Interesting GPU/CPU Usage

[EZ1]

I've done the low flight thing many times, but I wanted to see how the CPU and GPU usage looked over varying landscapes. What I am seeing looks like the GPU is begin under utilized in some cases for some reason. In other situations like in a typical combat mission over the channel, the GPU stays maxed out as I would expect.

[NedLynch]

I've had the same experience regarding gpu usage, however my gpu usage as measured with afterburner has gone up significantly (from 60-80% to 80-99%) after the beta patch, which I do see as an improvement.

[DrSanchez]

most probably the cities take a lot of cpu power as well as gpu power. Think about all those LOD swaps and all the data that has to be sent to gpu. gpu is not showing 100% usage because it was waiting for the cpu. therefore in that situation the cpu is the bottle neck.

In the countryside there's not a lot of the cpu to do so the gpu is able to run at full tilt.

[EZ1]

But the CPU usage stays relatively low and does not fluctuate regardless of the GPU usage.

[DrSanchez]

that's more than likely windows spreading the threads across all available cores. try it with a game you know is single threaded and you'll see spread 50/50 (if you're running a dual core) even though it spreads the threads it can never go above 100% total for a single thread.

plus as cod is multi threaded (I think) there could be situations where 1 thread is stalled waiting for another thread to release the data it want's to work on. this can stall the cpu also.

[Igo kyu]

Originally Posted by EZ1

But the CPU usage stays relatively low and does not fluctuate regardless of the GPU usage.

I suspect (I would welcome clarification from someone who really knows) that Hyperthreaded CPUs only ever run up to half speed, because there are half the number of cores that Windows thinks there are, and TANSTAAFL.

[Buzpilot]

If you disable hyperthreading in Bios, will it use 4 cores 100%, instead of 8 virtual ones at 50% ?

[Ailantd]

Not sure about this, but also could be that shaders to render terrain were a lot more expensive than shaders to render buildings. Also trees have a lot of geometry, same or even more than buildings at similar distances. If all this is the case that could be a lot less work to gpu in city that in landscape.

[Stefem]

Originally Posted by Igo kyu

I suspect (I would welcome clarification from someone who really knows) that Hyperthreaded CPUs only ever run up to half speed, because there are half the number of cores that Windows thinks there are, and TANSTAAFL.

Windows recognize both physical and logical cores as independent unit, in fact prior to Win 7 the OS thread scheduler not even cared if a core was physical or logical.
The Windows task manager shows the average of all CPU cores usage including logical cores but also can show (depend on configuration) a graph for each core, whether it is physical or logical.

[Fall_Pink?]

Originally Posted by Stefem

Windows recognize both physical and logical cores as independent unit, in fact prior to Win 7 the OS thread scheduler not even cared if a core was physical or logical.
The Windows task manager shows the average of all CPU cores usage including logical cores but also can show (depend on configuration) a graph for each core, whether it is physical or logical.

The HT cores are just parked with CoD whereas the real, physical cores are active with CoD, but cpu power is not the issue with this game.

An i7 or fast i5 is more than enough. Heck, even when I underclock my cpu to 2.8 Ghz it still runs pretty good.

It's just the buggy 3d mode (full, pseudo..) and gpu clock speed that worries me. Sometimes the game starts and my vid card stays at 157 Mhz no matter what. I shut it down and change to pseudo, and all of a sudden the vid card is now at 850 Mhz. Next time, nothing has changed in between, it's back at 400 Mhz and sometimes even back to 157 Mhz.

This is really weird game behavior which is a bit unexpected.

Rgs,
FP