CPU usage during gaming...60% = normal?

[tonysama916]

So I was benchmarking Far Cry 3 on my Xeon E3-1245 and Asus GTX 670 DCU2 and the highest CPU usage during gaming (including fighting pirates) was 60% on the busiest core... averaging around 50-60% on each core.

Is this normal? What is your experience during gaming?

 

[Scott_D_Bowen]

Checks: http://ark.intel.com/products/52274/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E3-1245-8M-Cache-3_30-GHz

4 cores
8 threads.

Yes, that is indeed normal.

Anything over 50% means that HyperThreading is actually gaining you something.

This is normal for all SMT processors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_multithreading
- Including AMD's FX-#### series, which are actually SMT, they're not full cores as they share an FPU (and/or other internal Resource Contention between 'pseudo-cores').


'tis a shame that some people on another forum, that shall remain unnamed, encourage people that there is a bottleneck because of this foolishness...


EDIT: Try disabling HyperThreading and run the benchmarks again, each 'real' cores ability to reorder instructions for Out-of-Order execution will sky rocket; much like the Core i5 - only with the Xeon's cache!
- Each core will be busier, and performance may actually be higher due to this (^) and reduced resource contention between cores.

There is a fairly well known article on the net somewhere that covers this, from back in the Athlon K7 days when the DEC Alpha processors (including one that was never made if I recall correctly) explains it in 'somewhat' plain English.

 

[tonysama916]

Thanks for trying to explain it in plain English! I'll disable hyperthreading and see what happens

 

[tonysama916]

Best answer selected by tonysama916.

 

[tonysama916]

As a quick update i disabled hyperthreading and my CPU usage jumped from 50 - 60% on the busiest core to 80-100%!! It felt smoother but I haven't ran a FRAPS test yet.

 

[Scott_D_Bowen]

FRAPs can impact the performance of stuff, I've seen a high performance OpenGL game go from 1400fps to 700fps to 1000fps with just FRAPS loaded.