CPU usage ussually high all of a sudden

[impaledmango]

I bought a gtx 480 the other day and ever since I installed it in some games the cpu usage gets really high. When I load battlefield it goes to 100% and fluctuates between the normal 20% from before and 40-100 which is much higher then when I had my old 4890. My CPU is an i7 920 @ 3.6ghz.

The motherboard is gigabyte x58 ud3r. It's not a huge deal because it doesnt get that hot, but i still find it weird that it is reaching that percentage of usage and it would be great if someone could help fix it.

 

[jimmysmitty]

What resolution are you playing at.

Also, did you completley remove the old ATI drivers before installing the new nVidia drivers?

 

[impaledmango]

I game at 1920 x 1200, and I used driver sweep to uninstall the ati drivers, I find that it only happens in some games. In Heroes of Newerth, Guild Wars, Left 4 Dead 2, League of Legends and Stalker I get no issue, but in BFBC2, TF2, Crysis, GTA 4, I get it. I'm gonna try and uninstall and reinstall the games and see what happens.

 

[Raidur]

Is your performance being effected at all?

You should expect your CPU usage to increase with a faster GPU. With the faster frames the CPU is going to need to do faster calculations.

 

[impaledmango]

There's no performance hit at all, but I find it weird going from a 4890 to GTX 480 to cause my CPU usage to increase to 50s. I can't really re-install all the games to test because it'll kill my bandwidth through steam, but what you said does make sense, anyways I lowered the OC to 3.2ghz and lowered the voltage to 1v, at 1.25v + a gtx 480 my room is getting allot hotter while I game!

 

[JDFan]

There's no performance hit at all, but I find it weird going from a 4890 to GTX 480 to cause my CPU usage to increase to 50s. I can't really re-install all the games to test because it'll kill my bandwidth through steam, but what you said does make sense, anyways I lowered the OC to 3.2ghz and lowered the voltage to 1v, at 1.25v + a gtx 480 my room is getting allot hotter while I game!

It just shows that your gaming performance was being held back by the old video card and so the system was not using the CPU as much as it would if the game was running full speed - the new card can run at a faster FPS so the CPU is being utilized more to keep it running at that higher FPS performance.

 

[impaledmango]

Best answer selected by impaledmango.

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey