Why does anyone look at gpu usage %

[emosun]

Why does anyone ever look at the gpu usage % as if it's some sort of accurate % like cpu usage?

I can make the gpu % go up to maybe 10% just moving the mouse around the screen. Good thing I don't have 10 mouse pointers otherwise the gpu might not be able to handle the extreme task huh.

[fldujit]

I'd be interested in understanding where these values come from and what exactly they represent (% of cores/cycles currently doing something?). Like many others I noticed Task Manager reporting 10% GPU usage when I was playing MW, while afterburner reported 99%. Those must be two different measures or a simple UI bug but still it left me wondering.  

[Kisai]

13 minutes ago, emosun said:

Why does anyone ever look at the gpu usage % as if it's some sort of accurate % like cpu usage?

I can make the gpu % go up to maybe 10% just moving the mouse around the screen. Good thing I don't have 10 mouse pointers otherwise the gpu might not be able to handle the extreme task huh.

That's completely not understanding the point.

 

 

See that peak and valley on the GPU load? That is a VP9 1920x1080p30 video on Youtube. When I hit pause, the GPU load goes to 0%. Notice how no change in the TDP, Power Consumption or Memory use happens, only the GPU load, Memory Controller load and Bus Interface load change.

 

Using the GPU Load figures is how you determine if a program actually makes efficient use of the GPU or just wastes it. Notice "Video Engine Load" is zero. A software program has to invoke NVenc for that to move, and then in theory the GPU load itself goes down.

 

[emosun]

3 minutes ago, Kisai said:

See that peak and valley on the GPU load? That is a VP9 1920x1080p30 video on Youtube. When I hit pause, the GPU load goes to 0%. Notice how no change in the TDP, Power Consumption or Memory use happens, only the GPU load, Memory Controller load and Bus Interface load change.

 

Using the GPU Load figures is how you determine if a program actually makes efficient use of the GPU or just wastes it. Notice "Video Engine Load" is zero. A software program has to invoke NVenc for that to move, and then in theory the GPU load itself goes down.

yeah....so..

24 minutes ago, emosun said:

Why does anyone ever look at the gpu usage % as if it's some sort of accurate %

 

[Mira Yurizaki]

2 hours ago, emosun said:

Why does anyone ever look at the gpu usage % as if it's some sort of accurate % like cpu usage?

I can make the gpu % go up to maybe 10% just moving the mouse around the screen. Good thing I don't have 10 mouse pointers otherwise the gpu might not be able to handle the extreme task huh.

Even CPU % Utilization isn't accurate. I can peg a 4C/8T processor to ~30% using only a simple forever loop that just adds 1+1. I'm pretty sure it doesn't take 30% of the CPU to perform simple math. Processor % utilization isn't "how many resources are being used." It's "what percentage of time did the processor spend not idling."

 

Basically, people usually don't understand the metrics they're looking at.

[LeftyBC]

Modern Windows uses the GPU to render the entire system, so anything you do on your machine will add a little bit of GPU load.

 

As for CPU utilization, Windows adds all the threads and cores up when calculating that 100%, so a simple single-threaded infinite loop could easily use 100% of a single core.  It's just calculating that infinite loop faster, even if it's throwing the result away.

 

 

[emosun]

Just now, LeftyBC said:

Modern Windows uses the GPU to render the entire system

lol what

 

1 minute ago, LeftyBC said:

As for CPU utilization,

that , wasnt something i was asking about

[iBoolGuy]

I'm not sure I understand your curiosity, but for me, monitoring all kinds of stuff going on in my PC, gives me an insight and understanding on how everything works and what's best for optimizing my settings, like fan curves for example.
One very important, and obvious usage for GPU % utilization, is to see if you're being bottlenecked or not, the other day my friend's laptop was overheating, and throttling, pretty normal for laptops, I wanted to examine what was causing more heat, the GPU or the CPU on the laptop, knowing that they both use the same heatsink, it's important to balance them to at least try and eliminate overheating. That's an example where GPU % and CPU % was very important to us.

If that usecase is too specific for you, then hear this, sometimes if I'm playing a new game, and I'm trying to see how I need to optimize it best, looking at GPU % throughout different areas and different parts of the game, looking at GPU memory, clocks, temps, all of it, gives a good insight on what parts of the game are intensive for the GPU, try putting an fps limiter, and test how the GPU % goes up and down in different areas of the game. 

I dunno.. it's definitely not necessary, but it's just interesting for me at least to look at.

[vanished]

I've noticed oddities in the past with GPU and CPU usage reporting enough to know that, as you say, it's not by any means a perfect representation of how hard it's actually working relative to the most that it could possibly achieve.  Not all 100%s are equal.  However, taken together with other stats like power consumption, frequency, etc. it can give some sense of how hard the card is working, and I don't know of any other way to do that.  If there was a well-known, reliable option, I'm sure people would be using it instead.

 

GPU load is (at least in theory) useful for checking how a system is bottlenecked.  If the GPU load is at 100% then conceivably you're getting good use out of it, but if it's sitting lower at 80 or 50%, then something (likely the CPU) is holding it back.  Conversely, you can't really determine this from CPU usage because if a game only has 2 demanding threads, you'll only ever hit ~50% usage on a quad core, even if the cores that are actually in use are pinned to the max and are very much a bottleneck.

[emosun]

1 minute ago, iBoolGuy said:

 

i don't think you've understood what i was asking

[TVwazhere]

Personally the only time I care about GPU usage is when I'm trying to determine if there's a GPU bottleneck where my CPU is running at or near 100% but my GPU is only at 65% load (cough GTAV and AC Origins). That, or when I'm folding and trying to determine how much power relative to the GPU load is being used to determine how much further I can push the overclock. 

[Devin92]

I am curious to why you say GPU % is less accurate then CPU %?

Isn't gpu and cpu are essentially the same thing while CPU has less but more powerful cores.

[emosun]

1 minute ago, Devin92 said:

Isn't gpu and cpu are essentially the same thing while CPU has less but more powerful cores.

no