Graphics Card Performance Drop

Hey guys, as indicated in the title of this thread, I'm having some issues with my Radeon 6900XT card. I recently upgraded to this card from a RTX 3060 Ti and have noticed that the card performs a lot worse than the 3060 Ti in BeamNG drive. I initially played around the West Coast map for a bit and while I noticed that the FPS was hanging around the 60-70 FPS range but didn't put much thought into it as my PC tends to perform worse on that map compared to other maps. I also started playing in the Utah map which is when I noticed that massive decrease in performance. After spawning the standard Gavril pick up truck at the default location, the game was running at around 70-80 FPS and when I began to drive around the map (turning right from the gas station and making my way towards the highway) I noticed the FPS drop to around 50-60 FPS the faster I was driving. I then drove onto the highway for a bit before crashing into the hills/mountains on the left side of the highway. During the crash, FPS remained low but jumped up to 105 FPS after the crash and when the car was stable on the highway.

At the same time, I noticed large fluctuations in GPU utilization, meanwhile the 3060 Ti would hang around 80-95% utilization with one car in the game and power usage would be around 150-200W. In the case of the 6900XT, power usage remained well below 100W.

Does anyone know why I might be having these problems with the card?? I'm also curious to know if anyone with an AMD card has noticed these issues as well.

 

AMD driver can use CPU differently from Nvidia driver and drawcalls require CPU power, despite being part of the graphics.

Ctrl+f twice and you should see number of drawcalls, when you are experiencing slowdown, do you see higher drawcalls? Then it would be that, but can be other things too.

In DX11 drawcalls are somewhat single core dependent even with latest game versions which have improved situation.

Although I'm not sure why you would have so low fps in Utah, do you have some reshade mods? Those can affect this.

Because your GPU power usage is low, it does sound like your CPU is not feeding enough data to GPU, only thing that comes to mind is that AMD driver might require more CPU power.

Unlikely reason could be throttling of GPU, if there is something wrong with the cooling, but if it works fine in other games and benchmarks, then definitely not that.

New updates of game can change this of course, also reflections, shadows, ssao can add drawcalls, try shadows partial and see does that make change to drawcalls and is fps then increased.

In Beamnng you need currently as of 22.3 version of the game, fast single core CPU for graphics and many cores for running many cars, although graphics engine is lot less dependent on single core performance than many versions back, it is still DX11 game and most of those tend to require lot of single core performance.

But if you have plenty fast single core performance of CPU, then it could be some software or driver issue, sometimes latest drivers are not best, so downgrading GPU driver would be option in that case.

 

Make sure you have fully removed the previous NVidia drivers using DDU. If you have drivers of both NVidia and AMD it can cause issues at times with certain scenarios. What are your system specs?

 

Thanks for your detailed response. After clicking Ctrl + F twice, I see draw calls appear on two different rows. The first is under GFX row and the second under terrain row. I noticed major changes on the draw calls displayed on the second row. While the car is in idle mode, it seems to hover at around 50-60 drawcalls but during a severe crash it jumps to over 100 (can't tell the exact number for sure because it seems to fluctuate a lot).

I installed a re-shade mod a few weeks ago but removed it well before I made the switch to this GPU.

I haven't played many other games so far but I did try out FS2020 yesterday and things appeared fine for the most part, with the GPU pulling upwards of 255W with relatively stable frame rates. Didn't monitor any other indicators. Although I did notice some random drops in performance here and there.

One other thing I'd like to note is that AMD asked if I wanted to download new chipset drivers and other drivers (besides those that are directly related to the operation of the GPU) when I made the switch to this card. Not sure if that has anything to do with this.

Tried setting shadows to partial but performance is the same. I didn't notice any major jumps to draw calls though.

Thanks.
--- Post updated ---

Yup, that's the software I used to remove Nvidia drivers and software. System specs are as follows:

CPU: Ryzen 9 3900X
RAM: 4 x 8GB 3600Mhz CL18 (This is new but I don't think it is the cause behind this drop in performance)
SSD: 2 x 1TB NVME
PSU: RM850 850W Corsair

*Edit: Resolution is 3440x1440p

 

Would be interesting to see your GPU usage while playing it could be that you have the same bug as me then

 

Important drawcalls number is the other one, that is bigger number.

However with your CPU, drawcalls should not become an issue.

I'm usually playing high graphics, SSAO off, dynamic reflections off and shadows at partial, I'm seeing solid 120fps in Utah with gtx 1080 and i7-8086k.

Although I play at 1080p, I guess you play at 4k?

@skodakenner GPU power draw is under 100W, so it is very under utilized from some reason, maybe it is similar to bug you had, you had to downgrade driver?

 

I have a 3070 so no driver issue for me espacially since i had the issue only after the update came. But i noticed he has the same cpu so maybe it cant keep up with the gpu in beam?

 

That would be odd, because you should have same SC performance than I have and then more multicore performance.

I'm thinking that maybe clocks are not holding up or some throttling happens from reason that is not clearly obvious. I know 5900X can run quite hot in games, but if I understood correctly what I read, 3900X should not have that effect. With 5900X clocks are boosted quite aggressively when utlizing few cores only, so voltage gets to over 1.4V and CPU heats up quite well.

