OW using cpu and not gpu

Technical Support
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So the last few days playing OW my system has been running really high cpu usage (around 80%) while my gpu is sitting around 10%. Cpu used to average around 15% and gpu around 80-90%. I’m running an i7 7700 and a 1050. I play on low/med settings and average 144 fps no problem. As of now I’m barely getting above 80fps with my system struggling. Any ideas for why this is happening? I apologize ahead of time, I’m fairly new to pc gaming. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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Hey iMeiBeDrunk,

Have you checked to make sure Overwatch is set to High Performance in the Nvidia options?

  1. Right-click the desktop
  2. Click “Nvidia control panel”. If you don’t see Nvidia control panel, open the Control Panel in Windows, then click View by: Large Icons. Find the Nvidia Control Panel in this list to open the menu.
  3. Select “Manage 3D Settings” from the option in the left-hand panel
  4. Select the game to change the graphics processor under “Select a program to customize”. If it’s not is not available, select the specific game from the drop down list.
  5. Select your “Prefer maximum performance” graphics card under “Power management”.

I’d also suggest checking the Windows power options.

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Here is a screenshot to help illustrate Zenlaka’s instructions:

PhysX
PhysX958×709

I also recommend checking the PhysX settings in your NVidia Control Panel to see if it set correctly. Select the Surround, PhysX option on the left navigation pane and inspect the PhysX processor setting. See the screenshot below for reference:

PhysX
PhysX958×709

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Thank you both for the quick reply. I tried both changes and nothing worked. Game still using 60-80% cpu and 5-15% gpu. I have tried other games to test and they all work fine. Overwatch is the only game with this issue. No other game has frame drops either.

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iMeiBeDrunk,

If that didn’t work, can we get a bit more info? 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:

  1. Maximize the HWMonitor window and expand all the nodes on the left
  2. Scroll all the way up
  3. Take a screenshot with the Print Screen (prtscn) key
  4. Open up the program Paint and press ctrl+v to paste in the test
  5. Crop the screen if you want to only show the test, then save it as Test1.JPG
  6. Scroll all the way down, then repeat steps 3-5.
  7. 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.

looks like this

It’ll also help if you generate a text copy of your DxDiag using these instructions. Once you have that made, open the file. You’ll need to copy and paste the contents of the Text document into the post and put four tilde (~) marks in front of it. It’ll look like this when you’re done:

DXDiag goes here
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I would make sure that your monitor is plugged in to you GPU and not into the CPU\Chipset ports on the back of your PC.

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