u/Enfentonk

Computer Type: Desktop

GPU: Powercolor RX 5070XT 8GB (stock speeds)

CPU: RYZEN 5 5600X 6C 12T

Motherboard: Gigabyte B550I Aorus Pro AX

BIOS Version: whatever the most recent BIOS was as of February

RAM: Crucial Ballistix 3200MHz 2x16GB

PSU: Lian Li 750W bronze

Operating System & Version: WINDOWS 10 22H2 (I do not intend on updating to W11 or switching to linux right now)

GPU Drivers: see post

Background Applications: Discord, Steelseries, Google Drive, Steam, Kaspersky

Description of Original Problem: For the last couple of weeks, I will launch a game and start off at 100% utilisation, no problems with framerate. Slowly the framerate will taper down e.g. in FH6 I start off around 70-90fps and it slowly tapers down to 15-20fps within about 5 minutes, with similar effects in FH5 and FH4. In rocket league, it will stutter non-stop from the start, violently swinging between 10 and 300fps.

I enabled my RTSS and it shows that initially I have 100% utilisation and around 1900MHz clock speed on the GPU core. As my FPS tapers down, the utilisation starts swinging violently up and down, between 0-70% with corresponding jumps and dips in frame-time. I have checked everything else and I do not appear to be bottlenecked in any other way, and this thing was working fine for the last few months (was stored in its box for a couple of years but was in regular use for the years before that).

Troubleshooting: I am quite sure this is not thermal throttling as I have removed all my side panels and cranked my GPU fan speed to 100%. My GPU temperature is never above 75^(o)C and by the time the utilisation has dropped enough to get me 20fps, it is down to around 45^(o)C.

I used AMD's Radeon software to both overclock and undervolt (the preset buttons), they did absolutely nothing.

I tried updating to AMD's latest GPU drivers (26.5.2) and that felt like it exacerbated the issue - originally I was only having problems with Rocket League (was a good excuse to quit) but since updating it has spread to basically every other game. I am not sure whether this is coincidental timing or not.

I used DDU and reinstalled the latest driver, no change. I tried to reinstall the driver I was using before updating (I think 26.1.1), but whenever I tried to launch the installer it forced me to use the latest driver (why??? Even when I specifically download an older driver from AMD's page). I again DDU'd then downloaded an older driver from Guru3D (25.12.1). This also has not changed anything in terms of the clockspeed/utilisation swinging and framerate tapering off.

I have absolutely no idea what to do or what is happening, my worst case scenario is that this GPU is already dying. Please let me know if you have any suggestions because I am stuck.