Games and CPU usage.

I dont have the latest games on my pc (ironic, since I have a gaming laptop )
anywho I was wondering whats the cpu usage you guys are getting from running just the game itself


Just generalizing here, a good majority of the NBR gamers have sandy bridge or A6/A8 processors

So from the following games (going by the most popular, in no particular order) whats the cpu usage you guys have? For general stuff I measure it by the gadget that is like a black rectangle with all the cores and ram usage and what not

Battlefield 3
Skyrim
Modern Warfare 3
Crysis 1/2

What this thread is trying to address is if these games dont fully utilize these cpu's, then why dont developers code the game to use the leftover cpu power to help handle graphics and unload the weight off the gpu.

I mean the GPU was invented to relieve stress off the CPU when it came to rendering, but now adays (at least for laptops) the GPU is always the bottleneck and the CPU is too powerful for it.

This assuming the games dont fully utilize it.

I dont know if I have made a fool out of myself wiht this thread but worth a shot

Be gentle

 

To me, that is what console ports are, they rely heavily on the CPU.
I would really like to see quad-core support for games; or does this already exist?

 

BF3 says it uses quad core yet on the beta it made my 2630qm turboboost to 2.4-2.5ghz so im assuming it only made use of 2 of the cores.

unless it saw the hyperthreading.

And I dont mean console ports, like the cpu in desktops, hell even notebooks (current ones) are way above the standards for games in the same timeframes.

Thats leftover potential that could be used better ya know? Help a GPU out!

 

I'm pretty sure the way CPUs handle calculations is so much different from the current GPUs that the difference would be marginal at best.

One example that leads me to believe this is the Bitminer program that came out a year or so ago. People originally used processing power for this, but eventually learned that if they used their GPU instead it was 100x more efficient because of the way the GPU calculates the process compared to the CPU.

 

Leftover CPU power is still drawrfed by even the weakest of graphics cards. GPU's are very limited in what they can do since they're so specialised, but they can completely destroy anything else out there when it comes to what they're designed for - graphics processing. The gain would be minimal at best.

 

For the 2630QM, turbo is as follows:

2900 (1 core)
2800 (2 cores)
2600 (3 or 4 cores)

It could have been running in two or three core turbo mode.

 

BF3 is threaded for four cores. The only other game I can think of is SC2. Crysis is completely GPU dependent, a measly i3 can run it fine. Never tried the others.

 

You didn't make a fool of yourself, for someone who doesn't have extensive knowledge, the question makes perfect sense. I can tell you that Crysis is GPU dependent as was already said. I haven't played the other games so i can't comment form personal experience. I do know that BF3 is coded for four cores though. for skyrim and MW3, it would depend on three things i'd say: the game was coded for 4 cores, how well the games were ported, a bad port can eat your CPU cycles like a sugar addict would eat candy (think GTA IV) and mods, depending on the nature of the mods.

GPUs are meant to do certain types of calculations. If you were to make an analogy to a normal CPU, due to the nature of the calculations required for graphics, they were developed as highly specialized processors with an insane amount of cores. As such, they are insanely fast compared to general purpose CPU for the type of calculations they were designed for and trump CPUs for those kind of operations. In short GPUs have a very high level of parallelization, but in a very limited range of operations.

The current trend is to use GPUs to take some load off the CPU instead of the other way around. Think nVidia Physx for example. Unfortunately, in games, that means loosing performance for the graphics themselves so it doesn't serve much purpose, especially in laptops. However, in applications other than games, GPGPUs are becoming more and more popular. There are some types of scientific calculations that can be split into operations similar to what is done for graphics processing and using the GPU for those operations can reduce crunch time which is something all researchers running computer simulations are striving for. Matrix and vector operations are one thing GPUs excel at and it is something used heavily in finite elements simulations. If you think about it, it makes sense, a 3D image is a mesh of triangles and finite elements work in a similar way.

Short version: GPUs are better at what they do than a CPU, so you wouldn't gain much from offloading some of the GPU load to the GPU. Taking some of the load off the CPU and sending it to the GPU can yield benefits, but for now, all the power of the GPU is required for graphics alone so there's no point in sending some of the game's other calculations to the GPU yet.

EDIT: Even if some of those games don't make full use of a CPU, games are becoming multithreaded more and more so a quad core would make more sense, and the unused cores can be used for the OS and other processes if the game doesn't make use of them. Oh and some games have been taking advantage of quad cores for a few years now, civ5, dragon age for example.