EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 VRAM and Power issues

Hey there,

So, I recently picked up a new EVGA GeForce RTX 3060, and you can check out the previous discussion on this thread here: Topic. That said, I've run into two specific issues while playing Battlefield 1. My current setup uses a Core i5-8400 and 8 GB of single-channel DDR4 RAM running at 2666 MHz.

The first issue is that my VRAM usage hits the ceiling—sometimes it even shows weirdly high numbers like 12 GB. To make matters worse, once I close the game, the VRAM doesn't clear out; it just sits there stuck at 5, 6, or 7 GB even when I'm doing absolutely nothing on my PC. It stays like that until I give the whole system a restart.

The second thing is the power draw. I'm seeing the card pull a maximum of about 130 W under full load, though it usually hovers around 100 W. Looking at the specs for this card, that feels a bit low to me, and I'm wondering if that might be why my performance isn't quite where it should be. For context, I'm using an EVGA 500 W1 power supply that's about three years old. I'm using a 6+2 pin cable for the GPU, but those extra 2 pins are sitting empty even though the PSU has an 8-pin connector. Is it possible that this specific cable configuration isn't delivering enough wattage, or could the entire power supply be the culprit?

The game is actually pretty playable most of the time, at least until that VRAM spike hits, which causes my frame rate to tank down to the 40-50 FPS range. Even when things are stable, I feel like I'm missing about 10-20 FPS compared to what I see in benchmarks and on YouTube.

Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Have you tried testing this with a different game yet? Also, what kind of software are you using to track things like your GPU or CPU usage? By the way, I thought that card had 8GB GDDR5 of VRAM, not 12!?

Larry Ortiz5 said:Have you tried testing this with a different game yet? Also, what kind of software are you using to track things like your GPU or CPU usage? By the way, I thought that card had 8GB GDDR5 of VRAM, not 12!?

I've tested it with other games, but this issue with Windows seems to pop up everywhere, if it's even an actual problem. I'm not sure if it's possible for the card to hit its max frequency if it isn't getting enough power, or if it can even run at all without the PC shutting down or hitting a BSOD. Basically, it hits about 130W in any game I play. I can't tell if it's actually affecting performance; the FPS feels fine, though there are occasionally some bigger drops than I'd expect from this card, but nothing that makes it unplayable.

As for the VRAM, I was looking at HWInfo and realized I might have misread the numbers. There's GPU Memory Usage and then there's GPU D3D Memory Dedicated. That Usage number jumps around quite a bit, but the Dedicated part stays around 3.5 GB in Battlefield 1, which is exactly what I expected. MSI Afterburner shows 3.5 GB as well. So, I probably just misread it originally—it seemed weird that it could go up to 12, but I figured maybe it was doing something like using the pagefile to pull memory from somewhere else.

Honestly, I'm more concerned about the power supply side of things, especially since I see this card pulling up to 180W under load elsewhere, and I don't know what could possibly be a heavier load than Battlefield 1 on Ultra settings. I even tried setting the Power limit to 10-20% and then up to 50%, but nothing really changes.

I don't know—to me, it feels like logical reasoning suggests that if the power supply was actually the culprit, the whole system would just shut down entirely.
Unless you can borrow a beefier PSU, just to be safe, maybe try testing it out and see if that changes anything?

Honestly, I’d expect it to just shut down completely or trigger a blue screen. I'm going to borrow a unit from a friend to test it out. If the power supply isn't the culprit, then I'm honestly stumped.

Your monitoring software is only showing you the power draw for the actual GPU chip itself, so it isn't accounting for the VRMs, fans, or other components. That’s perfectly normal. If you were actually running into power supply issues, you wouldn't just see lower FPS—your whole PC would likely shut down or crash entirely.

