AnsweredAssumed Answered

GPU usage hitting 100% on non-GPU-intense games

Question asked by coreychapman88 on Jul 29, 2015
Latest reply on Aug 8, 2015 by coreychapman88

I have been having an issue lately and I cannot figure out why it is happening..


Occasionally when I am playing something, my GPU usage will spike up to 99-100% while my CPU usage will drop to around 20-40% between the 4 cores. Normally I restart the computer, re-launch the game, and it would be back to normal (doesn't always work... sometimes I just give up and go do something else). This will randomly occur when I start playing a game. The CPU usage drops below normal and GPU usage increases way above normal. The games I have seen this happen on: Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, CS:GO, GTA V. I know this kind of FPS drop is expected in a game like GTA V, but hearthstone/CS:GO?


Now, I know in an ideal situation, 100% of your GPU will be utilized. However, Hearthstone should be (usually) using about 20% of my GPU for me. CS:GO usually runs at around 250 fps, with 60%ish usage. When this problem happens, I drop to <30fps in-game. I have a GPU monitor on my other screen, and it shows my GPU at 95-100% when this occurs. I also look at ProcessExplorer, and whatever game I'm playing will be at 99-100% GPU usage. There's nothing else that is using up the processing power, at least from what I can see.

When this happens my GPU sits around 55°C and my CPU around 60°C, so it's definitely not overheating. So far I have tried messing around with video settings in the games, but nothing seems to work. Switching from fullscreen to fullscreen borderless, V-Sync on/off, changing resolution, etc, nothing works. It almost seems that my CPU usage is dropping, therefore more is required by the GPU in terms of processing the frames. I don't know why in the world it would be doing that. I have spent hours googling trying to find a solution, and can't seem to figure it out. I went a good 3 or 4 weeks without this happening, and all of a sudden it started up again today.


Here's a tl;dr of my system.


CPU: i5 4690k (not OC'd)

GPU: Radeon 7970 3GB 950MHz GDDR5


SSD/HDD (games installed on HDD, OS on SSD)

Mobo: Gigabyte z97


I am running Catalyst Version 15.7.1


Has anyone else had this occur before? Thank you for any information you can give.