Hi,
I have been playing Overwatch since season 1 and I have been having this issue for a very long time. Honestly, I’m on the verge of giving up on this game.
I have an FX 8350 (8 cores) with 3.9 Ghz speed, 8 Gb RAM, and a GTX 1060 SC with 6 GB GDDR5. My PSU is 600W (This fits the GPU requirement). When I play on practice range, my GPU usage sits at around 50-70% usage and when I enter quick play or competitive, GPU usage drops and remains at 30-40%. CPU usage is somewhere around 60%. Sometimes, it even dips below 30%. I have read through many forums and discussions pertaining to this issue and despite trying all the suggested methods, this issue still exists to this day.
Things I have tried,
-Updating my GPU drivers, BIOS, audio drivers
-disabling the HPET in both BIOS and windows
-Preferring Max performance in Nvidia Global settings (and turning off the necessary features to get max performance) and Power Plan
-Ensuring all video settings in Overwatch are at the lowest settings possible (ex: lowering rendering scale to 75%)
I have tried playing other games like Witcher 3 Wild Hunt and when I play on both lowest settings and highest settings, my GPU usage remains at 99%. I further tried benchmarking engines such as Unigine Heaven Benchmark and again my GPU usage is fine as it is fully utilized. This proves to me that this issue is specific to Overwatch.
I am using a 144 hz monitor and it pains me to see that I can’t even go above 144 fps in quick play and competitive games. I also tried capping my FPS to display based( approx. 154 fps), and my FPS still sits around 90-120 fps in quick play and competitive games. So please, if there is a fix to this problem, let me know as soon as possible.
One other thing I noticed, when I create a custom game where I am the only player in a match, my GPU usage remains at 99% in game. Don’t know if this helps but I thought I should point it out.