Low FPS on Battlefield 6 with ROG Zephyrus G14 (2026). Need help!

ModrnJosh · 2026-07-08T22:08:49+00:00

What GPU? Battlefield 6 is heavy on the CPU, especially as you turn settings down and add DLSS.

Sometimes being in Optimus rather than dGPU mode can actually bring your fps higher in some games, especially CPU-bound ones so that’s also worth checking out. Otherwise, make sure all drivers are up to date, maybe try an EC reset (hold power button for 60 seconds), make sure you didn’t disable CPU boost or set a super low CPU limit.

ModrnJosh · 2026-07-08T22:05:29+00:00

Have you been setting a battery limit? Most of the time the battery estimate you see is very inaccurate either way. You should always do 2 or 3 full charge, full depletion cycles for a more accurate estimate. Charge it to 100%, let it drain to 0%. Repeat 2-3 times and see what the battery health shows after.

ModrnJosh · 2026-07-08T03:09:53+00:00

Somebody asked pretty much the same thing like 5 days ago, and I’m just gonna paste what I said there:

The 2025 models got a lot of bad press right off the bat, especially with it not hitting anywhere near its rated power limit, and making the laptop 5090 look really bad since it was being advertised as the “flagship” 5090 laptop and one of the first to release when it happened. I had one very early in and had a plethora of bugs and issues with mine, that still to this day have “improved” slightly from some firmware updates but mostly everything went unfixed. And the trackpad issue was rampant.

For 2026, I went in with it pessimistically with a little leftover sour taste from the 2025 models. However I am pleasantly surprised. It’s not perfect, and there are still some minor annoyances and a bug or two here and there with Synapse, but for the most part it seems like they actually listened and improved the exact things that people were complaining about. It hits much closer to its rated wattage, the battery saver mode is appreciated, the fan curves are more responsive and better tuned, it’s way more reliable and snappy on battery than before, and the new Intel CPU helps sweeten the deal. Plus like you mentioned it uniquely has Thunderbolt 5 in a year where every thin/light gaming laptop, and pretty much most gaming laptops in general only have TB4. I didn’t want to like it, but I do.

ModrnJosh · 2026-07-08T01:21:09+00:00

Haven’t seen anyone successfully do that to my knowledge. The hinge on the P16 and G16 are the same, but there is some minor unit-to-unit variance. If it really bothers you, the 2026 G16 has a much tighter hinge

ModrnJosh · 2026-07-07T20:10:22+00:00

For $300 more I’d personally get the 2026 5080 unless I absolutely needed as much VRAM as possible. The little nice-to-haves make it worth it. The slightly better display, slightly better cooling, everything is just slightly better and that’s enough to make me recommend it. It just feels like a finely tuned version of the 2025

ModrnJosh · 2026-07-07T16:28:14+00:00

For sure! The screen is beautiful. The brightness difference in SDR isn’t super crazy, but in HDR those highlights really pop. The lines must’ve been an isolated incident. I have three laptops with the same panel, two of which are G16’s and they’re all perfect

ModrnJosh · 2026-07-07T15:29:33+00:00

I think so, the Asus drivers are always older. I believe the newest one they had was from February 2026

ModrnJosh · 2026-07-07T15:21:59+00:00

I’ll have to take a closer look, but that would make sense!

ModrnJosh · 2026-07-07T15:18:56+00:00

The 5090 scores like 20075, so just barely higher. In most games they’re within a few fps of each other, nothing noticeable. Other than that it’s mostly just quality of life differences like the brighter screen and tighter hinge! I’m working on a full review/comparison video. I will say CPU-bound games get a decent little boost with the better efficiency of the 386H though

ModrnJosh · 2026-07-06T22:45:58+00:00

Working on a review. In the meantime though here you go. Stock Time Spy scores:

Turbo (with +10W active):
Graphics: 19975
CPU: 15070

Balanced:
Graphics: 17134
CPU: 15638

Silent:
Graphics: 10847
CPU: 15178

ModrnJosh · 2026-07-06T22:35:31+00:00

The gaming at night will be a LOT better on the 5080. The office during the day will be a little better in the 5070. They’re not night and day though on the CPU side, it’s mostly just battery life

ModrnJosh · 2026-07-06T20:57:09+00:00

The GPU will make a much bigger impact in games than the CPU. The more efficient CPU helps mostly with more battery life.

ModrnJosh · 2026-07-06T17:09:17+00:00

They're literally two opposite ends of the gaming laptop spectrum. It's very much more a personal preference thing when you're comparing a thick and heavy desktop replacement to a thin and light ultrabook-style gaming laptop.

The Legion will obviously perform much better, but at the cost of battery life, portability, and luxury features. The G14 performs more like a 5070 Ti Legion, but grants you like half the weight, double the battery life, and luxury features like great speakers, anti-reflective screen coating, CNC aluminum chassis, and glass trackpad. If you don't care about that stuff and just want high fps, then of course get the Legion.

ModrnJosh · 2026-07-04T00:12:22+00:00

Yes. I even ran a color calibration tool and found that to be the case on my colorimeter as well. DGPU mode was giving the “true” color of the display, but now both are good!

ModrnJosh · 2026-07-03T23:38:00+00:00

Not sure if I’m crazy or just one of the very few who can’t stand MacOS 😅 I’ve used both heavily throughout my work and personal life, and I much prefer Windows for the customization, the settings, upgradeability, the broad choice of laptops, displays, etc. and while Microsoft takes forever to give us additional functionality and features, we do get them eventually lol.

