[SOLVED] CPU high usage and low GPU usage (fortnite)

Apr 21, 2020
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Hello, recently i've upgraded my GT 1030 to a GTX 1050Ti, and ever since my CPU usage has been very high playing fortnite..

I've tried putting my settings too high, epic, too make it more GPU dependent but I still get 80-90% usage. I have a 144 hz monitor, when I cap my frames at 144 its at 85-90% and my gpu is at around 30%

My CPU is a i5-2400. Also, the CPU usage is too high that the fortnite textures dont even load in. The buildings dont load in since its too high. I really need a fix asap for this.

Specs:
i5 2400
GTX 1050Ti
8gb ram
cx 450 psu
0M5DCD Board
Optiplex 390
 
Solution
Cpu has nothing to do with paint. When a cpu pre-renders a frame, it places every object, gives it shape, dimensions placement on screen etc but it's basically a wire frame. That gets sent to the gpu which adds the textures, the colors, the shading variations, anti aliasing, appearance.

So if the frame was a face, the cpu would say 'this is a nose, this is how big, these are nostrils, they go here and here, there's a shine on the left this is a zit, it's on the right over here' . That gets sent to gpu. The gpu is set for low details, so is basic geometry and puts a pink nose in the middle of the face with a couple of dark blurrs for the nostrils and a slight shadow on the right highlighting the left. Change that to epic details, the...
Apr 21, 2020
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Have you tried capping the frame rate to something lower? Maybe 100fps, for example? And do you have the FPS display enabled in-game to monitor what actual frame rates you are getting?
No, I have not tried too cap it at 100fps. And, yes I do. I get good fps, but my cpu usage is just wayyy to high..
 
Your texture issue is usually more to do with low amount of RAM and the game being installed on a HDD.

Your cpu usage is about right for an older quad core/thread cpu. As above try capping your FPS. Mainly the cpu determines the best FPS you can achieve, the gpu determines at what resolution and game settings you can achieve that FPS at. If you want to reduce cpu workload you need to reduce FPS.

When just at Windows desktop what is your cpu usage?
 
Apr 21, 2020
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Your texture issue is usually more to do with low amount of RAM and the game being installed on a HDD.

Your cpu usage is about right for an older quad core/thread cpu. As above try capping your FPS. Mainly the cpu determines the best FPS you can achieve, the gpu determines at what resolution and game settings you can achieve that FPS at. If you want to reduce cpu workload you need to reduce FPS.

When just at Windows desktop what is your cpu usage?
I have 800gb left in the hdd its installed on, (1tb hdd), I have 8gb ram and my ram has never been an issue for me since it always stays under 50-60% while playing. In windows desktop while browsing chrome and having discord open and some background apps usually its around 10-15%..
 
I have 800gb left in the hdd its installed on, (1tb hdd), I have 8gb ram and my ram has never been an issue for me since it always stays under 50-60% while playing. In windows desktop while browsing chrome and having discord open and some background apps usually its around 10-15%..
50-60% usage doesn’t mean too much, Windows can start caching to the HDD long before you get to 90%+ usage. When in game what is your HDD usage, if it’s close to 100% this is likely 1 problem.
 
Apr 21, 2020
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50-60% usage doesn’t mean too much, Windows can start caching to the HDD long before you get to 90%+ usage. When in game what is your HDD usage, if it’s close to 100% this is likely 1 problem.
My HDD usage is around 15-35% usage. Rarely goes up too 40. Sometimes even goes too 5% or 0. CPU is always at 100% when in game. (Battle royale, not creative) Dont know why.
 

Karadjgne

Titan
Ambassador
Multiple factors. It's an older 4thread cpu. You are playing a game that likes to use 5-8 threads. You are playing online multiplayer with large amounts of AI. Fortnite might be a simpler game, but that doesn't mean it's simple, it's quite involved with the cpu.

