game uses 98% of my gpu

[🎀Hara🎀]

even on lowest settings my guess is the fps is uncapped and my gpu just wants to give me all the fps in existence.
is there any way to limit it?

[Psyringe]

Go to Settings -> Video -> Vsync and turn it on. That will limit your FPS to your monitor's refresh rate.

If, after that, your GPU is still at almost 100% utilization even on low settings, then your graphics card might be too weak to play the game at lower load. Which graphics card do you have?

[🎀Hara🎀]

Nvidia RTX 2060

[RandyBobandy]

Best place to do it is in Nvidia control panel, there you can limit frames for every game at once, as some just does not work within their own settings. But after driver update you may need to do it again.

[Haddock_Dundee]

Originally posted by Psyringe:

Go to Settings -> Video -> Vsync and turn it on. That will limit your FPS to your monitor's refresh rate.

This is the best way to burn a Nvidia Card. I have now Vsynch off and did limit FPS in Nvidia control panel at 50.

My 27" screen has a refresh rate of 165!

Laptop never did get freaking hot again and never did I fry a Nvidia 3070 again.

There is NO impact on graphics rendering and game response by doing this.
Safer for your card and PC components nearby. Plus fans reduced to minimum.

[Psyringe]

Originally posted by Haddock_Dundee:

Originally posted by Psyringe:

Go to Settings -> Video -> Vsync and turn it on. That will limit your FPS to your monitor's refresh rate.

This is the best way to burn a Nvidia Card.

With all due respect, this statement has no relation as to how PCs and graphics cards work. I may be a terrible hunter, but I've built and tested PCs for more than 30 years, know how the parts work and interact with each other, and I can say this with absolute confidence.

What Vsync does, is this (and nothing else): After the graphics card has rendered a frame, it waits for the monitor to send the signal "I displayed the full frame and am ready for the next one" before it sends the next frame.

With Vsync off, the graphics card keeps rendering new frames nonstop, and sends them to the monitor as soon as they are ready. The monitor (which is usually in the middle of displaying a frame when it receives the new data) then starts displaying the new data for the rest of the frame. (This can lead to screen tearing and is therefore undesirable, but that's not the point here.)

Vsync literally _cannot_ "fry a card", because all it can, is make the card _slower_ in order to wait until the monitor starts displaying a new frame. The high-refresh monitor cannot, for example, push the graphics card to do more work - if your monitor can do 165 FPS and your card can only render 60, then your card will render 60 FPS regardless of whether you have Vsync on or off. Any overheating issues that you might have with Vsync on, would be worse with Vsync off (unless you limit the framerate by other means, more on that later).

What you describe, is a badly built PC that cannot fully utilize its components. This is (unfortunately) not a rare occurrence because users often focus on the price, and PC builders sometimes cater to that by choosing a cheap but inadequate cooling solution. In a well-built PC, you can run all components at 100% load 24/7. You can plan that ahead perfectly - you know from the specs how much power your components are going to draw, you can calculate how much heat this is going to generate, and you can also look up how much heat a given cooling solution can dissipate. All you need to do is to choose a cooling solution that can dissipate at least as much heat as your components can generate under full load, and put them in a case that has good enough airflow to not cause heat accumulation. And bang, you have a PC that can _never_ overheat and can never "fry" anything - because your parts _cannot_ generate more heat than when under full load, and your cooling solution will always be able to dissipate that amount of heat.

In your situation, you (apparently) either had a PC with insufficient cooling, or you had faulty hardware to begin with, so you couldn't run your graphics card at full load without damaging it. But Vsync had nothing to do with it. The Vsync setting had either no effect on your machine (if the card couldn't reach 165 FPS anyway), or it _reduced_ the load on your graphics card by _limiting_ it to 165 FPS (from a higher value).

In such a situation, limiting the frame rate through the driver is indeed a viable solution, and I'm glad you found it. But the problem was not Vsync. The problem was that either your card was faulty, or your PC was built with insufficient cooling.

[Haddock_Dundee]

Please look at Lenovo Legion Pro specs..... and cooling of it.
It has a new Nvidia 3070 card in after the first (still under guarantee) burned. With fans at 100%. It was running at FPS equal to screen refresh rate......

I found reducing the FPS in Nvidia settings highly reduced this risk of burning the new card.

And btw. I have been a software engineer for 31 years and did previously build all my PC's (towers) myself from the case up. If I'm on a laptop now (a good one) it was to save space on my desk. And no the price to build or acquire a properly build PC was never the issue.

Quality comes at a price. Don't need that lesson TY.

"What you describe, is a badly built PC that cannot fully utilize its components. "

ROFL. Do you know the first Lenovo's were in fact IBM Thinkpads after IBM sold his entire PC hardware branch to China? Ho yes. Chine does not always mean trash hardware...

[Psyringe]

Originally posted by Haddock_Dundee:

Please look at Lenovo Legion Pro specs..... and cooling of it.
It has a new Nvidia 3070 card in after the first (still under guarantee) burned. With fans at 100%. It was running at FPS equal to screen refresh rate......

Which means that it had either faulty hardware, or inadequate cooling. Again, it's unfortunately not that unusual that manufacturers of cheap laptops skimp on the cooling. But the problem isn't Vsync, the problem is the inadequate cooling solution.

