to include both a msinfo and dxdiag report. We can look into the issue further from there.