I recently upgraded my GPU from an RTX 3060 (12 GB) to an RTX 5070 Ti (16 GB).
Since the upgrade, my performance has dropped significantly, but only after plugins finish loading.
Before plugins load, performance is great.

Nothing else changed : same game version, same mods and plugins, same save and settings.

CPU is an i7-14700K, temps ~50 °C, clocks ~5.4 GHz, no thermal throttling

Overall CPU usage stays low (around 10–15%), but FPS drops heavily once plugins are active.

RAM and VRAM are not maxed, temperatures are normal.

What confuses me is that the game ran perfectly fine before on a weaker GPU (RTX 3060), with the same plugins and settings, and I had better and more stable performance than I do now on the RTX 5070 Ti.
The only change was the GPU upgrade, yet performance became worse instead of better.

Any help would be great, thanks in advance !

Is this on Legacy or Enhanced GTA?

Have you noticed a performance difference on any other game?

1 hour ago, Gan Ceann said:

Is this on Legacy or Enhanced GTA?

Have you noticed a performance difference on any other game?

First of all thanks for the quick reply. And this is on legacy, and no I don't have any problem with any other games, on the contrary, performance improved a lot, as it logically should.
I read something about gta 5, having been built on an older engine, isn't able to utilize all cores of newer CPUs and because of that, it hammers the one main core resulting in bad FPS, but still that doesn't explain why performance worsened after upgrading my GPU.

That is strange then. Just incase, because I've done this myself, does your GPU have enough PCI lanes? A lot of mother boards will have multiple PCI-E slots but only one or two with 16x lanes. I would suspect a 50 series on 8x lanes would be throttled but I'm not 100% on that.

Also have you tried all versions of DirectX in the game settings?

18 hours ago, Gan Ceann said:

That is strange then. Just incase, because I've done this myself, does your GPU have enough PCI lanes? A lot of mother boards will have multiple PCI-E slots but only one or two with 16x lanes. I would suspect a 50 series on 8x lanes would be throttled but I'm not 100% on that.

Also have you tried all versions of DirectX in the game settings?

I connected the new GPU on the first PCI slot on the motherboard where my previous GPU was so I'm not too sure.
And no I didn't try to change the DX version, I'll make sure to give it a try.

However I found a temporary fix and got a DLSS 4 Mod (I was using a previous version before which was compatible with the 3060) and since the new 50 Series GPUs support Mulitple Frame Generation, I wanted to try it out. I know a lot of people kinda complain that those are "fake frames" but it's working. The FPS is the same but the game looks way smoother overall cause of the rendered frame.

But again this is kinda temporary as I would still like to know why the performance worsened after the upgrade.

To be clear, I'm running a heavy setup with dozens of plugins, close to a hundred addon vehicles and graphics packs on top so I know it is pretty demanding, and Rage is a pretty old engine.

On 1/6/2026 at 12:20 AM, JohnNolan7A15 said:

First of all thanks for the quick reply. And this is on legacy, and no I don't have any problem with any other games, on the contrary, performance improved a lot, as it logically should.
I read something about gta 5, having been built on an older engine, isn't able to utilize all cores of newer CPUs and because of that, it hammers the one main core resulting in bad FPS, but still that doesn't explain why performance worsened after upgrading my GPU.

If you find no fix and are just annoyed by the FPS i could recommend lossless scaling (7€), helped me going from 40 Fps in 4k to 130ish with 3x frame gen but it affects your graphics a little bit and bugs sometime with like opening menus quickly or els lights