First off, I understand that games requre a lot of cpu usage, that is why I have the Athlon 64, but I don't think that it should always be at 100% usage whenever any 3D app is running.
This whole thing was brought to my attention when I was comparing 3DMark05 scores with a friend. Before my hard-drive failure and subsequent Windows reinstallation in April, I always got close to 6000 in '05. Since then, with the various Catalyst drivers and all settings the same as they were before, I only get around 4300. This puzzled me but I thought it was just in that app, which doesn't really matter anyways.
I have since run 3DMark03, and again, with the same settings I only get about 9000 when I used to get over 13K. Doom 3 timedemo was about 52 fps, now only about 43. Basically every benchmark I could remeber what scores I had (I lost almost everything in April) was now about 80% as high.
I have two monitors and so i opened up task manager on the second monitor and anytime any 3d app is running the cpu usage goes to 100%. Under the processes tab, the time is completly used up by the game process (no extraneous processes using up cycles). This would not bother me except that I am running these test specifically to isolate the GPU. I ran 3DMark05 at 1600x1200 , doom 3 at 2048x1536, fear demo at 1280x960 with soft shadows, and other game,s all with FSAA and CPU usage was always 100%.
I can't compare this to my computer before the crash since I never ran similar tests, but I did run similar GPU-isolating tests on my friends computer and cpu usage was never full (though that could be skewed by the fact that it was a p4 with HT).
I unistalled all the ati drivers, ran driver cleaner, then reinstalled the cat 5.6 (last ones before HyperMemory which slightly degrades performance on cards with 256 mb of memory). No performance change.
I am looking for any input here regarding the lower graphics performance or the high cpu usage that would be great. If you have a similar hardware setup and can check CPU usage while gaming I would be much obliged if you would see how yours stacks up against mine. Maybe this is normal, but I wouldn't think that the CPU would be bottlenecked with such high graphics settings.
As a last note, yes I do have cool 'n' quiet enabled, but I checked with CPU-Z while gaming to make sure that the CPU was fully clocked.
Thanks for your help/input.
This whole thing was brought to my attention when I was comparing 3DMark05 scores with a friend. Before my hard-drive failure and subsequent Windows reinstallation in April, I always got close to 6000 in '05. Since then, with the various Catalyst drivers and all settings the same as they were before, I only get around 4300. This puzzled me but I thought it was just in that app, which doesn't really matter anyways.
I have since run 3DMark03, and again, with the same settings I only get about 9000 when I used to get over 13K. Doom 3 timedemo was about 52 fps, now only about 43. Basically every benchmark I could remeber what scores I had (I lost almost everything in April) was now about 80% as high.
I have two monitors and so i opened up task manager on the second monitor and anytime any 3d app is running the cpu usage goes to 100%. Under the processes tab, the time is completly used up by the game process (no extraneous processes using up cycles). This would not bother me except that I am running these test specifically to isolate the GPU. I ran 3DMark05 at 1600x1200 , doom 3 at 2048x1536, fear demo at 1280x960 with soft shadows, and other game,s all with FSAA and CPU usage was always 100%.
I can't compare this to my computer before the crash since I never ran similar tests, but I did run similar GPU-isolating tests on my friends computer and cpu usage was never full (though that could be skewed by the fact that it was a p4 with HT).
I unistalled all the ati drivers, ran driver cleaner, then reinstalled the cat 5.6 (last ones before HyperMemory which slightly degrades performance on cards with 256 mb of memory). No performance change.
I am looking for any input here regarding the lower graphics performance or the high cpu usage that would be great. If you have a similar hardware setup and can check CPU usage while gaming I would be much obliged if you would see how yours stacks up against mine. Maybe this is normal, but I wouldn't think that the CPU would be bottlenecked with such high graphics settings.
As a last note, yes I do have cool 'n' quiet enabled, but I checked with CPU-Z while gaming to make sure that the CPU was fully clocked.
Thanks for your help/input.
