Poor FPS, CPU never goes above 50%

[Shadylurker]

Specs:

Q6700 @3.33Ghz (4 core)

ATI 6850 1gb

8gb ram

win7x64

 

fps 7-16 in the ka50 "Battle" mission

 

I know my system isn't the greatest, and I was trying to figure out what was stressed the most for a possible upgrade when I noticed not one core will go above 50% (they all hover right around there in game), to be sure I used Windows performance monitor to log it, and sure enough it never goes anywhere near 100%. In fact it goes higher when loading in and out of the single player DCS world instance. It fluctuates in game and even goes down to nearly nothing when I shut off the game. As a test I ran prime 95 just to make sure something wasn't going wrong hardware side, and yea...it worked fine, shot up to 100%.

 

Any idea why this is happening? It did this in another game as well but I cant seem to remember the specific game.

 

Any Ideas of what I can do?

[Kuky]

You can't do anything, the sim uses little more than 1 core (main game engine is on 1 core and sound engine is on another core) so your CPU having 4 cores doesn't help and they will never be utilized fully unless the game engine is coded to use more threads that run on separate cores.

 

Your CPU is getting outdated so your only option is to either overclock your existing CPU as much as it allows or upgrade (new M/B, CPU, RAM)

[Rotorhead]

Yeah, but he said that none of his cores goes above 50% I am really not an expert about computers, but i guess that one core (the one used by main engine) should be running at max, while others are relatively idle. Or am I wrong?

[Kuky]

No, on my PC none of the cores are at 100% ever (I think only during loading 1 core might get up to 100%) so this is normal. In game I get about 30 maybe 33% total CPU utilization (4 cores here, with HT off)

[Rotorhead]

Ah, did not know that. Sorry for my disbelief mate :)

[EtherealN]

Note that within a processor therer are several types of execution units. This means that if the CPU is weak in, for example, floating point operations, and the application is heavily dependent on FP throughput, the integer resources will have relatively little to do because the FP's are the bottleneck. (The same thing can also happen with other things - like cache being too small and requiring a lot more communication "out-of-chip", or cache being too slow to handle all the data and instructions fast enough, etcetera.)

 

Thus, not seeing 100% utilization on a specific core does not eliminate the CPU as a potential bottleneck.

Edited July 22, 2012 by EtherealN

[BRooDJeRo]

Im running the game as a server with 10-15 visitors on max settings at 40-70 FPS.

CPU is at max 25-30%. Seems indeed most cores arent used. :doh:

The memory doesnt go above 50-55% and the videocard seems also on undercapacity.

 

AMD X6 Phenom 2

AM3+ board

8Gb DDR 2000Mhz

EVGA Nvidia GTX 460 se 1Gb

 

At the moment the most resources are from in memory. System performance with GCS seems to rely not on alot of memory, but fast memory. 8Gb seems more than enough, but having at least 1600-2000Mhz DDR3 memory is vital for DCS. Very fast DDR2 of around 3-4 GB at 800-1000Mhz does the trick too with an AMD X2 running on 50-55%. The result is a similar FPS number with the same GFX card.

 

A positive side is that when youre running a server, alot of systemresource like CPU are spared for other programs like TS3 or SQL/html servers.

 

However knowing that your rig is capable of much more and also showing performance difficulties is kind of hard to grasp as an addicted gamer. Specialy when you see it all working like a charm with other software.

[Pikey]

i see the same things on some other multicores. CPU will show 50% rather than 100%, I assume it's the way windows is showing CPU as a fraction of all the cores, but then that's not always the same with others. I definitely think its at capactity though and its just the way it's being shown.

 

If that didnt make sense then if you have 2 cores and only one is used and its full then the CPU as a whole is used half...ie 50%.

 

There is a lot of history with multi-core discussions. Multi core utilisation is best between different simultaneous apps since not many apps break down seperate processes to use multiple cores.

 

Try giving DCS it's own processor and remove other things like Trackir to a seperate logical CPU.

[BRooDJeRo]

Theres no multicore discussion here.

 

My mind works differently than that of the blabla sheep.

 

Measuring = knowing

 

When i look at other programs the measuring of CPU's is according to specs and the readout is fine. Its alos confirmed a few postsup even and by the devs that it only runs on 1-2 cores resultingin low CPU measurement.

 

And i believe what i see, dont let others change you mind with socalled highly studied assumptions. I dont care about 'discussions'.

[Shadylurker]

Im running the game as a server with 10-15 visitors on max settings at 40-70 FPS.

CPU is at max 25-30%. Seems indeed most cores arent used. :doh:

The memory doesnt go above 50-55% and the videocard seems also on undercapacity.

 

AMD X6 Phenom 2

AM3+ board

8Gb DDR 2000Mhz

EVGA Nvidia GTX 460 se 1Gb

 

At the moment the most resources are from in memory. System performance with GCS seems to rely not on alot of memory, but fast memory. 8Gb seems more than enough, but having at least 1600-2000Mhz DDR3 memory is vital for DCS. Very fast DDR2 of around 3-4 GB at 800-1000Mhz does the trick too with an AMD X2 running on 50-55%. The result is a similar FPS number with the same GFX card.

 

A positive side is that when youre running a server, alot of systemresource like CPU are spared for other programs like TS3 or SQL/html servers.

 

However knowing that your rig is capable of much more and also showing performance difficulties is kind of hard to grasp as an addicted gamer. Specialy when you see it all working like a charm with other software.

 

 

There are more hardware intensive games/simulations/programs that look better, do more work and runs/scales better with hardware.

for instance people have hardware that benchmarks (not just in 3d programs) 75% better then mine in every different situation whom are getting 5 more FPS then me.

[Congo_Toey]

This is an interesting thread as I am seeing some things like this that i posted on a different thread but might be worth posting her as well.

 

My system is getting around 22 fps average at the moment.

 

This is my system:

i7 980x @4.5GHz Hyper threading off.

12G DDR3 at 2001 MHz

EVGA Classified SLI Motherboard

ocz revodrive x2 pci-express ssd as my disk.

ASUS HD 6970 DirectCU 2G GPU@980MHz Memory@5800

Triple Monitor Eyefinity with 6048x1200 resolution

TrackIR 5

CH Products fighterstick, pro throttle and peddles

 

Can think of any other relevant info

 

My graphics setting are all on high, with HDR,MSAA and TSAAA turned off

 

MY CPU Load is total is about 8% with activity on 3 cores on at approx 30%, the other 2 at about 15%

 

My GPU is maxed out at 99% all the time.

 

It seems to me that my GPU is being the bottle neck.

 

Have tried all the graphics to minimum and that gave max of 30 fps.

 

Seems something is really loading the GPU a lot but cant work out what it is, the older versions I had a bout 10fps more on all settings