Frequent stuttering and sudden, brief GPU usage decrease on Gigabyte Radeon RX 580 8G

[Axel Aodh]

Hi there,

I recently got a Gigabyte Radeon RX 580 8G card to replace my aging R9 280x.

I started noticing almost immediately pretty frequent stutters in games. These would last less then half a second usually, but enough to have a negative impact during tense moments.
I loaded up a GPU tracker and noticed that during these stutters GPU usage reduced by about 10%. Also every minute or so the GPU usage would just drop to 0% (though I can't say for certain I noticed any performance issues during that kind of drop). So far I've noticed this same pattern in Destiny 2, 3D Mark, The Witcher 3 and even in Diablo 3 to a lesser extent. I noticed the only thing that seemed common was that it happens around every 7 seconds, and consistently reduce the current GPU usage by 10% of what is currently being used.

One weird thing I noticed that if I had Destiny 2 set to limit it's framerate to 72fps the GPU would constantly jump for 100% to 0% every second or so. I thought it might be a loading issue, since now everything is on "High" when it was on Low or Medium before, but even if I just hang out in one spot with nothing really loading anymore, I still see the performance drop every seven seconds or so.

I used DDU while in safe mode to uninstall the previously installed drivers, and updated to the latest available from the AMD website.

I'm not using any performance enhancing apps or overclocking the card in any way.

The highest the temperature got during a severl hours long play session was 72 degrees, which from what I can tell isn't high enough to negatively impact performance.

Some other stats on my system. I'm not sure what's important and what's not, so sorry if I throw too much information at you:

Gigabyte Z87X-UD3H ATX LGA1150 Z87 DDR3 3PCI-E16 3PCI-E1 HDMI CrossFireX/SLI SATA3 USB3 Motherboard
Corsair Enthusiast Series TX750M 750W ATX Modular Power Supply
Intel Core i7 4770K Unlocked Quad Core 3.5GHZ
Kingston KHX1600C10D3B1K2/16G 16GB Kit 2X8GB 1600MHz DDR3 240PIN DIMM CL10 1.5V

I appreciate any help.

Cheers.

I put in the data from the GPU tracker in to a google doc. If you think that info will be useful, just ask and I'll post a link to the doc. I've attached some screenshots from the GPU tacker so you can see the sudden drops.

Update: I took the nuclear option and reinstalled windows entirely. This seems to have fixed the stuttering issue, but I'm still seeing pretty frequently that my GPU usage suddenly goes down to 0% for less than a second. Though when it does that I don't seem to notice any change in the game performance.
Still very curious, and I'd like to know why it's reducing so much and if there is a fix, or just how it works?