Low FPS Crysis w/ 75% usage

I still play Crysis so I can see what my rig can do as its the most demanding game I own right now . But I noticed something weird...

(When I play Crysis I open up task manager and pull it across my 24" 1920x1080 screen so i have a preview of a long time of CPU usage. I also open up MSI Afterburner and set it on top of Task manager to see GPU usage.)

Now I noticed something funny when I closed Crysis. I was having frame stutters occasionally and low FPS overall, but my CPU usage never went higher than 75%. My GPU usage in Afterburner never went over 80%. Sooo:

Why is Crysis have stuttering and low FPS, but it isnt using my GPU or my CPU?

My Rig:
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-Bit
MSI 870-G45
AMD Phenom II B45 x4 3.1 Ghz (Unlocked Athlon II x3 445)
MSI GTX 460 1GB Cyclone (Operating at 820/1640/2000)
4GB G. Skill Ripjaw DDR3 1600 (Operating at 1333)
500 Watt Corsair PSU

your processor is slow and doesn't have any L3 cache and your video card lacks enough vram for that game. Lower your resolution to 1024x768 and try again. You can also turn off motion blur and crank back other settings.

.............. and disable physx in the nvidia control panel.

I read your post. Did you read mine ? First of all Tom's is wrong about the L3 cache if someone did write an article here about it being insignificant. I suggest you look it up elsewhere. Ram, L3 cache and HD cache all help to keep your games from stuttering to put it simply. There is physx involved in Crysis. 1gig is NOT enough for 1080p and it surely isn't enough for Crysis. I've been down that road. If you don't lower your resolution and tinker with your game settings you'll keep complaining until the cows come home. Your system cannot run Crysis the way you want or the way you expect. Try running in DX9 mode. That's the only other thing I can suggest that would help you.

I had to belittle myself. Here's a quote direct from tom's;;;

"Finally, it remains to be said that L3 cache memory is imperative if you want to reach the highest performance levels. At the 2.6 GHz clock speed that we benchmarked, it may not be that obvious, but at 3 GHz and up we see the Phenom II scaling much better than the Athlon II X4."

I hate to throw into this flame fest...but my 955 overclocked to 3.8 and crossfired 5770's that I used to run forced me to drop resolution to 1680. At that resolution I could play most settings on the highest level and drop a few to keep things running nice. Crossfired 5770's roast a 460. I would recommend dropping to 1680 and tinkering with a few settings down in that range. You should be able to get good FPS at 1680.

Haha thanks for your input .

BUT, my question wasn't: Can my computer run Crysis? It is: Why am I only using 75% of my rig?

I did run it with higher settings and it still ran just fine. Not to mention I have my GTX 460 OC'ed to about 470 speeds. I just got home, and ill tinker with it for a few...

Here at the L3 tests on gaming that Toms did:

http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 416-6.html

Here’s a forum. Look at the last post (Against another guy who made ridiculous claims without backing it up):

http://www.overclock.net/hardware- [...] -does.html

I used to think the same thing till i was told differently by about 7 other people in a thread I posted in. I did some research and pulled up mutlple things that pointed that L3 cache does almost nothing in gaming.

Finally someone else . Roughly 75% of my CPU is being used by Crysis, the other 25% is free, according to Windows Task Manager. My GPU usage ranged from 65-70%, spiking to 85% sometimes. Im not sure how many cores it can use...

I know irts that I had to leave agin and I didnt see this morning when I posted.

These two items you list take all credibility out of your diagnosis. I was ready to believe the cache issue, but this is just flat wrong.

Crysis does NOT use physX. It uses the Havoc physics engine instead.

People, myself included, have been running Crysis at maxed settings for years with 1GB and lower VRAM.

i did maxed settings with my old 4870 512mb at 1080p.....

I'll bench it later tonight and stick the results up. I also will try messing with the settings and see if I can get that to work.

No i haven't installed a fresh copy. I have 6 users, all with multiple "i" devices and personal programs, its a pain in the **s to get them all back to where it was. Plus I have Adobe Suite Master Collection CS5 all set up, i dont want to reinstall that mess . I could try, but its a last ditch effort and im not there yet .

haha I was actually planning to upgrade to this sometime soon:

8 Core Bulldozer
A Better Mobo
Corsair H80 or H100
Either ATI 6990 or GTX 590 (I don't have room for two cards in my case)
16GB DDR3 1600 RAM
1200 Watt PSU

(Edit) Sometime soon meaning like Christmas lol

Didn't read nearly the whole thread, but there was certainly plenty of fail up front, as well as some sound advice. Here are the facts of the matter:

1)Your CPU is holding you back. I've taken a Phenom II X4 well over 5GHz on LN2 and it still bottlenecks 2x GTX 460 in SLI in the Crysis graphics benchmark some of the time. That's right, not even talking about the CPU benchie. Idk if you've unlocked the L3 cache or if you even have it to unlock, don't know much about such things. BUT, Crysis/Warhead love L3 cache.