Understanding what usage really is might help. Usage isn't how much of the cpu ability is used, it's how much resources the cpu is using. The cpu always works at 100% of its ability, if it's capable of pre-rendering 100 frames a second, that's exactly what it's going to send to the gpu, regardless. Usage is how much bandwidth, memory controller, Lcache, and other things that the cpu needs to use to fulfill that 100fps. Reaching 100% usage means its using maximum resources, and is waiting for availability of more, which slows down fps output. That's affected by the game code, some in-game settings like grass detail, viewing distance, name tags, floating damage. AI.

High usage is usually indicative of lack of threads, lack of Lcache, weaker cpus. You can turn down/disable those particular cpu bound settings, but nothing short of a cpu swap to a stronger cpu with greater Lcache and more threads will fix high usage. Moving upto a stronger gpu just exasperated the problem because the stronger gpu is capable of greater detail intensity, more shadow affects, higher degree of grass detail etc, so puts higher demands on the pre-render of every frame.

Gpu just has to paint the picture, it's on the cpu to say what's in the picture, what collisions, what angles, what interactions, where everything is what dimensions, what numbers, what AI, npcs, damage, lighting, shadows, intensity, particles, velocities, directions, movements.

Crank up your gpu details, lower the cpu details.
 
Apr 21, 2020
98
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Multiple factors. It's an older 4thread cpu. You are playing a game that likes to use 5-8 threads. You are playing online multiplayer with large amounts of AI. Fortnite might be a simpler game, but that doesn't mean it's simple, it's quite involved with the cpu.

Understanding what usage really is might help. Usage isn't how much of the cpu ability is used, it's how much resources the cpu is using. The cpu always works at 100% of its ability, if it's capable of pre-rendering 100 frames a second, that's exactly what it's going to send to the gpu, regardless. Usage is how much bandwidth, memory controller, Lcache, and other things that the cpu needs to use to fulfill that 100fps. Reaching 100% usage means its using maximum resources, and is waiting for availability of more, which slows down fps output. That's affected by the game code, some in-game settings like grass detail, viewing distance, name tags, floating damage. AI.

High usage is usually indicative of lack of threads, lack of Lcache, weaker cpus. You can turn down/disable those particular cpu bound settings, but nothing short of a cpu swap to a stronger cpu with greater Lcache and more threads will fix high usage. Moving upto a stronger gpu just exasperated the problem because the stronger gpu is capable of greater detail intensity, more shadow affects, higher degree of grass detail etc, so puts higher demands on the pre-render of every frame.

Gpu just has to paint the picture, it's on the cpu to say what's in the picture, what collisions, what angles, what interactions, where everything is what dimensions, what numbers, what AI, npcs, damage, lighting, shadows, intensity, particles, velocities, directions, movements.

Crank up your gpu details, lower the cpu details.
My problem is that its too high that my textures wont load in. I dont really care if its high and my textures are loading in. Also in fortnite I dont really know any of the settings that depend on cpu or gpu, I just usually play all low.. I just need too fix my textures not loading in, and im 99% sure the reason they arent loading in is because my cpu is at 100% usage all of the time. Even if I put shadows too epic, and some other settings too epic, my cpu is still high, and my gpu usage becomes high, and my fps just goes down. Its a loss loss. When I play on all low settings capped at 144 fps on 1600x900 my CPU usage is at 100% and everything else is under 40%. Other than my memory (sometimes).
 
Naturally, given a faster GPU, CPU usage will be higher,,,,

You can certainly expect high CPU usage with an old i5-2400...; only way to lower it (not aht that in itself is a or should be a goal) is to become more GPU limited by raising visual quality and detail at 1080P. (the GTX1050 is not really appropriate for higher resolution)

Your fix is a new CPU/RAM/mainboard, and, possibly a GTX1660 as well... :)
 
Apr 21, 2020
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Naturally, given a faster GPU, CPU usage will be higher,,,,

You can certainly expect high CPU usage with an old i5-2400...; only way to lower it (not aht that in itself is a or should be a goal) is to become more GPU limited by raising visual quality and detail at 1080P. (the GTX1050 is not really appropriate for higher resolution)

Your fix is a new CPU/RAM/mainboard, and, possibly a GTX1660 as well... :)
Would me getting a i7-2600 fix the problem?
 
