During gaming, should GPUs be at 100% usage at all times?

[Mastrocode]

I just got a GTX 970, and I was testing it out with Valley Benchmark. I noticed, with MSI Afterburner, that my GPU usage was only at ~50%? Is this normal? Is my FX-6300 bottlenecking it? I knew it would a bit, but not that bad!

 

[Robertwhyte]

well tell me what score you got and ill tell you lol

 

[Mastrocode]

well tell me what score you got and ill tell you lol

I got around 3700 I believe.

 

[Robertwhyte]

test on extreme hd, if you get between 58 and 62fps, youre good. If you dont update your drivers and BIOS then test again, if its still the same then it could be a bottleneck, but i doubt it.

 

[ko888]

The Unigine Valley 1.0 Benchmark is GPU limited. Very little load is placed on the CPU.

Have you run GPU-Z during the running of Valley to determine what speed the PCI-E Bus Interface is running at? Also check the graphics card's clock rates. Check the Sensors tab page to see what the PerfCap Reason is (i.e. could be Pwr: Limited by total power limit, Thrm: Limited by temperature limit, VRel: Limited by reliability voltage, VOp: Limit by operating voltage, Util: Limited by GPU utilization)