2)Your performance monitor can hide from you that you're CPU bottlenecked. You CPU monitor reports to you every second; in that time your CPU does billions of operations. So even if too many of the cycles were full when critical operations needed to be performed and it got backed up, it will still say to you, "Hey, I only used 75% of my cycles over the last second, I'm good." Afaict, Crysis is poorly optimized in two ways; it's not serious about multithreading and the thread(s) it does run are poorly optimized in themselves.

3) I know that Crysis needs more than 1GB of VRAM at 1080p if run on very high with heavy antialiasing. Exactly what the cutoff is, I don't remember, but the core of a GTX 460 can't nearly handle everything at very high at 1080p anyway, say nothing of anti aliasing. I haven't paid too much attention to VRAM requirements, but I'd suggest getting a graphical mod like Blackfire's to get good looking graphics and decent performance, rather setting everything to a combo of high and medium. Unfortunately, the mod doesn't help with the CPU too much.

Well, if your using 80% that means either 20% is being used either waiting on some event and/or system processes. If you haven't done a clean install in a while then it's possible some copy protection or another is sucking up cycles. It could also be that you have some processes running that are sucking up RAM (monitoring tools, bit torrent, chat clients, development tools, etc.) and the slow down is a result of your system having use the swap file every now and then. Of course with 4GB you would really have to clean out your system if that was the case since that shouldn't happen on a decently clean install .

Finally it could be your antivirus. Microsoft Security essentials seems to hide some of it's processes so you may not see it in the regular task manager. It also likes to do a quick scan of files you access (that's a pain if it's an iso ) but Norton and Macafee are alot worse in that reguard.

i seriously doubt that you can get a phenom 2 to 5ghz, (in fact I'm outright calling bs, phenom 2's hit the wall and lose stability around 4ghz) and on top of that how the heck would it bottleneck anything at that clock rate? I have a 955 be @ 3.8 ghz with 2 gts 460 768mb cards and get about 50-60 fps at maxed out details @ 1080p with 4x aa

SIGH

1) Read what I said
2) Understand what I said (Google something like "Phenom X4 LN2" [you obviously haven't a clue what the italicized part means])
3) ???
4) Profit

Edit: A golden Phenom II X4 will be stable at 4.4GHz on water, no problem. Mine is far from golden and I have it 24/7 stable @4.2 on an H50.

Do you have fast user switching on? Any chance that 25% is being used for other users logged on? Have you tried making sure your the only user on (Clean boot) and that it still uses only 75%?

I would think it should be a bit higher, but from what I know 75-80% is rather normal for a game.

Those numbers are about exactly what I'd expect with your system. I'd recommend turning AA down to x2 or off. A single 460 is not exactly the most powerful setup, and Crysis really is that demanding.

By these benchmarks, you are doing quite well (though I'm sure those slow downs are more in line with this): http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 684-8.html

Agreed, I don't notice a difference between 4x MSAA and 16xCQ, other than the fact that 16x is utterly unplayable. As for the whole framebuffer issue, I suspect that Crysis looks at your system resources, and sets certain values like draw distance depending on how much VRAM you have. Even if I "max out" my in-game settings, my draw distance is terrible, and I know for sure that I can max out the 1GB on my 460s without breaking a sweat.

I wasn't complaining, i wasn't whining. I was simply stating facts and asking questions. You were the one complaining when you were blabbing about how you were belittling yourself. Actually that might be considered whining...

Sorry everyone, when i reread his post, it kinda ticked me off.

Every card is different. If you've done all that your supposed to and cant' cross 820, guess what card you have?

Only hyper transport that I know of is the CPU. Might be an unstable unlock/overclock. Not sure why OCing the GPU would reveal that. Up the Vcore or NB voltage?

Wow.... I went to Newegg to see if there were answers in the reviews and there are a great many people who get the HTSFE. They all say to manually set the Vcore and RAM voltage... There was also a guy who had the switch turn to 20% auto OC from the factory, though I doubt I missed that. So tomorrow I will try the combination of fixes and see what happens. Maybe I will get to 900! Yay!

It's nice to know when I said increase the vcore or NB voltage I was on the right path.

Fun, that's why I ask if anyone knew in my first post. If it only does two or three threads, you'll always be at 75%.