What's the deal with GPU Usage and Framerate?

[RavenSEAL]

I've been getting frame rate drops in games such as Just Cause 2(Which noted, doesn't take advantage of more than 3 cores) My e8500 hangs around 60% usage when playing the game, while the GPU just kicks back and relaxes in the 30-50% range even when overclocked to 920/1130. Seeing frames dropping from high 40s @ 1080p high settings to mid/low 30s.

In bad company 2, GPU doesn't kick past 70%(at most). I know i'm bottlenecked on that one by my dual core.

Mass effect, happens at times too. FPS drop to the low 30s, GPU usage under 50%. I can list borderlands as well as Red Faction: G.

Ironically, no issues of such with UE3 games such as Batman AA and mirror's edge. Are these just signs of CPU intensive games or is there more of a science behind it? Is this where the lower amount of ROPs and Shader units really shows their darker side? Just be aware that i'm monitoring these with MSi afterburner OSD, so these are live, in game figures.

Thoughts?

 

[happy medium]

Try lowering your memory overclock on your card.

Could just be poor code in game.

 

[Ataristic]

This really can't be helped, as it is an issue on how the individual game was coded, some are CPU intensive, others GPU intensive. You can see the difference on how games like COD:BO or FLNV run with very good fps on even less powerful hardware since they are optimized console ports, they are usually more balanced than PC only titles, like Metro 2033 and Stalker COP, which are exclusively GPU intensive and will punish most GPU.

 

[toyota]

Metro 2033 is also a console game.

 

[Gonad the Barbarian]

I think what RavenSEAL is asking is, if both the GPU is at 60% and the CPU is at 60%, what is the bottleneck keeping either or both from going 100% and churning out more FPS? Maybe you're hitting the memory/bus bandwidth limit of the GPU/CPU.

Or if you're using vsync this will likely keep your GPU/CPU from going 100% because they only have to maintain an FPS <= refresh rate. A lack of triple buffering will have a greater effect because FPS is limited further to multiples of the refresh rate and will cause more severe slowdowns. I suspect if you're using vsync this is what's causing most sudden FPS drops. If the game doesn't have a triple buffer setting D3DOverrider can force it in DirectX games.

 

[RavenSEAL]

I think what RavenSEAL is asking is, if both the GPU is at 60&#37; and the CPU is at 60%, what is the bottleneck keeping either or both from going 100% and churning out more FPS? Maybe you're hitting the memory/bus bandwidth limit of the GPU/CPU.

Or if you're using vsync this will likely keep your GPU/CPU from going 100% because they only have to maintain an FPS <= refresh rate. A lack of triple buffering will have a greater effect because FPS is limited further to multiples of the refresh rate and will cause more severe slowdowns. I suspect if you're using vsync this is what's causing most sudden FPS drops. If the game doesn't have a triple buffer setting D3DOverrider can force it in DirectX games.

I can always increase my memory clock to increase bandwidth. But @ 147.2GB/s, i don't think that's an issue.

 

[Ataristic]

Metro 2033 is also a console game.

It is now, but what i refer to as a console port is a game that was originally intended for consoles, and then ported to PC, such as Halo or Resident Evil 5. Since consoles are much more underpowered than PC, such games will run great on even the weakest of PC. Metro 2033 was originally released on PC, and was then cut down and ported to console.

 

[jimhsu]

No one's brought up texture loading yet. In open-world games (Fallout, Metro 2033, Just Cause 2 certainly qualifies, Mass Effect to an extent) the game typically loads content in the background, which uses CPU but more importantly disk IO (which is SLOOOOWWWWWW compared to memory, the PCI-E bus, or anything else in the system). Modern meshes and textures are quite big ... for example, a 1024x1024 texture with bump and specular maps takes up to 9.1MB uncompressed. You'd have dozens of potential objects, which means potentially hundreds of MB to load during a scene change, sending your FPS crashing down.

I'd try to chart your disk queue length (Windows 7 can easily do this from the resource monitor), or put the game on a RAID array and/or a SSD drive to see if that bottleneck gets smaller. It won't disappear, because hard disks are SO MUCH SLOWER than everything else in the system, unless you have a truly insane storage solution.

 

[Throckmorton]

Welcome to the "I should have spent a few extra bucks for a quad core even though everybody said it's useless for games" Club

 

[RavenSEAL]

Welcome to the "I should have spent a few extra bucks for a quad core even though everybody said it's useless for games" Club

Lol, i bought this CPU back in the days when it was the god of overclocking and performance. Recommended CPU to run Crysis optimally.

 

[Throckmorton]

Lol, i bought this CPU back in the days when it was the god of overclocking and performance. Recommended CPU to run Crysis optimally.

I know, and I bought my E6600 in 2007 when I could have gotten a Q6600 for like an extra $100. The quad would still be going strong

 

[toyota]

It is now, but what i refer to as a console port is a game that was originally intended for consoles, and then ported to PC, such as Halo or Resident Evil 5. Since consoles are much more underpowered than PC, such games will run great on even the weakest of PC. Metro 2033 was originally released on PC, and was then cut down and ported to console.

Metro 2033 was designed for pc and console at the same time and released on both at the same time.

 

[happy medium]

Welcome to the "I should have spent a few extra bucks for a quad core even though everybody said it's useless for games" Club

Hey, now that was funny....

Yea, I jumped last year (e8400) and got this quad for $150.

 

[snarl]

I know, and I bought my E6600 in 2007 when I could have gotten a Q6600 for like an extra $100. The quad would still be going strong

The Q6600 is legendary, awesome chip