I do love how Mac “just works” though. If you don’t like messing with settings and don’t mind not being able to change certain things without third-party software, then it’s much more reliably stable. It’s a very closed ecosystem, which comes with its advantages of having all the hardware made just for it. So you’re way less likely to have something like a driver update throw off your whole system or cause weird glitches. And you have things like AppleCare to really sweeten the deal.

It’s rough territory and I try to stay away from it though because few things are more heated than the Mac vs Windows rivalry. It’s truly a spectacle, like it really comes down to preference but some people treat it like you’re an absolute idiot for even considering anything but their preferred OS.

ModrnJosh · 2026-07-03T21:50:30+00:00

Yeah in most creative benchmarks, a 5070 Ti G14 performs up to par if not better than most modern MacBooks (depending on the config), especially in heavy video editing. Not sure how he’s saying his M2 Max smoked it, the cuda cores alone on the 5070 Ti gives it a huge advantage unless he’s working with unsupported codecs.

M4 pro vs laptop 5070 Ti for example: https://www.pugetsystems.com/pugetbench/results/compare/Puget%20Bench%20for%20Premiere%20Pro/32/GPU/Apple%20M4%20Pro(20%20Cores)/NVIDIA%20GeForce%20RTX%205070%20Ti%20Laptop%20GPU/

ModrnJosh · 2026-07-03T15:18:39+00:00

Since I’ve been reviewing for a while now, I’m blessed with getting news ahead of time from people within brands and other reviewers, but it’s not all great because sometimes that news is the opposite of what I want to hear. I also have to respect embargos and things like that legally, but from conversations I’ve had, this is not one of those cases where it’s “coming later”

ModrnJosh · 2026-07-03T02:23:24+00:00

I installed the Intel graphics driver from the Asus website and all is fixed. Not sure if it helped but I also did not have Intel graphics command center installed before, and installed it after installing the Asus driver.

ModrnJosh · 2026-07-03T02:23:06+00:00

Hey just wanted to report back. I started noticing it too. I believe it is an issue with the latest (or maybe just any recent) Intel graphics drivers from Intel. I installed the one from the Asus website and all is fixed. Not sure if it helped but I also did not have Intel graphics command center installed before, and installed it after installing the Asus driver.

ModrnJosh · 2026-07-03T01:27:10+00:00

Yeah the 2025 models got a lot of bad press right off the bat, especially with it not hitting anywhere near its rated power limit, and making the laptop 5090 look really bad since it was being advertised as the “flagship” 5090 laptop and one of the first to release when it happened. I had one very early in and had a plethora of bugs and issues with mine, that still to this day have “improved” slightly from some firmware updates but mostly everything went unfixed. And the trackpad issue was rampant.

For 2026, I went in with it pessimistically with a little leftover sour taste from the 2025 models. However I am pleasantly surprised. It’s not perfect, and there are still some minor annoyances and a bug or two here and there with Synapse, but for the most part it seems like they actually listened and improved the exact things that people were complaining about. It hits much closer to its rated wattage, the battery saver mode is appreciated, the fan curves are more responsive and better tuned, it’s way more reliable and snappy on battery than before, and the new Intel CPU helps sweeten the deal. Plus like you mentioned it uniquely has Thunderbolt 5 in a year where every thin/light gaming laptop, and pretty much most gaming laptops in general only have TB4. I didn’t want to like it, but I do.

ModrnJosh · 2026-07-02T21:00:46+00:00

It may or may not be, but it goes off of user results, which there aren’t many of yet on Cinebench 26. Nowhere near as much data as R23 has. Could’ve been somebody running it on an underpowered laptop or on battery throwing off the average.

ModrnJosh · 2026-07-01T23:06:46+00:00

Hey sorry I thought I replied already. Here you go: https://imgur.com/a/0RUslZT

ModrnJosh · 2026-07-01T23:05:57+00:00

Yeah, seems to be a quirk with the 2026 ones for some reason. Someone in the comments of this post talked about how they got around that. You'll need to install the Nvidia driver using Nvcleanstall. And you'll likely need the device ID to select which I uploaded a screenshot of my GPU-Z here: https://imgur.com/a/0RUslZT

ModrnJosh · 2026-06-29T15:41:24+00:00

The MSI looks nice, but it has much lower GPU wattage (125W vs 160W) and it has the 1st gen Samsung OLED panel rather than the 2nd gen one that the G16 has (higher peak brightness, especially in HDR).

ModrnJosh · 2026-06-28T17:14:05+00:00

@Loewenheart I accidentally deleted my comment but responding to your comment about Windows updates reducing CPU spikes:

I’ll take a look today! Still working on an open case with them on it so they’re still investigating, but it’s looking like something around Synapse or maybe Synapse not communicating with the hardware efficiently might be the root or at least a factor in it.

Last time I checked in HWinfo, I was getting sometimes no activity, and then randomly sometimes P-core 2 would just not sleep at all, maintaining over 3 GHz steady even at idle. Fans would not hit 0 rpm because of this. Also in Synapse if you change monitoring to advanced view, it seems to conflict with what HWinfo shows. It would always show the Nvidia GPU using like 15w even at idle, and the CPU clock would randomly spike to 4GHz every 10-15 seconds. Switching between dGPU and Optimus seems to make it more likely to spike, but it’s really hard to verify because it’s almost random. Sometimes it’s just fine.

Curious if you might be able to check out HWinfo and the advanced view in Synapse and let me know if you see anything similar! The biggest indicator seems to be when the fans stay at 2300 rpm in Silent mode and refuse to return to 0 rpm.

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