CPU usage analysis - crysis + 5870

[straxusii]

I was interested to see how much of my [email protected] was actually being used whilst running crysis at very high settings with the 5870.

I was surprised to see it was quite high, so anything less than a quad will hold crysis back.

This was 1 demo loop at 1920x1080, very high, no aa, gpu bench, dx10 64 bit

I also tested with the crysis cpu benchmark and got pretty much the same results.

 

[Sasahara]

Try setting Affinity to 2 cores instead of 4 and see if there's any noticeable difference.

 

[Ease]

The green line, and the red one to some extent, are barely being taxed. So I think even a dual-core would do fine, so long as it had a good clock-speed, as your first two cards are doing a lot of work even at 3.6GHz.

 

[OrphanBoy]

Is that with the demo/timing program? If so, I thought that didn't engage the AI and physics code? Is the load higher when actually playing the game?
Also what's with the bit at the end on the battleship? The performance was appalling!

 

[straxusii]

All of the above is just doing the benchmarks so no extra in game load like AI.

 

[HangTime]

The green line, and the red one to some extent, are barely being taxed. So I think even a dual-core would do fine, so long as it had a good clock-speed, as your first two cards are doing a lot of work even at 3.6GHz.

Agreed, if you average it out across all cores it looks like only around 50% peak cpu usage there.

Now, I'm not saying that 50% usage on a quad is bad, far from it, but it wouldn't surprise me to see a heavily clocked tri-core Phenom II giving it a run for it's money.

Bearing in mind that the bench is being run without AA I'd say there's certainly plenty of headroom for a GPU upgrade in there.