Graphics Cards

[Barry2]

Hello! I have had a nvidia geforce 1080 since 2017, and thought it was long past time for an upgrade. After plenty of research, I ordered myself a 7900 xt. To my dismay, my computer showed no signs of improvement in performance, and has been experiencing a myriad of issues since installation. 

I am inexperienced with installing my own parts ( my pc was a prebuilt that I got back in 2017), so I am unsure where to start with troubleshooting. 

Here is some information that may/may not be relevant to my issues, according to my research:

- I am rocking a Z370 SLI plus motherboard- the PCI-E express it supports is 16x3, the card requires a 16x4 ( is there a way to update bios or something?)

- I have a I7-8700 from 2017 as well- Could this be bottle necking my performance?

- I have 16gb DDR4 Ram. do I need a upgrade?

- I used DDU to uninstall my Nvidia drivers prior to installing the card. AMD drivers say they are up to date.

If there is any more information needed, please let me know. I want to get this card working so I can enjoy my purchase!

Thanks.

[Mr_Tony]

Core i7-8700K and Radeon RX 7900 XT build in General Tasks | Bottleneck Calculation | PC Builds (pc-...

[FunkZ]

16 lanes of PCIe 3.0 will not significantly impact performance with modern cards, compared to 16 lanes of PCIe 4.0 - where PCIe version will cause an impact to performance are low-end cards that only have 4 or 8 PCIe lanes. But as to your Z370 motherboard, no a BIOS update can not advance the PCIe generation, this is a function of the chipset. The only way to get PCIe 4.0 is to upgrade to a board that supports it.

Whether your CPU/Mobo/RAM bottlenecks your graphics performance depends greatly on the game you are running, what resolution you play at and what level of graphics settings you select. Games that are more CPU intensive, 1080p or lower resolution and/or low graphics settings will definitely reduce your framerate due to system bottleneck. Games that are more GPU intensive, 1440p and especially 4k and high/ultra graphics settings will have less impact on your framerate from system bottleneck.

When you say your computer shows NO signs of improvement in performance, what are you using to gauge this? Upgrading from a GTX 1080 to a RX 7900XT even on an older system should definitely improve graphics performance which should be easily verifiable using a benchmark such as 3DMark.