[SOLVED] Why is my gpu being used 97% consistently while my cpu is only being used 30%

Aug 30, 2020
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I play siege and my settings are set to medium and high on some settings. When i used to play on ultra everything the gpu was pegged at 97% and cpu at 30% usage and now i changed to medium and its still the same thing.
Pc specs:
Rtx 2070 super
32gb ram 3600mhz
Ryzen 7 3800x
Gigabyte x570 gaming x motherboard

the gpu is being used fully while im on the lowest possible settings.
 
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Solution
What is your problem?
Is your performance not good?
A game will always be limited by either the cpu or the gpu.

Your test of lowering the settings and getting presumably the same fps, suggest to me that your cpu is what is limiting those particular games.

Be careful how you interpret task manager cpu utilizations.
Windows will spread the activity of a single thread over all available threads.
So, if you had a game that was single threaded and cpu bound, it would show up on a quad core processor as 25% utilization across all 4 threads.
leading you to think your bottleneck was elsewhere.
It turns our that few games can USEFULLY use more than 4-6 threads.
How can you tell how well threaded your games or apps are?
One way is to...
What is your problem?
Is your performance not good?
A game will always be limited by either the cpu or the gpu.

Your test of lowering the settings and getting presumably the same fps, suggest to me that your cpu is what is limiting those particular games.

Be careful how you interpret task manager cpu utilizations.
Windows will spread the activity of a single thread over all available threads.
So, if you had a game that was single threaded and cpu bound, it would show up on a quad core processor as 25% utilization across all 4 threads.
leading you to think your bottleneck was elsewhere.
It turns our that few games can USEFULLY use more than 4-6 threads.
How can you tell how well threaded your games or apps are?
One way is to disable a couple of threads and see how you do.

You can do this in the windows msconfig boot advanced options option.
You will need to reboot for the change to take effect. Set the number of processors to less than you have.
This will tell you how sensitive your games are to the benefits of many threads.
If you see little difference, it tells you that you will not benefit from more cores.
Likely, a better clock rate will be more important.
 
Solution
GPU usage goes up with resolution, detail/quality, and refresh rate, and with a decent processor that can feed it...

Many of the newest games (BF5, for one) at 'only' Full HD (1080P) are still largely GPU limited when quality is ultra/max...

Are you perhaps on a 100/144 Hz refresh monitor as well?

There are several AMD/Intel scaling comparisons with assorted GPUs in various games where you can see if your framerates are at least in the correct ballpark...
 

mjbn1977

Distinguished
I would only be worried if it would be the other way around meaning that you would have a fancy video card that is held back by your CPU. But you your card seems to go full in and can use its full capacity....

Yes, even on low setting you see the GPU at almost 100% as long it is not bottle necked by your CPU. The card always will calculate as many frames per second as it can (as long as it gets updated draw calls from the CPU). So, if you have lower graphics settings, your video cards is still working at 100% but probably pushing out more FPS than working at 100% with higher graphic settings. The only time the GPU would be a less than 100% is if you limit the FPS to a value below what it can achieve ( you can do that in some games). Let say you usually hit 80fps at 100% and you limit fps to 60, you would see less than 100% usage on the GPU.
 
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