I don't know off the top of my head, but I'm pretty sure it's standard for those two pins to show up as "empty."
https://forums.hexus.net/graphics-ca...s-psu-end.html

Regarding your FPS, double-check that you haven't overestimated what the GPU can handle (like cranking MSAA to the max or upscaling the resolution to some crazy level). If I recall correctly, your native resolution in Battlefield 1 was set to 42% scale, so make sure you didn't get tripped up by that setting.

I find myself wondering if those YouTubers are perhaps only displaying the power draw specifically for the graphics chip itself, while his readings show a slightly different range of 100 to 130W. My own card seems to be operating at a somewhat lower voltage due to being stuck on an x4 2.0 connection—which appears to be causing a mild bottleneck—but when I run Dirt Rally or Metro with the frame rate unlocked, the consumption aligns quite closely with his results, sitting right around 95 to 135W. If my memory serves me correctly, I also saw it pulling about 130 to 135W during the Superposition benchmark.

Hannah Bishop4, have you considered attempting to increase the Power limit by 50% yet? It might be worth your while to also verify the PCIe slot status within GPU-Z; there is a small indicator or perhaps a question mark located just to the right of the slot information section that can provide some clarity. Additionally, I was wondering if you are currently utilizing the High Performance power plan within Windows. It might also be prudent to look through your BIOS settings to see if any unnecessary, overly complex features are enabled that could potentially interfere with your overall performance—I personally found it helpful to disable a few such options myself, though I wasn't referring to the standard low power states, but rather other specialized settings. Finally, it might not be a bad idea to run a quick stress test on the graphics card itself just to be certain.

There are plenty of videos out there showing cards like this pulling a steady 170-200W without budging an inch while usage hits 100%, regardless of which game you're playing. When you look at the individual readings for the chip and everything else, it’s the same story—nothing even breaks 130W, and even hitting that is rare. Most of the time I'm seeing around 100W, and it just fluctuates constantly; you can literally see the usage and FPS tank whenever the wattage drops. If it were just running steadily at 130W while pegged at 100% usage, I'd think it was fine, but it keeps dipping below 100W. There's just no consistency at all.

I tried bumping the Power limit up by 50%, but honestly, it didn't make a bit of difference—everything stayed exactly the same. I've got High Performance enabled too. I poked around in the BIOS as well, but I couldn't find anything useful worth changing.

Power limit 135 W

What's up with this Power limit 135 W? Is that coming from the motherboard?

I ran Superposition at 1080p High, and it stayed right around 125-130W the whole time, even with the Power limit set to +50%.

That person might just be running a different version of the monitoring software, a different driver, or they might have even overclocked their system.

Why make this so complicated? Just pick a benchmark, find the stock performance numbers in a review, run it yourself—just make sure you're using the same versions and drivers—and compare your results. That’s really all there is to it. You judge performance based on actual results (like FPS in games or benchmark scores), not by looking at some wattage readings in a third-party app.

Honestly, I’m just looking at my in-game performance right now. I wouldn't even bother checking wattage or anything else if it wasn't acting up this badly. For some reason, it's just not performing the way it should. Looking at any video or benchmark online, I haven't seen anyone else's FPS dipping below 60 like mine does. It really should be staying at least around 85, but I'm stuck in the 70-75 range with constant drops below that, even on the exact same maps and settings. When I toggle VSync to 60 FPS, it actually dips below 50; if it could at least hold a steady 60, I wouldn't complain so much. And it doesn't matter what settings I throw at it—whether I'm on Low or Ultra, the performance is practically identical. Also, while everyone else seems to have their usage pinned at 99-100% constantly, mine randomly drops to 0% right in the middle of a session before slowly climbing back up. How is it even possible for usage to tank to 0% during heavy load? Naturally, the FPS follows suit. It doesn't even matter what's happening on screen—I'll be in the middle of an explosion with 90 FPS, and then suddenly in an empty field, it drops to 55 just because the card decided that's what it wants to do.

