How to check cpu/gpu usage?

[Sauf]

Just did a quick test in france free flight (109) and core "0" max's @ 48% (spikes, generally in low 40's high 30's), the rest of the cores are all being used but never seem to get over 30%. I currently have affinity mask disabled (per a beta performance thread) was running it at 14 but havent had a chance try affinity again and compare them yet.

[Kakashi]

I am a noob when it comes to all this, and how much of the hardware should actually being used while gaming... but shouldn't it be closer to 100%? instead of being close to zero?

I don't mean to insult the devs, I'm sure they'll sort it out eventually. But 40% is extremely low isn't it? (If it is that would be good, it would mean that when all problems are fixed my comp would run this game better )

[Sauf]

Mate I'm no guru myself, there are ppl on this thread who can explain a lot better than me, but yeah at the moment I think GPU is the bottle neck for me, that being said I remember it took 4 years or so till the tech caught up with 1946 and I could turn water=4 in config, tbh I'm happy to be in at the start, though I do go through stages of anger and disappointment at times, but that just might be the piss talking.

S`

[squidgyb]

In all honesty I doubt that it's the GPU - or the CPU, in an odd way. I have a tendency to go off on tangents while trying to explain something I think I understand, so try to bear with me...

It's mainly the CPU, but in most cases just turning up the CPU won't help you beyond a certain point - the same is to be said by the GPU. There are a lot of... knots... in the code - think of it like a huge machine that has been having wire upon cable upon wire plugged into it day after day, for, well, 4-5 years. These cables get tangled, and what the devs are currently doing is untangling the cables.

If the cables were all straight and laid out perfectly in parallel, all cores on a PC could run 100% as the "machine" is being supplied constantly from all the cables.

Ah, I'm a little bit drunk on a Friday night and I fear that I'm becoming as nonsensical as raaaid (sorry raaaid, I love you but sometimes you make littel to no sense!).

What I'm trying to say is that if the code gets all straightened out, and all the loops, dud ends, and "knots" get cleaned out, then it should use as much of the cpu as it can. Because it's a complex beast, and has to do a hell of a lot of calculations, in parallel, and provide the results of those calculations to the GPU, so it in turn can make sense of the results and show them in a pretty display on the screen for you. In reality it will never use 100% of every system in any given PC, because some part of it will hold the other bits back. Which part does this will depend on the quality settings in the nvidia control panel and CoD, the speed of your CPU/GPU, background processes, and a myriad of other things.

There's a lot going on in there, you know.

[Kakashi]

Well you do seem to be making some sense still thanks for all the clarification, I actually have a quad core Q9000 @ 2000Mhz combined with a pretty descent Nvidia 9800m GTX 18months ago which seems now (along with my cpu) to be severily outdated today... I still think that 35 to 40% CPU usage is still extremely low despite your information (which you noobified quite nicely to my understanding). Anyway only time will tell I think

What about other quad core users? Are your CPUs also being used so poorly? please post your data so I can have an idea

EDIT: Lol at your Raaaid comment

[15JG52_Brauer]

If you have a single core you would expect 100% utilisation, but multi cores and multi threading are far more complex - you have to run seperate threads for different parts of the game, but they may have dependencies on other threads, so may stop while waiting for input from something else on another core that has not finished. There will be a limit to how many threads can be split out before you actually slow things down - kind of like how SLI/crossfire does not scale to 300% with 3 cards - there is a law of diminishing returns. The devs are working to improve things, but dont expect a quad core to be automaticaly using twice as much cpu power as a dual core. Also it depends on resolution - at high res the GPU may be maxed out - so the cpu is actually waiting for the gpu before it can crunch more data - while at low res the GPU is not maxed out and will therefore call for more from your cpu (assuming vsync is not enabled).

i re-enabled processaffinity mask to 14 and got at least 7 - 10 fps back

[Troll2k]

Alacrity PC is a program that will turn off unnecessary processes for gaming.
It used to be called FS Autostart.

http://alacritypc.kensalter.com/download.html