So, I play Hunt: Showdown and I had an older machine up until recently. An old intel chip on an equally old motherboard with an R9 290. It ran Hunt just fine on the lowest settings.

I upgraded to a Ryzen 7 3700X on a B450 Aorus Pro Wifi, NVME SSD drive, 16 gigs of DDR4 2800 (I think) back in December and had been playing the game and others fine since then (better than fine!). Maxed the graphics on Hunt and low and behold the GPU wasn't even what was holding it back. It was the CPU, RAM, or some combo all along. Of note, I had to remove my back fan because the board was too big so I only have 1 120 MM fan now at the front. More on that later.

Then my catalyst control center changes from whatever it was to the Adrenaline version. Whole new look, I wasn't too concerned though. Weeks later I play Hunt again and I start having issues. The game runs fine at first but then starts to throttle. Getting 72 FPS no problem and then it starts dipping to 60 and freezing and it gets worse the longer I play until it's unplayable. Even after I drop all the graphics again I still run into this issue.

Temperature was at about 85C, but that's below the "safe" range of 95C indicated for the R9 290. To me that doesn't seem like a place it would throttle due to temperature? The CPU usage graph just spikes to 100, drop to 0, over and over and over with the drops correlating to the freezes. Even after I shut the game down and the GPU cools to around 46C the CPU usage spikes to 30-60 every few moments even with no other program running. Even as I sit here I can see it spiking to 80 occasionally and all I'm running is Chrome and a virtual desktop for work.

Any ideas what could be causing this? Is it the heat and I'm an idiot? Or is there some new setting with adrenaline that is screwing with me?

Appreciate anyone's help and time.