Low effective load in Elden Ring, power draw strongly below limits
Hi everyone!
Quick specs (laptop):
CPU: I7 13700H
GPU: Nvidia RTX 4070
RAM: 32 GB DDR5
I am a happy CachyOS user for the past year or so. Recently I decided to play some Elden Ring with proton. Game suggested ultra settings for my PC and while I was inside the cave at the beginning of the game, it was stable 60 fps. But now on the open world it drops to some 40-50 fps. Looking at nvtop it shows 90-100% load and only about 50% effective load. The power draw is something around 65 W out of 115 W power limit and 140 W boost limit.
What could be the problem here? I tried various versions of proton - proton experimental, hotfix, cachyos native, cachyos slr, older cachyos, GEproton. Same problem every time. CPU load is max 30%, none of the cores is being maxed out on 100%.
BTW: I also tried downgrading Nvidia drivers back to the pre december migration to nvidia-open yet the problem still persists.