Low FPS, but also low CPU/GPU usage

[DarkForceRising]

I'm somewhat puzzled here. I recently installed and tried to play Serious Sam 3:BFE, only to discover that the performance was terrible. What seems weird to me is that it isn't maxing out either my processor or my graphics card. If it was, that would at least tell me what the limiting factor here is.

It's maxing out at 15-20 fps in general gameplay at ~45% overall cpu load and ~45% gpu load. If I walk into an enclosed area, it temporarily spikes to 40 fps and 70% gpu usage. Temperatures are in the 50-60C range at this load. The cpu is a quad core and the cpu load split isn't even, so presumably SS3 isn't perfectly multithreaded. Still, the most load on one core is around 70%. With performance this bad, I would expect to see something maxed out, but no. Vsync is off both in-game and at the driver level.

Just to see if it was just SS3, I tried booting up some other games. Shattered Horizon was next. It had basically the same deal, except load was up at ~70% for both the cpu and gpu.

The Witcher 2, though, was different. The gpu was pegged at 99% the whole time. That's obviously gpu limited on my machine. Even at that load, gpu temps maxed at ~72C, which is fine.

What is going on here? Any ideas? The only one I've got is that somehow the cpu is limiting things, even though none of the cores are utilized fully. Am I missing something really obvious?

Specs as follows (never overclocked, either):
Athlon II x4 635 @ 2.9Ghz (stock)
ATI 4850 512MB
4GB DDR2-800
520W Corsair PSU

 

[fastman]

What harddrive, how full?
Try running some benchmarks http://www.futuremark.com/
See what numbers you are getting there.
May be time for a new computer?

 

[oynaz]

Might be a driver issue. Try updating your video card and chipset drivers.

 

[Puppies04]

What is going on here? Any ideas? The only one I've got is that somehow the cpu is limiting things, even though none of the cores are utilized fully. Am I missing something really obvious?

If the games you are playing can only utilise 2 cores then you will only see 50% cpu usage (+whatever widows/other open programs are using) likewise if you are running out of VRAM your GPU may not be able to fully utilise its processing power and may show less than 100% usage even though it is bottlenecking itself.

What resolution are you running at?

 

[heymrdj]

SS3 is a high VRAM game, the textures are quite large. That 512MB is a very large bottleneck. I use a 5850 in one rig, 6870 in the other, no issues with the game. Uses mainly two cores of my 1045t X6's.

 

[sm625]

Underclock your cpu by 20% and see what effect that has on your framerate. If it doesnt have much effect then it is most likely your video RAM.

A 2.9GHz athlon core with no L3 cache and only 512K of L2 isnt exactly the most speedy thing in the world. Especially coupled with DDR2.

 

[DarkForceRising]

What harddrive, how full?
Try running some benchmarks http://www.futuremark.com/
See what numbers you are getting there.
May be time for a new computer?

The hard drive it's installed to is a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3320620AS 320GB 7200 RPM, according to Newegg. It has 35GB free out of 300GB.

Probably. I've been managing to hold on, though, and was hoping to make it until whatever the next Intel release is, since the Ivy's didn't really impress me. I should rephrase that. The Sandy's or Ivy's would stomp all over my current processor, but if I was to get one now, I'd basically be equaling my brother's computer from a year ago.

Might be a driver issue. Try updating your video card and chipset drivers.

Video drivers were updated last night, chipset drivers are apparently slightly out of date (a few months?), but the last release was in 2010 and they don't even have a Win7 version.

If the games you are playing can only utilise 2 cores then you will only see 50% cpu usage (+whatever widows/other open programs are using) likewise if you are running out of VRAM your GPU may not be able to fully utilise its processing power and may show less than 100% usage even though it is bottlenecking itself.

What resolution are you running at?

Yeah, I thought about the core usage. I'm not sure how multithreaded SS3 is, honestly. VRAM usage hadn't occurred to me. I didn't realize 512 MB was considered a bottleneck. Last I checked, going from 1GB to 2GB caused minimal changes, and I didn't think 512 -> 1GB would make that much of a difference.

I was trying to run at 1920x1200, which is my native resolution. I did try lowering it to 1680x1050 initially, but that didn't help much. However, if I turn everything to low and run at 1280x800, I get between 30 FPS and 110 FPS, so I can make this playable.

I thought I would be getting similar performance to the HD remakes of the First and Second Encounters.

Underclock your cpu by 20% and see what effect that has on your framerate. If it doesnt have much effect then it is most likely your video RAM.

A 2.9GHz athlon core with no L3 cache and only 512K of L2 isnt exactly the most speedy thing in the world. Especially coupled with DDR2.

I'm going to see if I can do that now. I'm aware that my system isn't the fastest. I originally built it in 2007, with the graphics card updated to the 4850 in 2009. The Athlon II was the fastest CPU I could drop into my AM2 motherboard when the CPU was upgraded, probably in 2010 sometime. I look at those dates now and I think that it doesn't seem that long ago.

 

[Puppies04]

Yeah, I thought about the core usage. I'm not sure how multithreaded SS3 is, honestly. VRAM usage hadn't occurred to me. I didn't realize 512 MB was considered a bottleneck. Last I checked, going from 1GB to 2GB caused minimal changes, and I didn't think 512 -> 1GB would make that much of a difference.

