If a game is not running well on an i3, is there a way to put the load the cpu handles on the gpu?

Carlos Hudson-Bey · Mar 26, 2014

Hello everyone, I recently upgraded my video card from a gtx 650 to a gtx 770, but am not experiencing the best performance because I have an i3 3245. In games like Alan Wake that work best with a quad or hexacore cpu, could I used my 650 to handle what the cpu does?

Shneiky · Mar 26, 2014

Sadly, you can't. CPU is a Central Processing Unit where as GPU is Graphic Processing Unit and they do different things in a different matter. As of now, not much software (well there is GPU acceleration) does offload certain things from the CPU to the video card and only AMD Mantle is aiming at improving CPU+GPU coexistence. Before the flaming starts on, DX 12 was just announced and is still not here, where as Mantle is already available. I am not promoting Mantle or anything.

Junit151 · Mar 26, 2014

Shneiky :

The internet has become a very sad place for unbiased people who just want to get a point across.

Back on topic (sort of):
If Alan Wake uses Nvidia's PhysX, you can put both cards in and actually use one to calculate the PhysX to take load off of the main gpu. Not many people know you can do that so just throwing that out there.

Shneiky · Mar 26, 2014

Alan Wake uses Havok and has a preference to AMD cards. Nothing he can do with the 650 to fix his Alan Wake problem.

Junit151 · Mar 26, 2014

But at least he can run a side monitor or fold on it

The good news is that you can upgrade your cpu to a better one without changing your motherboard!
(As opposed to those people that have like an i7 920 or something)

Carlos Hudson-Bey · Mar 26, 2014

Very well; it was worth asking. Thank you both for your quick responses.

Carlos Hudson-Bey · Mar 26, 2014

I just remembered! Would a substantial overclock help at all? And considering my processor, what is the best overclock I could realistically hope to achieve?

Junit151 · Mar 26, 2014

Sadly you can't overclock any i3 processor.

Carlos Hudson-Bey · Mar 26, 2014

Did you mean to say they can't be overclocked substantially? Because using Extreme Tuning I was able to take it from 3.4ghz to 3.55ghz.

Junit151 · Mar 27, 2014

That is just the turbo boost. Your clocks will increase when you cool it well enough, but you can't actually overclock it like change voltages or base clock or anything. It isn't unlocked.

Rationale · Mar 27, 2014

On Nvidia cards, if a game uses PhysX, you can set just the GPU to handle PhysX. As others have said, that won't help in Alan Wake since it doesn't use PhysX. But since your 770 is a lot stronger than your i3, you can at least check in your Nvidia Control Panel to make sure you have PhysX set to run on the 770. That may help in games such as Metro: LL or Borderlands 2, which make heavy use of PhysX.

Khaleal · Mar 27, 2014

Newer AMD (28m) cards have a technology called Mantle built-in.. It's an API like DirectX but a much lower-level one.. Games developed with Mantle in mind (Like Battlefield 4) will be able to talk to your graphics card almost directly saving many CPU calls and making the best performance out of your GPU and decreasing bottlenecks effect.
Other than that, there is nothing you can do about your CPU performance..

coozie7 · Mar 27, 2014

Just a point, Alan Wake uses the CPU for some of its special effects, while it's impossible to change this, or usefully overclock the current i3 CPU, you could try lowering certain effects to reduce the workload-fog and lighting are the main offenders.
As has been said, upgrading the CPU to a more powerful i5 will resolve the overall problem and release the full potential of the GTX770 in all games.
A useful overclock would be at least by 500MHz.

Carlos Hudson-Bey · Mar 27, 2014

I see, thanks again everyone.

Shneiky · Mar 27, 2014

Khaleal is grumpy, going around deselecting best answers.

cst1992 · Mar 27, 2014

Shneiky :

You're not going to get any medal for getting most Best Answers on Tom's Hardware.

BTW, looking at the entire thread, your solution isn't the best anyway.

