read the last line of the post for the question if you don't want to read my reason for the question
I decided to fire up GTA 4 since there has been news that its DLC will be made available for PC. I was met with constant framerate drops and game slowdowns like I was driving threw molasses. I didn't remember the game playing that badly so I started running Hardware Monitoring on my second monitor.
anyways, I observed 90%+ usage on Core 0 and 80%+ usage Core 1 with my E8500 @ 4.1 Ghz. I also observed GPU usage generally spiking between 0 to 100% usage. the 0% usage were the instances where I mostly experienced framerate drops and game slowdown.
I originally used GTA 4's auto configure option to configure settings with my stock 4870 512 playing @ 16*10. obviously, the auto configure settings sucked. so I started testing to see what was causing the GPU usage drops to 0% and observed that the Reflection Resolution and Shadow Quality setting were essentially the culprits. the View Distance and Detail Distance had an effect on framerate but wasn't causing GPU usage drops to 0%. Video memory usage never came close to 512 MB.
so, does anyone have an idea why GTA 4's reflection resolution and shadow quality has a detrimental effect on my GPU's usage stats? is my CPU the reason (not feeding information quickly enough so the GPU goes idle) for the GPU usage drops?
I decided to fire up GTA 4 since there has been news that its DLC will be made available for PC. I was met with constant framerate drops and game slowdowns like I was driving threw molasses. I didn't remember the game playing that badly so I started running Hardware Monitoring on my second monitor.
anyways, I observed 90%+ usage on Core 0 and 80%+ usage Core 1 with my E8500 @ 4.1 Ghz. I also observed GPU usage generally spiking between 0 to 100% usage. the 0% usage were the instances where I mostly experienced framerate drops and game slowdown.
I originally used GTA 4's auto configure option to configure settings with my stock 4870 512 playing @ 16*10. obviously, the auto configure settings sucked. so I started testing to see what was causing the GPU usage drops to 0% and observed that the Reflection Resolution and Shadow Quality setting were essentially the culprits. the View Distance and Detail Distance had an effect on framerate but wasn't causing GPU usage drops to 0%. Video memory usage never came close to 512 MB.
so, does anyone have an idea why GTA 4's reflection resolution and shadow quality has a detrimental effect on my GPU's usage stats? is my CPU the reason (not feeding information quickly enough so the GPU goes idle) for the GPU usage drops?
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