The reason going from 1gb-2gb doesn't make a difference a lot of the time is because "most" newish AAA games on med/high setting @1080p use under 1GB VRAM.

The reason going from 512mb-1GB does make a difference is because "most" newish AAA games on med/high settings use over 512mb VRAM.

 

[heymrdj]

The reason going from 1gb-2gb doesn't make a difference a lot of the time is because "most" newish AAA games on med/high setting @1080p use under 1GB VRAM.

The reason going from 512mb-1GB does make a difference is because "most" newish AAA games on med/high settings use over 512mb VRAM.

It was that way with OS's. When XP SP1 came out, a single module of 256MB of RAM could mean the difference between tearing hair out and a pleasureful experience. When you had 512MB of RAM and alot of startup programs XP would hit the RAM wall mid-login and start page filing. This paging would be a viscious cycle as it retrieved, loaded, ran the program, repaged the new running instance, stored it back to the hard drive and repeated for the next service/program. This could add minutes to login time even if you were just 100MB over 512 at boot. But add a 256MB module in (768) and all of a sudden Windows flies, you may boot up at 700/768, but you kept the OS in RAM which could shave minutes off of your boot time to the point that you could actually load and run something.

 

[BrightCandle]

If I was you I would want to test the assertion that the GPU VRAM is full. Get the latest version of GPU-Z and see if it can show you how much VRAM is being used in its sensors. I don't know if its a feature of modern cards and drivers or if it'll work on your system but its at least worth a go to go along with the GPU utilisation (which presumably you are reading from something like GPU-Z as well).

 

[Puppies04]

If I was you I would want to test the assertion that the GPU VRAM is full. Get the latest version of GPU-Z and see if it can show you how much VRAM is being used in its sensors. I don't know if its a feature of modern cards and drivers or if it'll work on your system but its at least worth a go to go along with the GPU utilisation (which presumably you are reading from something like GPU-Z as well).

Good idea, also if it works with your card afterburner will give you live data on how much vram is being used.

 

[DarkForceRising]

What harddrive, how full?
Try running some benchmarks http://www.futuremark.com/
See what numbers you are getting there.

Behold:
PCMark: 1899 PCMarks.
3DMark: 7369 in Graphics, 9036 in CPU, P7725 3DMarks overall.

Verdict: Not so hot.

If I was you I would want to test the assertion that the GPU VRAM is full. Get the latest version of GPU-Z and see if it can show you how much VRAM is being used in its sensors. I don't know if its a feature of modern cards and drivers or if it'll work on your system but its at least worth a go to go along with the GPU utilisation (which presumably you are reading from something like GPU-Z as well).

It didn't occur to me to see if I could check VRAM usage. I'll do that the next time I boot it up.

Good idea, also if it works with your card afterburner will give you live data on how much vram is being used.

Yeah, I've been using a combo of Afterburner and HWInfo.

 

[Puppies04]

Let us know what you find, it is always nice to have an answer to these issues.

 

[DarkForceRising]

Ok, results:

This is what I get when I manually customize the settings to what I think should be the lowest memory usage:

From top down, that's:
GPU temp, load
Framerate
VRAM usage
CPU core #1 usage
CPU core #2 usage
CPU core #3 usage
CPU core #4 usage
Overall CPU usage
GPU usage
GPU temp
CPU temp
Various GPU temps

So I've got 494 MB VRAM usage. This is a 512MB card. Okay, that's pretty well maxed out. I get ~20 fps at 41% GPU and 45% CPU load (max of 73% on one core). What's sort of weird about this is that this isn't the lowest I saw the memory go. I changed the settings, couldn't get a screenshot, closed the game, and then loaded it back up. It went from 300MB before closing the game to this, afterward. See the screenshot #4 below for what happens after I change from Medium GPU memory settings to these without closing and opening the game again.

Here's what I get when I click the lowest automatic in-game setting for GPU memory:

A little lower memory usage, maybe a few fps more, but that's it.

Here's medium VRAM settings, which is where autodetect puts me:

Over 500MB of VRAM. It definitely looks VRAM limited here. The rest of the stats are very similar to before.

And here's when I switch from medium to what I think would be the lowest:

365MB of VRAM used. Still similar in the rest of the stats, though. The first time I did this, I closed the game and booted it up again and got screenie #1. I dunno, maybe if I'd played longer, the usage would have gone up again?

Anyway, this hasn't really gotten me anywhere. I'm definitely limited at medium VRAM settings or higher, but not necessarily at low. Even when I'm not obviously VRAM limited, it doesn't appear to help. I'm still puzzled.

I did try to underclock my CPU to see if that changed anything. My PC wouldn't boot. Maybe I can try something else.

 

[BrightCandle]

Anyway, this hasn't really gotten me anywhere. I'm definitely limited at medium VRAM settings or higher, but not necessarily at low. Even when I'm not obviously VRAM limited, it doesn't appear to help. I'm still puzzled.

The test told us at least what it wasn't, progress however small is at least progress. I am puzzled as to the cause of the problem however, not sure what to do next.

I did try to underclock my CPU to see if that changed anything. My PC wouldn't boot. Maybe I can try something else.

Then underclock it. I think its important to see if changing the CPU performance adjusts the performance in game.