Shneiky · Mar 27, 2014

If you understood the problem, then you would have understood the answer. The op asked a question, and the answer was no, simple as that. TH is a place where people ask questions and get answers, not a place where everybody writes an essay. I mentioned this, because I against people just walking around selecting and deselecting best answers. It is the OPs choice. Whatever he find useful. And whatever someone else who might google this searching for an answer.

cst1992 · Mar 27, 2014

Couple of points:
- You said CPU and GPU are totally different, and you cannot offload work of CPU to GPU, but you can if you have a game that uses PhysX, specially when you have a separate GPU for PhysX or a strong GPU.
- Another thing is that while it is correct that Mantle is a technology that reduces CPU overhead and hence bottleneck, the counterpart for Mantle is not DX12, but an update for DX11 which promises even better performance than Mantle.

Shneiky :

While I partially agree that it's the OP's choice whether an answer is best or not, or as you say, useful to him, once a best answer is selected, new posters generally don't visit that thread.
It may happen that there is a better answer than the one selected/or there isn't a good enough answer, and someone selected a best answer just for the sake of it.

Shneiky · Mar 27, 2014

1.
"You said CPU and GPU are totally different"

Yes, coding for CPU and coding for GPU is different, they work in entirely different matter. You can't just offload "whatever the heck you want". GPUs have the ability to be amazingly fast, while CPUs are, as of yet, much more precise than GPUs. Try Googling Mental Ray, Vray, Arnold (CPU renders) and FurryBall (GPU renderer) and see how much GPU rendering sucks compared to CPU rendering. RealFlow or any other types of liquid simulations. (hint - 99% they run on CPU). nVidia is trying to push their CUDA for physics, but CPUs are, and at least up untill 202 or so, will be far more accurate.

2.
"and you cannot offload work of CPU to GPU"

No, I said there is "GPU acceleration" in my 1st or 2nd post. But 90% of the software does not use it. The 10% of software that does use it - well not to a great extend. One of the best and most noticeable GPU accelerations are in Sony Vegas (OpenCL). Still, only a minority of functions is accelerated on a GPU. And in games - the CPU and GPU act as how the code was written. If the simulation is to be calculated on the CPU - then CPU it is. If it is send to the GPU - then GPU it is - and there is nothing none of us can do to change that.

3.
PhysX is a minority of usages. Get it, minority. There are so many other engines and almost all of them run on CPU. And Alan Wake is a game that does not have PhysX. The Havok runs on CPU.

4.
As I said before, drop this DX 11 update / DX 12. It is not here. It won't be here for a while. Whatever it promises, it does not help the person who published this thread. He has a question now, not when those updates come.

Junit151 · Mar 27, 2014

cst people like you make Tom's a vile place like the rest of the internet. If you read the whole thread, you'd see how we are talking about ONE game.

One game that:
- Nods towards the Red Team
- Does not use PhysX
- Is more CPU intensive than many other games

Also, DX12 is Microsoft's (who was pushed by Nvidia) answer to mantle. Go read the press releases before you speak.

Khaleal · Mar 28, 2014

Shneiky :

I'm sorry guys! I thought it was a bug and was trying to figure out what's going on being a forum owner myself

Sorry again..

cst1992 · Mar 28, 2014

Junit151 :

http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/177407-microsoft-hints-that-directx-12-will-imitate-and-destroy-amds-mantle
http://hothardware.com/News/NVIDIA-Talks-High-Performance-Graphics-APIs-DirectX12-DirectX11-Improvements-and-OpenGL/

NVIDIA said that a future DX11 driver will drastically improve efficiency and offer “Mantle-like” performance improvements in existing applications. It plans to achieve this goal by reducing general API overhead and improving multi-core scaling. Other areas of investment in the NVIDIA’s DirectX 11 driver include an updated memory model with tiled-resources that offer more explicit control over resource management.

Learn to keep an open mind.
Insulting anyone is not going to prove your point/make you look cool/whatever-your-reason.
The game you said may not use PhysX, but there are other games also that could experience speedup if you assign more work to the CPU, even if they don't use PhysX.

If a game is not running well on an i3, is there a way to put the load the cpu handles on the gpu?

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