I suspect the CPU is working harder to transfer info on all those objects, and is unable to keep the GPU busy. Your computer is "CPU-bound" (or limited) in this situation rather than "GPU-bound".

No expert myself, I base this on videos at the Hardware Unboxed YouTube channel.

You might try running a CPU performance meter and see what that shows.

Edit: You do have a powerful CPU, so I dunno... something to consider.

You didn't tell us what performance meter you're using, I have no idea if you're reading it correctly either. I can tell you my 3070ti has zero problems running at 99% throughout all of Valheim - instance & fire laden or not. Of course I am asking it to try for 4k@60p with max graphics.

My only guess - and it's a pretty wild guess - is that you're using windows without the fancy governor for an Intel CPU with efficiency cores (does win10 have that yet?), and your games particle physics have ended up on a core that can't handle them - bottlenecking your GPU and lagging the game.

I bought a 12th gen without efficiency cores (i5-12500), I also have half your ram - zero problems.

From a system wide point of view..think about these in no particular order they can ALL impact

• Start with read writes from HDU, (NOTE if it moves it breaks) SSD arent moving HDUs Are potential bottlenecks
  
• How many pixels or datapoints in the image area is the GPU trying to render. so get a some reference data and even compare to freely available refernces of similar same GPU's
  
• Whats your CPU ALSO doing Stop or pause unnecessary background tasks (Windows update trying to get you to windows 11 for example!!
  
• As mentioned by @FissionChips Which Benchmark are you using... and is it the problem? just saying
  
• have you tried lowering the display resolution and seeing what performance is like? in Audio there is a setting known as "Parity/Unity" setting EVERYTHING to Parity gives The best performance and then you adjust a little bit here and there for the room the instrument and the mix to the audience..
  
  (what does this mean?).. Just because you have a Lamborghini doesnt mean you drive with the pedal to the metal all the time!
  
• Please tell me its not a Laptop if it is you MUST set up dedicated Graphics to run on Valheim.exe
  
• Modded or Vanilla
  
• Solo or MultiP
  
• And its not when the Save game lagg happens by any chance?

Sorry some questions appear dumb but its all checkable :-)

Originally posted by Tromador:

So sure, there's eleventy bazillion instances, and all the lights forever with their particle effects and yes, I have the graphics turned up to maximum so one could argue I'm looking for trouble.

But here's my confusion, in a pretty meadows with nothing in the area, my GPU (according to a particular performance meter, so sure take it with a pinch of salt, but anyway) is happily chugging away at about 34% load and F2 says all the FPS I can eat. In the complex area though, the GPU drops to about 14% load and I get graphics lag. If it's more difficult to render, why doesn't the GPU ramp up to deal with the extra requirement, instead of slowing down?

I've read various pages suggesting doing things in the nVidia control panel, startup options and editing the boot.ini file, without much success, but I wonder if anyone has a clue why the GPU slows down, instead of taking on the extra work.

I'm running an I9 13900K, nVidia 3070ti, 32GB RAM @ 2650x1440 resolution.

You're experiencing a CPU bottleneck technically. However the cause is actually in the engine. In lay terms, they call it a drawcall bottleneck, and it's essentially an in-software limitation where a single particular pipeline is saturated in the CPU queue. This won't show up as a buried needle in any kind of normal performance measuring tools you'll find floating out there.

The only way to alleviate this bottleneck is to either lower settings so there's fewer draws being called (Shadows and by extension lights are the biggest culprits) or increase the raw throughput of your entire CPU by upping the clock speed (Brute Force)

There's nothing wrong with your game or your hardware.

The GPU is slowing down, because the GPU isn't working anymore, it's waiting for the CPU to push out what it needs to draw.

I would need to know a little bit more about what your actual FPS numbers are though. Like "All the FPS I can eat" can be any number between 0-99,999,999. I don't know how much you can eat. Likewise, I don't know what you consider "Lag".

on an RTX 3090, I can swing from 144fps (Where I cap for my monitor) all the way down to the high 60's in the most complex bases with enemies running around. Even can drop into the low 40's in the mountains, during a blizzard with High Particle Lights enabled. Speaking of that, you should set Particle Lights to low, it makes virtually no visual difference, and a massive performance increase in some scenes. You also should not have Maximum Shadows, but set it to one step lower. It's another setting where you will never see the visual difference, but it dramatically improves your framerate.

How many torches/fires do you have in your settled area? I replaced some of mine with dvergr lanterns and either that or some of the recent updates made improvements. I also don't keep my bonfires going all the time anymore. Could be just placebo though, didn't make any accurate testing or anything. But still, it's probably the lights.