There are times when you wonder why the performance of your PC feels sluggish or lagging behind, even when your hardware is perfectly fine. For programmer and TechPowerUp (TPU) contributor, W1zzard, the lag in performance was being caused by AMD Radeon drivers. The kicker to the story? He’s using an NVIDIA graphics card.
It should be made clear that in this scenario, W1zzard’s setup is…fairly ancient, to say the least. In effect, the CPU is a dual-core Intel Pentium G3220T, and the system itself is only running on 8GB of RAM.
Initially, W1zzard’s first reaction upon finding the performance issue was to fault NVIDIA directly. However, upon opening up Task Manager, he noticed one of his CPU cores was running at 100% load and upon closer inspection, he found that it was some Radeon software that wasn’t completely removed from his PC that was hogging up said core. Again, W1zzard isn’t using a Radeon GPU, but one from NVIDIA.
Once he ended its task, the CPU loads were restored to normal. W1zzard then decided to go a step further and brought out his debugger. To cut a very long story short, he found a string of code that was responsible for causing the CPU consumption. It’s a very lengthy and detailed explanation, and you can read it via the source we’ve attached below.
So, the bottom line here is: if you’re planning to or are in the process of switching your graphics card brand from NVIDIA to AMD (or vice versa), it’s generally good practice to uninstall the previous GPU drivers before you install both the new card and its corresponding drivers into your system. To that end, there are several options to do so, but we simply just recommend using uninstaller programs like DDU for a fuss-free experience.
(Source: TPU)
