Need advice in terms of GTX 1080TI gpu usage

[Shinzra]

Hello and good evening everyone.

So I have recently picked up a Zotac Amp GTX 1080Ti, and have installed it and been gaming and benchmarking for around 2 days now. However I have noticed something which has me interested and I do not really have any knowledge of how gpu usage functions so thought I would ask if this is normal.

So essentially, when I am benchmarking my 1080TI (Furmark, 3D Mark) usage is at 100% all the time, however I have noticed in some games, examples being Battlefield 1 and Deus Ex Mankind Divided, that the usage seems to be dropping and varies from 70-100%.

My resolution is 1440p and I normally have my frame limit either off or to my monitors default of 144hz.

Any ideas or thoughts as to why the usage is like this, if it is normal, any concern?. I do not believe it to be a bottleneck by the cpu, as when gaming the loads hardly go past 40% on all cores. However I did notice and try setting the deus ex benchmark to 4k resolution and the usage at that time stayed at 100%.

Effectively looking for insight into how it works and thoughts or suggestions if there is a solution or even a solution needed .

Cheers all

Here are my pc specs.

Motherboard: Asus Rog Strix Z370-H
CPU: I7-8700K @ 4.8GHZ
CPU Cooler: Corsair 115i Pro Rgb
GPU: Zotac Amp Edition GTX 1080TI
Ram: 16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX 2133MHZ DDR4 (Dual Channel)
PSU: Corsair 650W
SSD Storage: 128GB Samsung Evo 840 and 500GB Samsung Evo 850

 

[Disco_P]

It'll be a bottleneck somewhere. You'll notice gpu usage dips usually at very high frame rates. As long as it doesn't happen at lower frames that is normal.

However your ram frequency is quite low. Have you enabled XMP?

 

[imginy]

When you hit 144fps your usage will drop down.

 

[Radox-0]

Likely a small boundry or limitation at times elsewhere (entirely normal), weather it is data coming from drive, CPU or your simply at the refresh rate, Your card sounds like its working normal to be honest. Just sounds like the limitation is not always on your GPU and you can see that it can and does respond when you force it to draw more pixels by running at 4k.

 

[Shinzra]

I have checked on GPU-Z during a benchmark and game, and I am getting a Vrel and perf Vrel appearing, could this be a reason why or anything to be concerned with?

 

[Radox-0]

I have checked on GPU-Z during a benchmark and game, and I am getting a Vrel and perf Vrel appearing, could this be a reason why or anything to be concerned with?

Its normal. Will usually be a limitation in place of some kind when under load. It just means Your at the cap in terms of voltage reliability. Your card sounds like its working fine from everything you have posted to be honest.

 

[Shinzra]

Yh it probably is, I just thought I would double check.

Just seems strange and somewhat annoying to load up Doom, and be on %40 usage, so I am getting less frames than I should. But again I dont know anything really of how it works

 

[Sasahara]

The looks like it's the games single core performance that is the bottleneck. (Normally the case for most games)

It's very hard to distribute all the processes evenly over 4 or more cores on a complicated process such as gaming, so the limiting factor is the CPU single core speed.

When you say the CPU is stuck at 40%, that would suggest this is the case. 50% would be 100% usage if hyper threading isn't being used. So 40% mean that 20% of the potential usable CPU power isn't being used.
Since 12.5% usage is the maximum 1 core can be loaded you probably have a situation like this.

Core 1 at 12.5% of the load (100% for that core) This is the bottleneck.
Core 2-4 using average of 9.16% (73.28% usage). They can't be used more because these processes require core 1 to be faster for their processes to be used at 100%.
We don't know the distribution of the power of these cores either. Core 2 could also be at 12.5% (100%) with cores 3 & 4 at an average of 7.5% (60%).

 

[Calo]

Yh it probably is, I just thought I would double check.

Just seems strange and somewhat annoying to load up Doom, and be on %40 usage, so I am getting less frames than I should. But again I dont know anything really of how it works

Im pretty sure Doom (2016) only requires 40% of a 1080TI to run crazy high frames! I get a steady 140fps @ 1080p with a GTX 970 using a garbage CPU

(love that Vulkan API)

 

[wunkley]

From what you've described and looking at your specs it's 99.9% down to certain games just being the way they are.

I have similar specs to you - 1080Ti and and a 6 core/ 12 thread i7 at 4.4Ghz and I see GPU usage plodding along at around 70% in some titles, when it really 'should' be higher i.e I'm not being cpu limited, and the fps isn't maxed out at my refresh rate.

Two prime examples of games that do this for me are Ghost Recon Wildlands and Assassins Creed Origins. Both great games by the way, but both Ubisoft so perhaps an obvious pattern. GRW is especially punishing on the GPU at near or max settings, and genuinely needs all the power of a 1080Ti, yet I rarely see the usage top 90%.

Battlefield 1 doesn't likely 'need' all the power at 1440p though so 70% is all your GPU has to take. I'm surprised you cite Deus Ex Mankind Divided though. This is a very GPU intesive title and I'm pretty sure on mys system it runs pretty maxed out on the GPU. Will check later if I can.

 

[Shinzra]

Just giving a update, so last night I decided to just do a fresh install of windows, re installed doom etc afterwards and now everything is performing much better, High gpu usage is showing and fps has improved drastically. Not sure what happened exactly, though previously a 3d mark run said invalidated run due to driver, so perhaps that caused a issue, or the windows updates which I have decided not to get.

 

[AiiR]

I get this also on BF1 and my 1080ti, mostly in conquest/operations as TDM/Domination it's always pegged at 100%. It's my understanding that this is because the bigger player count games are a lot more CPU dependent.

You'll likely see it in more games aswell, and it can be anything from the game engine to a system bottleneck. Rest assured, your GPU is fine.