My problem is that its too high that my textures wont load in. I dont really care if its high and my textures are loading in. Also in fortnite I dont really know any of the settings that depend on cpu or gpu, I just usually play all low.. I just need too fix my textures not loading in, and im 99% sure the reason they arent loading in is because my cpu is at 100% usage all of the time. Even if I put shadows too epic, and some other settings too epic, my cpu is still high, and my gpu usage becomes high, and my fps just goes down. Its a loss loss. When I play on all low settings capped at 144 fps on 1600x900 my CPU usage is at 100% and everything else is under 40%. Other than my memory (sometimes).
Have you tried turning textures up to epic and seeing if that helps at all? That might seem counterintuitive, but I noticed on an underpowered laptop with a weak processor that texture loading issues tended to be more common with the textures reduced, perhaps because resizing them requires additional resources as they are streamed in during the game.
 

InvalidError

Titan
Moderator
Also in fortnite I dont really know any of the settings that depend on cpu or gpu
The answer is pretty simple: in the vast majority of games, most graphics-related settings are heavily if not entirely GPU-dependent. Some, like higher resolution textures, will stress VRAM a whole lot more than anything else and running out of VRAM typically translates into a dramatic FPS drop due to the GPU now having to borrow system memory over PCIe to make up the difference between VRAM available and VRAM needed, which may get exacerbated by having only 8GB of system RAM, especially if your swapfile is on HDD.

Hiccups are to be expected when attempting to play new-ish titles using a nearly 10 years old CPU, only 8GB of RAM and no SSD.
 

Karadjgne

Titan
Ambassador
Cpu has nothing to do with paint. When a cpu pre-renders a frame, it places every object, gives it shape, dimensions placement on screen etc but it's basically a wire frame. That gets sent to the gpu which adds the textures, the colors, the shading variations, anti aliasing, appearance.

So if the frame was a face, the cpu would say 'this is a nose, this is how big, these are nostrils, they go here and here, there's a shine on the left this is a zit, it's on the right over here' . That gets sent to gpu. The gpu is set for low details, so is basic geometry and puts a pink nose in the middle of the face with a couple of dark blurrs for the nostrils and a slight shadow on the right highlighting the left. Change that to epic details, the nose is cleaned up, edges are far sharper, nostrils are very evident, as is the zit and all its colors, depth, shadows, shading etc.

The info sent by the cpu is exactly the same, it's on the gpu to decide how to deal with them. How to organise and paint the picture. Changing graphics details doesn't affect the cpu, it's changing the physical details that does. Big difference between a minecraft face and nose compared to a photo realistic BF5 face and nose.

So something as simple as floating damage not only has to be calculated, but also has to be placed on the screen, moved around, added to, changed etc and that's work for the cpu to do, the gpu just has to put the graphical numbers up and paint them red. Disable that feature, and the cpu doesn't have to go any farther than the calculation of damage per frame as that's a game code option. It's slightly different than the zit, because there's no option to disable the facial features, so the cpu still has to render it, whether or not the gpu needs to deal with it.

So cutting back on Some settings can be beneficial to the cpu, but whether or not textures are loading isn't one of them, that's on the gpu. High cpu usage isn't going to change that. Could be gpu drivers, storage glitches, or other things.

An i7 will help, definitely won't hurt, just because the cpu will have extra resources to work with, background and windows tasks no longer need to take up space on the 4 threads of the i5. The i7 has larger Lcache, faster clocks etc.

Everything goes through the cpu, has to. What DirectX does is label things. So at first, cpu can say 'mine' or 'not mine' and send stuff directly to the gpu or keep it and deal with it. That too takes up space, resources.
 
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