New system: Question about performance in skyrim (FPS, gpu usage, cpu usage)

salawow · Nov 17, 2014

Hello ! I finally recieved my graphic card to complete my new system. I play skyrim (heavily modded with an ENB). I managed to balance mods pretty well so i have 60fps almost everywhere. Though, there are still specific places where fps drops to 40. Seems normal since these places are heavier than others. However, when monitoring CPU and GPU usage in these area, i noticed that CPU is at 60-70% and GPU is at 50-60%. Any idea why it does that ? Why won't it just max GPU usage and give me more FPS ? When testing in unigine, GPU goes to 100%, and CPU will go to 100% when doing things like 7-zip compression.

Specs:

i5-4590
8gb ddr3 1600
Asrock H97 fatal1ty performance
GTX 970
650w PSU (XFX core)
HDD

Thanks !

hang-the-9 · Nov 17, 2014

This question actually comes up a lot, why is my comuter not running at 100% all the time?

And I don't actually think I've run across an official answer aside from "the game and drivers just don't".

salawow · Nov 17, 2014

Thank you. So if it's driver or game engine limitation i'm reassured. I was afraid it could have been hardware problem or CPU bottleneck

hang-the-9 · Nov 19, 2014

salawow :

I'm sure it's not a hardware issue or a bottleneck with your CPU or video card.

A quick way to check is to run a benchmark, then overclock the video card run the benchmark again, if speed stays the same, you are CPU limited. You should run the benchmark 3 times at least, reboot between each run and average the results. Do the same run of 3 after the overclock.

salawow · Nov 19, 2014

So i ran some benchmarks in unigine and overclocked and everything is normal. Tested Skyrim with overclocked GPU and nothing changes beside lowering GPU usage a little bit. I was saying earlier that CPU usage was at 60-70%, but now i noticed it spikes to 85% as well.

Anyway, i finally found the issue in Skyrim. I tried and tested almost every possible settings, and found that the problem was shadows. On that specific area i was talking about, setting shadows on Ultra gives 40fps. High gives 54fps. Medium gives 60fps. (tested with disabled vsync and medium gives in fact 69fps). At medium shadow setting, GPU usage is allowed to go to about 70-80%.

So i googled a little bit about skyrim and shadows and it appears that shadows in Skyrim are handled by the CPU instead of the GPU, so that explains the issue pretty well. Better looking shadows isn't worth 20fps to me, so it will stay at medium.

Thanks again for the help

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New system: Question about performance in skyrim (FPS, gpu usage, cpu usage)

salawow

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