LG UltraGear 34GS95QE is throttling my GPU performance. Is this normal when upgrading monitors?
Hey everyone! I've posted in this subreddit before regarding this monitor. First it was due to an issue of it not getting any signal. I found out that it was due to a driver issue and not because of the monitor itself. The reason I bought this monitor in the first place was because it was a substantial upgrade over my current monitor, and it was very good according to the reviews. Plus, it was on sale for $800 instead of $1,300 so I went ahead and got it. However, I'm beginning to have buyer's remorse due to the issues it's caused me.
Thankfully due to the awesome people of this community, I was able to get the first issue solved. My GPU is an RTX 3080Ti, and I needed to download a special driver in order for it to detect my display (it wasn't working with normal drivers). However, there has been another issue that has been happening ever since I got this monitor.
To put it simply, my GPU is not performing as well as it did when I was on my older monitor. My older monitor was a Lenovo 34" UltraWide 3440x1440p 144hz. This new LG monitor is the same size, same resolution (3440x1440), except it has a 240Hz refresh rate, 0.03ms response time, G-SYNC, and OLED HDR 400. So it's not like this is a major change from a 1080p 16:9 monitor; it's the same resolution.
Initially I thought that this was an issue with my GPU, either driver or some other sort of software issue. Well before I got this monitor and when my PC was performing at its peak, I ran several different benchmarks just to get some data. Here are some of those benchmark results (I would post screenshots, but apparently I'm only allowed to post one picture so that makes it kinda hard...):
- Unigine Heaven Benchmark 4.0
- FPS: 280.2
- Score: 7058
- Min FPS: 52.7
- Max FPS: 572.9
- PassMark PerformanceTest
- 26,922
Again, these were scores that I got with my old monitor. Then I got the LG34GS95QE, and the scores plummeted. Here are the new scores with no changes to my system except the new monitor and driver:
- Unigine Heaven Benchmark 4.0
- FPS: 258.1
- Score: 6501
- Min FPS: 62.9
- Max FPS: 500.2
- PassMark PerformanceTest
- 25,615
- While this isn't a benchmark, this is what made me realize that there was an issue. I've mainly been playing COD MW3 multiplayer recently. Back on my old monitor, at minimum settings with DLSS turned on, I was getting 250-280 FPS, but now on the new monitor, with no settings changed, it's only getting 140-190FPS. Yes, I know that's still a great frame rate, but with a decrease that big, that means there's an issue.
Another variable I should mention is that shortly after I got this new monitor, I also added a second GPU into my system (EVGA 1080). That also seemed to decrease performance significantly. I plan to post about this in another subreddit, but I think my motherboard, even though it has 3 PCI-e slots, may not have enough bandwidth for a 3080Ti and a 1080. When I say decreased performance significantly, I mean the Unigine Heaven score went down to 5319, with an average FPS of only 211.1. My motherboard is an ASUS ROG STRIX X-570 E Gaming. Maybe if someone else here is able to help me out with finding out if it can handle those two GPUs, I'm all ears. But the only reason I bring this up here is because when I took the GPU back out, the performance of my system went back up, but still not back to where it was with the old monitor.
Now you're probably wondering why I'm saying it's the monitor, as there are so many variables at play when it comes to GPU performance. Well, I can say with certainty that I have done pretty much every single thing that it is possible to do in order to isolate the issue. I have even went back and forth with NVIDIA support a couple of times, and nothing they suggested worked. I have made sure windows and all of my drivers are up to date, reinstalled and done clean installations of NVIDIA drivers, turned overclocks on and off (MSI afterburner, and the overclocks were not the issue), uninstalled the EVGA software for the 1080 (from when I had that in the system), made sure LG monitor firmware was up to date, changed various NVIDIA control panel settings, made sure my CPU overclock was the same, and BIOS was up to date.
After eliminating all of the software variables, I then decided to do some experimenting with hardware. First, since I kept my old monitor, I decided to plug that one in instead and run these benchmarks again. Not only did these benchmarks run much closer to what they were supposed to, some ran even better! For example, the PassMark score went all the way up to 27,546. I plugged the power supply directly into the wall, then back to my surge protectors, with no major differences. Then I went back to this new monitor, and the issues came back, suggesting that the issue is something with this new monitor, and not in fact software related.
So to conclude, something about this monitor is causing my GPU to throttle in performance. I am very confused as to why this is happening, considering again, that the resolution is the exact same, so there isn't any additional stress on the GPU. It was already generating well above 144 FPS beforehand, so the only difference is that this new monitor is actually capable of displaying it.
Could the new driver that I had to install in order for the monitor to get a signal be the issue? Since this was a separate one and not through the NVIDIA app, how could I uninstall it to see if that's the issue (I don't think it is)? Or is this monitor just putting additional stress on the GPU overall that I'm not seeing?
Either way, some insight into this would be much appreciated, especially to those who also have this monitor. Have you been experiencing a similar issue?