Also there has been some talks about different power profiles in Windows affecting AMD CPU's a lot, but usually that is just giving high idle temps.

Also as OP's change was GPU, this is bit odd why so much change to FPS.

I guess technically it could be possible that OP had CPU underperforming with Nvidia GPU and if AMD GPU driver needs more CPU power for drawcalls, then issue would manifest itself like this, but that really sounds a far fetched and difference should be huge in CPU computing power requirement.

To start finding out, I think you both would need to check CPU per core utilization as well as clock speeds during gameplay and see if there is something unexpected behavior, if not then it would be back to square one, but at least one possibility crossed out.

 

For me the wierd thing is that it didnt do anything out of the ordinary it wouldnt use much Gpu about 60-70 percent and the cpu only around 40 per core so it should have enough headroom.

 

Huh, that is odd indeed, like having software FPS limiter even there wasn't one.

If that continues after next version, then I guess devs would need to look at it as it is pretty difficult to sort out otherwise, I guess it is only BeamNG where it happened too, which makes issue really annoying to get grips about.

 

Resolution is 3440x1440p with GPU utilization between 40-99% with constant fluctuations of 10-15% from one second to the next.

 

I really hope they fix it since it basically ruined the experience with my new PC. I reported it quite early but never got a response now its a bit better but its still underperforming compared to my PC specs (i cant spawn more than 4 cars or it drops to 40fps or so)

 

Sorry forgot to mention that with the 3060 Ti I was getting over 100 FPS at the same parts in Utah with the same settings. My apologies for that as this would clearly indicate the huge drop in performance that I'm experiencing now. I guess I will have to take a more detailed look at each of the components and how they perform with Beamng drive running on the background.
--- Post updated ---

My CPU utilization hovers around 5%. Don't remember what it was before the GPU change though.

 

Does fluctuation happen even with 1080p or when playing windowed?

Oh that is really bad, even basic 4 core CPU might perform better, so definitely something odd there.

New update might come somewhat soon(ish) I guess, so I'm not sure if it is worth to try to fix issue for 22.3 version, but if it happens with new 23.x version, then I think you should contact developers and if you don't hear back, then contact again as they might forget things sometimes, they tend to have quite lot going on I guess.

Total CPU utilization is not so meaningful, it is per core utlilization that is giving better indication of what is happening. Software called HWinfo64 can give lot of details what is happening, run sensors only and set update interval to something like 100ms in options and it should give you quite good picture of what is happening.

Anyway, it can't be because of CPU lacking computing power, even single core computing power, must be some sort of software glitch.

One possibility is those driver updates and also updates to Windows too. With support ticket devs could see lot more, but they have to ask it themselves I guess, but you could go here https://supportid.beamng.com/ and do by instructions, then post ID and report that post, maybe they would get back to you then.

 

Ill wait for the update and hope it fixes it if not i kinda wanted to reinstall windows anyway since this Windows install has seen some hardware changes so maybe something screwed that up.

 

This is extremely weird. I use a 6800XT and get twice the performance at the same resolution with a 5900x. I can’t comment on how to fix it other than try some new drivers.

 

Windowed mode definitely improves the framerate which now ranges from 80-125 FPS but the fluctuations are still there with gpu utilization going all over the place. I can't reduce the resolution to 1080p but I did try 1440p and noticed the fluctuations in FPS are still there.

Yeah maybe a windows update or driver problem might be the culprit. I'll create a support ticket with the devs and see what they say.
--- Post updated ---

Even though this whole issue is a pain in the bum to deal with, I truly hope that it's just a software thing and not a hardware problem. I don't want to deal with potentially returning the card back to AMD.

 

I'm having performance problems in BeamNG too. I've got a RX 570 4GB, much slower and older than your GPU, but still I feel like it underperforms in this game. I've tried BeamNG on my friends PC, which has i5 3rd gen and GeForce 1050 Ti, and his game is running better than mine, on a worse system. I've got Xeon e5 1650 v2 (basically i7-4930k rebranded) and RX 570, but I have to play with shadows disabled to keep my FPS above 60 constantly. His system can run high settings with shadows smoothly.

 

His CPU is slightly faster than yours, especially in single core performance which is what matters to this subject.

Overall your single core performance is such that it definitely can have performance impact on some situation in DX11 games and that leads to your GPU underperforming then.

If also AMD drivers are bit heavier on CPU per drawcall, then that could explain difference that you are seeing, but it is still quite lot of impact, imo.

With Cinebench R15 single core result of 145, your CPU is quite sensitive to single core CPU load, but still I would think that there can be more to it, however you can check quite easily if your single core performance is limiting factor as when you monitor amount of drawcalls in game and as they get higher if your GPU load decreases while one of your CPU cores is working very hard compared to others, you can be quite certain it is the reason of slower framerates.

I play often without shadows too and I have Cinebench R15 single core result of over 200, especially on some mod maps I'm still limited by that, so for you it is of course more trouble.

 

So today i tried playing again and i had no issues on utah 60fps full gpu usage and i was able to spawn 12 cars without the frames dropping too much i sadly have no clue what the issue was sadly but i still have to try on other maps.