Cpu percentage

[Nick Ger]

My stupid friend says that he should buy a i9 9900k just for gaming because it has a lower cpu percentage than the i7 9700k while having almost the same fps. Is cpu percentage really important when buying cpu's cuz i think its not temps are same anyways

[minibois]

1 minute ago, Nick Ger said:

My stupid friend

2 minutes ago, Nick Ger said:

buy a i9 9900k just for gaming because it has a lower cpu percentage than the i7 9700k while having almost the same fps. Is cpu percentage really important when buying cpu's cuz i think its not temps are same anyways

CPU percentage doesn't matter, as long as your are below 100%

Just buy whatever suits your use the most.

[Nick Ger]

What happens if it is at 100% and does it decrease your cpu lifespan?

[Princess Luna]

8 minutes ago, Nick Ger said:

What happens if it is at 100% and does it decrease your cpu lifespan?

Having headroom is good for longevity and multi-tasking.

 

being at 100% usage shouldn't really decrease the life span of a CPU in any meaningful way.

[mariushm]

The CPU is meant to be used. It's designed to run at 100% for days and weeks and months, basically continuously.

It doesn't degrade, it doesn't go bad.

 

Ideally, when you run a game, you would have the cpu up to 80-95% and the video card above 90%

 

When you're playing a game, the game does calculations and thinks stuff between every image you see drawn on the screen.

 

If you see the cpu at low percentage but video card at high percentage, either the game doesn't "think" a lot or the game constantly waits for the video card to finish the job.

That could be a sign that the video card is too slow (not powerful enough) in which case you can lower the video quality settings a bit to increase framerate, so now as you produce more frames each second, the game will use the cpu more.

As an example, let's say the game needs 1/100 (1%) of CPU's time to calculate the information needed by the video card to produce ONE frame. If you use high quality settings and the framerate averages 40fps, then the CPU will be used only up to 40%, because the game has to use that 1% of cpu 40 times in a second. 

If you lower the video quality settings a bit and raise the fps to 70-80 fps, now the game uses 1% of the cpu 80 times a second, so in total 80% of cpu's time is used.

 

If you use a lot of CPU but the video card has a low percentage usage, that could be a sign that your video card is too powerful, or that the video game is optimized for lower performance video cards (fortnite for example, various online multiplayer games)

 

[GoldenLag]

9 minutes ago, Nick Ger said:

What happens if it is at 100% and does it decrease your cpu lifespan?

nothing from the perspective of someone using a CPU within a reasonable usage period below [insert big number of time here]. 

 

technically speaking a CPU degrades regardless of voltage applied, but 100% usage its not high enough voltage to impact the life expectancy. 

[Mick Naughty]

I’d rather have a better cpu than not. 

If the friend can afford top tier stuff, no reason to tell them to get lesser. 

Especially for gaming, want it to be enjoyable. Not like taking a few more minutes to render some videos is really gonna matter for a normal user. 

[steelo]

2 hours ago, Nick Ger said:

My stupid friend says that he should buy a i9 9900k just for gaming because it has a lower cpu percentage than the i7 9700k while having almost the same fps. Is cpu percentage really important when buying cpu's cuz i think its not temps are same anyways

I assume you mean CPU utilization? As long as the CPU isn't maxed out, it really doesn't mean too much...

 

Just tell him to get whatever he wants...it's his money, right?

[Faith7]

i think you might have the same problem as me 100 cpu in all games and 30 gpu utilisation 

[Faith7]

i think intel released broken cpus i see alot of people complaining about 9700k and i see no fix 

[sphbecker]

The only reason the 9900k shows a lower usage percentage is due to hyper-threading and the way Windows calculates CPU usage. The Windows formula is literally as simple as total usage of all threads divided by the number of threads. The two processors have the same number of cores, but the 9900k is dividing by 16 instead of by 8, so it will clearly show a smaller percentage. Hyper-threading does help, but it is basically impossible for a real-world workload to ever fully utilize all threads. 

[Mister Woof]

Personally i'd skip anything without HT/SMT. It's a very helpful efficiency feature and it's abysmal Intel released an i7 flagship model without it. But that's me.

[Harry Voyager]

So, the Windows Task Manager CPU utilization metric is not very meaningful. If you have a single thread that is running the CPU at 5Ghz Max boost, on an eight core, eight thread CPU, the CPU will report out as 12.5% utilized. While an eight core 16 thread CPU will report out as only 6.25% utilized.

 

That does not mean that the second CPU is putting out any less heat, or running at any less power, or even has twice as much performance available.

 

What hyper threading gets you is the ability to put more work into a single core at one time. Most threads aren't using every part of a CPU pipeline all at the same time, so a hyper threaded CPU let's another, lower priority thread, use the parts of the CPU that aren't being used by the other thread. Think of it as letting you're roommate use your washing machine while your laundry is in the dryer. 

 

So, hyper threading is good, because it lets your CPU get more work done with the same resources, but it does not reduce the load on the CPU, quite the opposite in fact. Further, having it is not the same as having more cores. Each thread is roughly equivalent to 20-40% of an additional CPU core, depending on implementation. 

[Mira Yurizaki]

As a note, CPU % Utilization in Task Manager is basically the time the CPU spent not running the System Idle Process. From the point of view of what Task Manager is meant to show, this is adequate. The System Idle Process is also the lowest priority task, so if anything else needs to run, it'll get the CPU.

 

Because of the way CPU % Utilization is measured, this is why people think it's misleading.