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PrincessFrosty
Supreme [H]ardness
- Joined
- May 6, 2009
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CPU utilization differs from area to area, I think the AI of the NPCs and enemies accounts for some of it, how many physics objects are being simulated and things like that, so it does differ, I'm sure there's places with less than approx 50% utilization.
It's also a hard thing to measure accurately, it was more than 50% on some cores and less on others, 50% is an approximate across all 4 cores and doesn't take into account the lack of hyperthreading use etc. It seems to behave like it has one master thread which runs at a higher usage than the secondary threads. It seems likely that whatever thread is in charge of the render/update cycle in the engine would be a bottleneck and whenever that thread maxes out the core it's running on the whole engine would be CPU limited, irrelevant of what is happening on the other threads.
It's very possible due to lack of threading optimisation (which is incredibly common in games) that the CPU will never be able to run 100% CPU usage or even close to it. However in these circumstance where the CPU becomes the bottleneck you would expect the GPU usage to start dropping and becoming erratic, and that's not happening in my tests, GPU usage is locked at 99% which is classic sign of it being the bottleneck.
As I explained prior, simply demonstrating task manager to be a bad way of measureing CPU performance is only half the battle, you'd have to explain why the GPU was also fully loaded, in order to reasonably support the conclusion that in this specific circumstance the game was CPU limited and not GPU limited.
It's also a hard thing to measure accurately, it was more than 50% on some cores and less on others, 50% is an approximate across all 4 cores and doesn't take into account the lack of hyperthreading use etc. It seems to behave like it has one master thread which runs at a higher usage than the secondary threads. It seems likely that whatever thread is in charge of the render/update cycle in the engine would be a bottleneck and whenever that thread maxes out the core it's running on the whole engine would be CPU limited, irrelevant of what is happening on the other threads.
It's very possible due to lack of threading optimisation (which is incredibly common in games) that the CPU will never be able to run 100% CPU usage or even close to it. However in these circumstance where the CPU becomes the bottleneck you would expect the GPU usage to start dropping and becoming erratic, and that's not happening in my tests, GPU usage is locked at 99% which is classic sign of it being the bottleneck.
As I explained prior, simply demonstrating task manager to be a bad way of measureing CPU performance is only half the battle, you'd have to explain why the GPU was also fully loaded, in order to reasonably support the conclusion that in this specific circumstance the game was CPU limited and not GPU limited.
