Increase Gaming Performance? 🙄

So my i7-8700K just arrived and I’m a little disappointed with my Gaming PC’s performance.
My GPU’s usage hovers around 60% and Shadow of War’s FPS dips down into the 20’s at times.
Black Desert averages around 12 FPS...

Does anyone have any tips regarding how to boost performance? I have good hardware and it’s very frustrating that my PC’s performance is lack luster.
I’ve even made adjustments within Nvidia Control Panel to no avail.

CPU: Intel i7 8700K (Coffee Lake)
AIO: NZXT Krakken X62
GPU: Gigabyte AORUS GTX 1080ti
MOBO: MSI Z370 GODLIKE GAMING
MEMORY: G.SKILL Trident Z RGB (32GB) DDR4 (3600MHz)
NVMe - M.2: Samsung 960 EVO (256GB) (OS/Apps)
OS: Windows 10

Well since this is a desktop I assume you have got it some good LCD and probably have it on some pretty high resolution . I suggest you just tune it down to full HD 1920 * 1080 .

The specs are very good but still when it comes to 3D the bottle neck becomes the GPU , and while yours is considered the best out there yet and VR ready and all , PC games do not come optimized to certain hardware specs like PS4 , when developing for PC they just think sky is the limit so usually "Ultra Settings" or "Very High Settings" in a game are meant for dual graphic cards setups so don't be sad but there is still better hardware setups out there (i.e you need to tune down your expectations for graphics level of detail a bit) .

The thing that hinder frame rates significantly in almost all games are Shadows , tuning down / off shadows in games might improve things not less than 25% / 40% .

Setting Nvidia global settings is oftenly over-ridden by the "Experience" component of the driver (An Nvidia app that fine tunes settings for every game individually based on Nvidia's testing but is known to be inaccurate most of the time) , so you might need to look at your game settings at "Program Settings" tab , you might be surprised to find it that Nvidia "Experience" managed to not recognize it and revert it to integrated graphics card or fool around with global settings boosting un-needed stuff you need to tune back down .

Try un-installing your driver / re-installing it without the "Experience" component , see if it make a difference , some reported that windows newly introduced game bar conflicts with Nvidia "Experience" component .

Press Windows Key + G to activate game bar while in game then enable Game Mode (Second icon from right) .

Hope these help ,
Cheers

Thanks for the detailed response. [emoji4]
I didn’t have the GeForce Experience installed actually and I definitely had game mode turned on.

My old system was a i5-4690K and ran both games just fine on higher settings at 2160p resolution.

I’m going to uninstall all NVIDIA drivers and see if that helps.
Thank you again.

I actually have a new mobo with this build. The only thing that I brought over from my old system was the SSD with the OS installed.
And yes I’m definitely on the High Performance Plan. That was the first thing I did in hopes of improving performance.

essenbe said:

BeK, you really need to do a clean install. You went from a 4th Generation motherboard and CPU to an 8th generation one. Too many spare drivers in there. You should download your graphics driver from Nvidia only and drivers from your motherboards web site. Just my opinion. Your rig should run any game around much much better than what you described.

Yeah I know it should and that’s what’s so frustrating for me. I did do a clean install of Windows 10 and I ONLY use the latest drivers from the MSI website as well as Nvidia’s own site.
Unfortunately none of those have helped.
Thanks for your input. I appreciate people at least responding.

You could try telling Black Desert Online to Override High DPI Scaling Behavior. I have heard for many people this increased FPS by about 10, for me it also increased my FPS in cities like Heidel where it's busy, but for some it did not do anything. If it does not work or makes the game crash/have less fps you can just turn it back off too. Hopefully this helps for at least Black Desert Online.