I was playing Ark Survival Ascended when my system locked up. No response from the mouse or keyboard, screen frozen, sound loop about 1 second long. I let it sit for a minute, thinking maybe it’ll break out of it, and eventually had to force the power off with the power button.
I restarted my system, and now my performance in games is really bad, I’m getting about 20fps where I used to get 80-100, sometimes it gets so bad it goes into the single digits. I get stuttering sound as well and some pretty bad input lag. In Ark, I can see the textures slowly pop in over time, which normally happens in a matter of a second or two.
Looking at CoreCtrl, if I set it to high performance mode, the GPU’s power usage peaks around 150 Watts instead of 300+.
I’m running Nobara on a 7900X3D and an RX 7900XT with 32GB RAM.
Not sure how to go about diagnosing my issue here. I haven’t made any software changes, so I’m a little lost as to why this would happen.
Update: After trying everything suggested here, and all the googling I could manage, I ended up doing a full reinstall, and kept having issues. Eventually, I narrowed it down to the PCIE riser cable in my case (which I suppose I should have mentioned in the first place) which is supposed to be PCIE 4.0, but it seems to be what was causing my issues. I set my PCIE to 3.0 in the BIOS and everything is fine so far. I don’t notice any performance reduction at all, so it probably wasn’t saturating PCIE 4.0, but the riser isn’t good enough for it I guess.
Just that game or all games performing poorly?
Just that game: verify or reinstall the game.
Other games too: if it’s a software issue, check Graphics Driver? For potential hardware issues, check if a GPU power cable is loose, reseat it, and make sure you don’t have two pcie power connectors from the same cable connected to both ports.
Why? Non question and I’m curious. I have 1 cable from PSU to GPU
The cable is only rated for so much power, which could be too much for double 8 pins. Having two operated cables ensures it can handle the load.
I personally used a single cable that carried double 8 pin. At some point, I had issues with my system crashing under GPU load. After investigating, I found that the GPU wasn’t getting the power it needed from the PSU. Looking at the cable, it had started to melt the plastic with the connector in the PSU. I replaced the cable and it was fine, but now I only use one cable per 8 pin connector.
Thanks! I didn’t know that.
Based on ATX standards https://xdevs.com/doc/Standards/ATX/ATX12V_Power_Supply_Design_Guide_Rev1.1.pdf,
Each 12V circuit from the PSU should deliver around 150W and definitely not more than 240VA (over current protection kick in rating). One cord runs on that single circuit so it can’t deliver more than that much power. I experienced this when I foolishly thought I could reduce cable clutter building my friends’ PC, only to realize the 3080 ran terribly and was drawing about 150W, not unlike OP, except in my case it was clear this was the issue.
Thanks! I didn’t know that.