AOE III - High GPU utilization

[Herr_Koos]

Hi all,

Age of Empires III is quite old by now, so I would expect my system to handle it without breaking a sweat (see specs in my profile). I play it at 1680x1050 with pretty much everything turned on.

The thing is, after playing for a while, my GPU fan audibly speeds up, and when checking my temperatures afterwards, RivaTuner confirms this. According to the graphs, I get 70C and near 100% fan speed. The only other game I have that comes anywhere near to pushing the card this hard is StarCraft 2, which is brand new and more intensive at high settings, I would think.

Any ideas? Is this known/expected behaviour for the game?

 

[BeCoolBro]

Do you enable or force extreme amounts of aa(eg.8xaa+)?All rts games tend to challenge configurations due to the amount of objects rendered(gpu) and the amount of ai and physics calculations(cpu) that need to be done.AA especially can push a gpu that hard.

 

[Herr_Koos]

Nope. I mostly have AA off or 4x at the most.

A quick check using GPU-Z has confirmed that utilization goes to 98%+.

 

[BeCoolBro]

Nope. I mostly have AA off or 4x at the most.

A quick check using GPU-Z has confirmed that utilization goes to 98%+.

It could be a bug.Is it fully updated?Maybe it hogs the gpu due to an error of the game's code.

 

[Herr_Koos]

I just patched it to the latest version, will see if it helped.

 

[plznote]

That is weird. My 9600GSO MAXES it out at full HD.
And it is trash compared to your 9800GTX+.

 

[Herr_Koos]

That is weird. My 9600GSO MAXES it out at full HD.
And it is trash compared to your 9800GTX+.

I can max the game out, it's just that my GPU seems to me working extremely hard.

 

[Herr_Koos]

UPDATE: I may have discovered the culprit. The main menu screen chases the GPU to 100% almost instantly, while game itself is much more relaxed. This seems similar to what StarCraft 2 did when it was first released. Does anyone know of a fix for this?