I'm not sure. If I thought it was a CPU bottleneck, I might suggest looking there, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Regarding those 6+2 pins, those two are supposedly just ground, so they shouldn't affect anything. Still, if you can borrow a different power supply just to test it out...

Which motherboard did you end up getting? You should check which specific slot you have it plugged into on the board.

EDIT

I did a bit of digging online. Apparently, one person dealt with this exact issue by doing a clean reinstall of Windows. Another person suspected their power supply, though that hasn't been confirmed yet.

It’s probably not the CPU since it's sitting at 85-95%, and from what I've seen, better cards don't run into this issue in Battlefield 1, so I doubt that's the culprit. I'm going to borrow a power supply to test that out. Honestly, I don't get why the usage drops all the way to 0; it shouldn't be dipping at all, let alone hitting zero, if you ask me. I even tried bumping up the resolution scale to put more pressure on the graphics card itself, but nothing works—no matter how much work there actually is to do, the usage just randomly tanks. On top of that, the longer I play, the worse it gets. After about 20 or 30 minutes, my FPS drops down to the 50-60 range, when it really should be staying above 80. We aren't talking about losing a few frames because someone might have slightly overclocked something; this is a 20-frame difference, and it happens whether I'm playing on Low or Ultra. Temperatures aren't the issue either, they stay around 70 degrees. My motherboard is an ASUS Prime B360M-A and the slot is running at x16 3.0.

Did you perform a fresh Windows reinstall, or are you running an older installation?

I did a clean install just three days ago.

Check your clock speeds, VRAM, and all that stuff through either GPU-Z or the NVIDIA Overlay while you're actually gaming.

It's pointless to argue about what the issue is if nobody has even bothered to figure out at which frequency the card stays stable.

I bumped up my pagefile size, and honestly, that fixed a huge chunk of the issues right away. I also grabbed another 8GB of RAM, so I’m finally running 16GB in dual channel instead of just 8GB in single channel (that actually dropped my CPU usage from hitting 90-100% down to around 70-80%). Everything feels smooth now performance-wise—no more frame drops. My GPU was always holding its max frequency, so that wasn't really the issue, but now the usage stays pretty much pinned at 100%, which wasn't happening before I tweaked the pagefile and added the extra RAM. The wattage is still fluctuating like it was before, though. I'm honestly stumped on why that's happening since every other metric shows everything is running exactly as it should. VRAM usage is sitting around 3-3.5GB in Battlefield 1, which seems totally normal. I haven't bothered testing a different power supply since things are working fine now, so I'm guessing those wattage readings are just being wonky.

It’s totally normal for wattage to fluctuate. Nothing weird there—games never pull a constant amount of power from the GPU, at least not according to what the software shows you.

I guess I don't know if Battlefield 1 is just one of those memory hogs that finally stabilized things by using up all that extra RAM.

Hannah Bishop4 said:I bumped up my pagefile size, and honestly, that fixed a huge chunk of the issues right away. I also grabbed another 8GB of RAM, so I’m finally running 16GB in dual channel instead of just 8GB in single channel (that actually dropped my CPU usage from hitting 90-100% down to around 70-80%). Everything feels smooth now performance-wise—no more frame drops. My GPU was always holding its max frequency, so that wasn't really the issue, but now the usage stays pretty much pinned at 100%, which wasn't happening before I tweaked the pagefile and added the extra RAM. The wattage is still fluctuating like it was before, though. I'm honestly stumped on why that's happening since every other metric shows everything is running exactly as it should. VRAM usage is sitting around 3-3.5GB in Battlefield 1, which seems totally normal. I haven't bothered testing a different power supply since things are working fine now, so I'm guessing those wattage readings are just being wonky.

It is quite an interesting observation; if Battlefield 1 running with 64 players is likely to consume somewhere in the realm of 5.5 to 6 GB of memory, then a standard, unoptimized installation of Windows 10—with all its various automated background processes running—could easily push that total usage up to 8 or 9 GB, if not higher.