I was playing Ark Survival Ascended when my system locked up. No response from the mouse or keyboard, screen frozen, sound loop about 1 second long. I let it sit for a minute, thinking maybe it’ll break out of it, and eventually had to force the power off with the power button.

I restarted my system, and now my performance in games is really bad, I’m getting about 20fps where I used to get 80-100, sometimes it gets so bad it goes into the single digits. I get stuttering sound as well and some pretty bad input lag. In Ark, I can see the textures slowly pop in over time, which normally happens in a matter of a second or two.

Looking at CoreCtrl, if I set it to high performance mode, the GPU’s power usage peaks around 150 Watts instead of 300+.

I’m running Nobara on a 7900X3D and an RX 7900XT with 32GB RAM.

Not sure how to go about diagnosing my issue here. I haven’t made any software changes, so I’m a little lost as to why this would happen.

Update: After trying everything suggested here, and all the googling I could manage, I ended up doing a full reinstall, and kept having issues. Eventually, I narrowed it down to the PCIE riser cable in my case (which I suppose I should have mentioned in the first place) which is supposed to be PCIE 4.0, but it seems to be what was causing my issues. I set my PCIE to 3.0 in the BIOS and everything is fine so far. I don’t notice any performance reduction at all, so it probably wasn’t saturating PCIE 4.0, but the riser isn’t good enough for it I guess.