Take your current setup. You have a 3070, which is a relatively powerful chip, but you have to artificially put a limit on its performance, for each and every applicaton because you do it via the driver, because whenever the laptop tries to actually make use of the card's power, it's (apparently) in danger of overheating. So what is the use of having a 3070 in that laptop? Unless you're also running applications that don't even reach the 50 FPS that you're limiting your card to (and take care to not run them for long because the laptop will obviously overheat under these conditions as well), you could have bought a cheaper laptop with a weaker card that you don't have to artificially limit, and get the same performance.

But again: I'm not criticizing that you limit your frame rate through the driver. That's a useful workaround to keep temperatures manageable in badly built PCs, and it's usually the second thing I recommend after suggesting Vsync (which is usually preferable since it is application-specific). In this case I didn't need to do that since Randy Bobandy already covered that.

What I'm pointing out, is that the statement "Turning on Vsync is a good way of frying an nVidia card" is completely and demonstrably incorrect, because as I said, turning on Vsync can only ever make a card work _less_. At worst, the GPU load remains unchanged. So if you're advising people to not even try using Vsync because it "will fry their graphics card", then you're giving bad advice that keeps people from trying potential solutions that could be useful for them. That's all I'm saying.

If you see any way how turning on Vsync could possibly "fry a card" that wouldn't get fried under the same conditions if you had kept it turned off, then I'd like to hear the technical details of how that would work.

[🎀Hara🎀]

found a solution. switching from fullscreen to windowed reduced the gpu usage from 99% to 50%

[Psyringe]

Originally posted by 🎀Hara🎀:

found a solution. switching from fullscreen to windowed reduced the gpu usage from 99% to 50%

Interesting, thanks for sharing!

In case you don't want the window border, you can try adding the launch parameter "/borderless" to the game's launch options in Steam. It's not available in the video options, but the game's engine does support it. Not sure how it will affect your GPU load, though.

[Vinkelslip]

Yeah a game like SOT should be at almost 100% at all times

[BAG-One]

Could someone give me some recommendations on what Nvidia or game settings I should use.
I have a new laptop that is a LOT more powerful than my previous one, but it does put out quite a bit of heat. I do 95% or more of my gaming with it hooked up to a TV screen which I believe has a maximum refresh rate of 60hz and only occasionally play directly on the laptop screen for a couple of motocycle racing games as the controls are a LOT more direct than playing on the TV screen.
Here's the main specs......

*DELL G16 7630
*Processor 13th Generation Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-13900HX, 36 MB cache, 24 core, up to 5.40 GHz
*LCD 16" QHD+ (2560 x 1600) 165Hz, 3ms, sRGB-100%, ComfortViewPlus, NVIDIA G- SYNC+DDS Display
*Memory 32GB, 2x16GB, DDR5, 4800MHz
*Hard Drive - First Drive 1TB, M.2, PCIe NVMe, SSD
*NVIDIA(R) GeForce RTX(TM) 4060, 8GB GDDR6

Thanks in advance.

[Westile]

Originally posted by BAG-One:

*DELL G16 7630
*Processor 13th Generation Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-13900HX, 36 MB cache, 24 core, up to 5.40 GHz
*LCD 16" QHD+ (2560 x 1600) 165Hz, 3ms, sRGB-100%, ComfortViewPlus, NVIDIA G- SYNC+DDS Display
*Memory 32GB, 2x16GB, DDR5, 4800MHz
*Hard Drive - First Drive 1TB, M.2, PCIe NVMe, SSD
*NVIDIA(R) GeForce RTX(TM) 4060, 8GB GDDR6

Thanks in advance.

My system is about half as strong as yours and I run it at Med-High with some Ultra settings so you can run the game at just about whatever settings you want with those specs. Limit your FPS to 60 when playing on your laptop since the screen has a high refresh rate, that way you don't have to fry your hand when you touch the laptop's keyboard.

[Psyringe]

Originally posted by BAG-One:

Could someone give me some recommendations on what Nvidia or game settings I should use.

When you play on your TV, you can try to go to Settings -> Video and turn Vsync on. This will limit your FPS to the refresh rate of your screen. Meaning, if the screen has a refresh rate of 60Hz, then the graphics card will send a frame to it, then wait until the screen has fully displayed this frame (and this waiting gives the card time to cool down a little), and only after that will it send the next frame.

However, when you're gaming on your 165Hz screen, then Vsync won't do anything for you, because the refresh rate of your screen is so high that your card won't have time to cool down between frames.

So if you want to cover both cases, then limiting the frame rate in the nVidia driver is the better option. To do that, right-click on "Nvidia Settings" in your system tray, then click on "Nvidia Control Panel". In the Control Panel, go to "Manage 3D settings". You'll see two tabs there - "Global Settings" and "Program Settings". Decide whether you want to apply your settings to all applications or just theHunter, and select the respective tab. In case of the latter, select the CotW executable.

Regardless of whether you go for global or program-specific settings, you'll see a list of setting in the box below. Click on "Max frame rate" and choose a framerate limit. Gameplay for a game like CotW should be fine with 60 FPS, but different people have different sensitivities for low framerates, so you may need to experiment a bit.

Save your settings, launch the game, and check how smooth it feels and how hot your laptop gets. Go back to the Control Panel and experiment with the frame rate limit until you find a happy medium between smooth gameplay and sufficiently cool operation.

[BAG-One]

Thanks for that Psyringe.

[VivisecTor]

Originally posted by 🎀Hara🎀:

found a solution. switching from fullscreen to windowed reduced the gpu usage from 99% to 50%

yes this works for me with an RTX asus tuf 3080ti. The usage is 50/60% now thanks. If i reduce the refreshrate of the monitor from nvidia panel control the temperature and fan noise it lowering too.