Is my GPU or CPU lagging?

When playing Shogun 2, in very large battles my frame rates drop to around 10.
I'm playing at 1080 at high setting.
Even at lower resolutions it lags, but not so much when at native but lower quality settings, so it must be the 860m then?

 

It probably is the 860M. Shogun 2 can have HUGE amounts of things on-screen at once. I'm not surprised it can lag. Try reducing some settings.

 

Ive read with others that with 860m, they could play Shogun 2 5000+ men battles on ultra smoothly! Maybe there is something wrong with my notebook.

 

Then maybe it is a CPU bottleneck... you have an i5 which is a dual core, and others would likely have an i7. Also, it is possible they overclocked their 860Ms heavily.

 

quad core may help, but make sure you're not accidentally running on the Intel GPU. Check your Optimus settings to ensure the 860m is active for playing Shogun 2.

 

Ah I forgot about that, that is a good point.

 

Probably a bit of both. I'd say it's more likely the CPU, though. Lots of objects on screen need CPU power.

 

Even at 1024x768 high quality, I only get a boost of 5 fps! Does this mean the GPU is responsible and not the CPU?
Also I noticed my processors aren't being fully used.
My powers settings for the CPU usage is at maximum 100% use and also intel gpu is not being used.

 

Shoulda gotten a quad-core

 

Maybe you should run some program like HWmonitor and record all the data in the background to know for sure? You could be thermally throttling, you could be running out of memory, or pegging gpu/cpu at 100%. If you had everything recorded, You could look and at least eliminate some of the things.

 

Shogun : CPU intensive => i5 is bottlenecking it..

 

I have to agree with everyone here on the CPU. When a game creates an object it uses the CPU, whenever it needs to modify the position, composition, or status (heath, attach, defense) it uses the CPU, once all of that is calculated and the next screen's base data is ready it is sent to the GPU to figure out how to make a data set be computed into a 3d image and then projected onto a 2D panel.

Bottom line, in a game with allot of objects, the CPU will be most likely be the limiter.

 

Shogun's benchmark of high 1080p gives me 42 fps. But with a battle of around 5000 men, my system really struggles.
I've noticed when totally zoomed out (battle of 5000 men), fps increase to over 20. Its only when zoomed in up close to the battle of 1000's of men the fps drop drastically. So I think its the GPU that bottlenecks more then the CPU.

 

Monitor your hardware before making any more assumptions

 

Good observation, but not a causality. When zoomed out the game doesn't need to calculate in intricacies of the battle, just the macro numbers. I.E. each Soldier is just an HP bar as opposed to a calculation of movements and reactions.

But octiceps is right...just log your hardware and see what maxes out first.

 

Using Msi afterburner I can see during the big battle, only my first CPU has a usage of around 85%, while the other 3 CPU's around 30%. Is this normal, why not to 100%?

 

What is your GPU usage when performance drops?

 

Recorded during a 5000+ men battle, the GPU usage is around 50%, and the 1st CPU is around 85% and the 3 other CPU's are around 30%. All this while having a frame rates between 5-18.
It seems the 3 other CPU's don't put a lot of effort. Could it be I need to turn on hyper-threading somewhere?

 

CPU bottleneck or the Total War engine is optimized like poo.

You already have Hyper-Threading enabled, otherwise it wouldn't show 4 CPU threads.

 

I found out this issue has been with more people, even with high end desktop gamers. Only one core seems to be fully been used. The problem is indeed that the game is not well optimized even after the developers stated it would be optimized for multi core hardware.
I sincerely doubt replacing my I5 with an I7 would matter at all. I can play all recent games smoothly at high @1080p, except this one.

 

So still a CPU bottleneck, but upgrading to an i7 won't help (unless it's an overclocked MX) since the game is single-threaded

 

That leads me to this question.
Unlike others I am unable to overclock my CPU thru the Bios. It has been updated to the latest version, what else do I need to be able to do that?

 

Is the i5-4340M even overclockable? Try XTU.

 

Reference clock is greyed out at 100MHZ and so are the multipliers for both of my active cores, so I guess it is not overclockable. The only thing I am able to change are the power voltages. I did that and my system crashed, but luckily it started up again. I dare not mess with it anymore!

 

every game at 1080p ? sure, even BF4 64 players ? Watch Dogs ? other Cpu hungry games..

 

No game is going to max out all cores at 100%, only benchmarks do that. 5000 men battles is just taxing on any system.

 

That will obviously happen if you decrease voltages too much.. Doesn't XTU let you set the turbo multipliers? You should be able to lock it at 31x... Can you give us a screenshot of what XTU looks like for you?

 

Is there no option to increase the turbo boost power? Otherwise, there is one way of probably doing this... Prema mod.. Read up about it...

https://biosmods.wordpress.com/w370ss/

I think you might not have to go to this extent.. Maybe throttlestop can help with this... Let's build on this for now