When a game has "High power usage" In the task manager, what's the issue?

[eEmillerz]

Heya!

I've recently played a whole lot of Europa Universalis IV, which can be pretty graphics intensive. However sometimes when I play, it's having trouble putting up a good amount of frames, which causes me to lag. When looking in my task manager while playing, my PC only seems to be using around 30% CPU and around 20-45% of the GPU. It doesn't look like any of those are the problems (to me at least?)... But when looking in the task manager, it says that Europa Universalis IV has a high power usage, which leads me to think that my power supply could be the issue here. Do any of you guys know what could be the issue here? Or have you had any similar experience yourself? 

Here are my PC specs for reference.

CPU: Intel i7-9700KF
Power Supply: Corsair TX750M 80 Plus Gold (I believe it's 750W)

SSD: 1000GB NVMe M.2
Graphics Card: Asus GeForce® RTX 2070 8GB GDDR6 Dual (Copied from website owner's name, a bit confused about this one)
RAM: 32 Gigs
 

Thanks a lot in advance!!! It's been a real headache to get that low frames.

[Joveice]

1 minute ago, eEmillerz said:

Heya!

I've recently played a whole lot of Europa Universalis IV, which can be pretty graphics intensive. However sometimes when I play, it's having trouble putting up a good amount of frames, which causes me to lag. When looking in my task manager while playing, my PC only seems to be using around 30% CPU and around 20-45% of the GPU. It doesn't look like any of those are the problems (to me at least?)... But when looking in the task manager, it says that Europa Universalis IV has a high power usage, which leads me to think that my power supply could be the issue here. Do any of you guys know what could be the issue here? Or have you had any similar experience yourself? 

Here are my PC specs for reference.

CPU: Intel i7-9700KF
Power Supply: Corsair TX750M 80 Plus Gold (I believe it's 750W)

SSD: 1000GB NVMe M.2
Graphics Card: Asus GeForce® RTX 2070 8GB GDDR6 Dual (Copied from website owner's name, a bit confused about this one)
RAM: 32 Gigs
 

Thanks a lot in advance!!! It's been a real headache to get that low frames.

Not using all the hardware usually indicates a game that isn't optimized or a bottleneck.

The high power usage I believe is just Windows telling you that a program is using a lot of resources, which in your case is exactly what you want it to do.

[Eigenvektor]

11 minutes ago, eEmillerz said:

But when looking in the task manager, it says that Europa Universalis IV has a high power usage, which leads me to think that my power supply could be the issue here.

Windows is just telling you that this program is using a lot of CPU and GPU power, which results in high power usage. In the case of a game, this is entirely expected, so not an issue.

 

If you had a background program that shouldn't be doing anything and Windows shows you it has high power usage then this would be something to investigate. But for a foreground program that is expected to use a lot of CPU/GPU it is normal behavior.

[eEmillerz]

8 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

Windows is just telling you that this program is using a lot of CPU and GPU power, which results in high power usage. In the case of a game, this is entirely expected, so not an issue.

 

If you had a background program that shouldn't be doing anything and Windows shows you it has high power usage then this would be something to investigate. But for a foreground program that is expected to use a lot of CPU/GPU it is normal behavior.

Hey, thanks for replying! But what do I do about the lag then? Is there any way for me to allow it to have a higher CPU / GPU usage? Europa Universalis IV is a Steam game, if that helps.

[eEmillerz]

20 minutes ago, Joveice said:

Not using all the hardware usually indicates a game that isn't optimized or a bottleneck.

The high power usage I believe is just Windows telling you that a program is using a lot of resources, which in your case is exactly what you want it to do.

Hey, thanks a lot for replying  As it doesn't even use near max GPU & CPU, there has to be a way for it to be able to use more, right? Europa Universalis IV is a steam game, if that helps.

[Joveice]

@eEmillerzMade sure your PC is in performance mode and not some default power saving mode?

[Eigenvektor]

36 minutes ago, eEmillerz said:

Hey, thanks for replying! But what do I do about the lag then? Is there any way for me to allow it to have a higher CPU / GPU usage? Europa Universalis IV is a Steam game, if that helps.

Turn based games usually don't need CPU and GPU to run at full speed all the time. I would expect CPU usage to mostly go up while the computer player(s) are busy calculating their turn, and go down significantly otherwise. During your own turn, it's mostly busy with animations. This shouldn't require 100% from either CPU or GPU on a reasonably fast system.

 

Did you open task manager above the game or did you minimize the game to see task manager? Some games will either pause or reduce frame rate while minimized, so this could also be a cause. I'd use something like MSI Afterburner to see usage while the game is in the foreground. But as I said, for a turn based game, I wouldn't expect 100% usage of CPU/GPU all the time.

[eEmillerz]

43 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

Turn based games usually don't need CPU and GPU to run at full speed all the time. I would expect CPU usage to mostly go up while the computer player(s) are busy calculating their turn, and go down significantly otherwise. During your own turn, it's mostly busy with animations. This shouldn't require 100% from either CPU or GPU on a reasonably fast system.

 

Did you open task manager above the game or did you minimize the game to see task manager? Some games will either pause or reduce frame rate while minimized, so this could also be a cause. I'd use something like MSI Afterburner to see usage while the game is in the foreground. But as I said, for a turn based game, I wouldn't expect 100% usage of CPU/GPU all the time.

Heya! I had my game open and unpaused while looking in my task manager. It's just weird how it lags, but is unable to use more GPU and CPU usage... Do you have any idea what the issue here could be?

[eEmillerz]

1 hour ago, Joveice said:

@eEmillerzMade sure your PC is in performance mode and not some default power saving mode?

Hey. I haven't checked these settings out before. I'm in the "Power Options" tab, but there's no option for me to pick high performance mode. It's currently set to balanced. Is that good enough?

[Joveice]

52 minutes ago, eEmillerz said:

Hey. I haven't checked these settings out before. I'm in the "Power Options" tab, but there's no option for me to pick high performance mode. It's currently set to balanced. Is that good enough?

Is there a "show more" or something like that there?
Balanced normally works fine, but there is a difference between it and performance mode.

[Mark Kaine]

graphical intensive applications will *always* use a lot of power, that's kind of their job...

 

 

Average gpu draws around 150-300 watt depending on model,  that's quite a lot of courses windows will see 'high power usage'.

 

I think this is unrelated to your lag issues therfore, not sure,  do you play at unlocked frame rates?  That could be a reason,  try playing with VSYNC in that case. 

 

2 hours ago, eEmillerz said:

Heya! I had my game open and unpaused while looking in my task manager. It's just weird how it lags, but is unable to use more GPU and CPU usage... Do you have any idea what the issue here could be?

From your screen shot it looks like something else is using a lot of resources as well that could also be a reason, make sure to have no other applications running while playing the game, and also click on cpu/gpu tabs to see what's actually using those as well... from looks of it there's at least another program using the cpu - which *could* lead to some issues. 

 

 

[Ocephtius]

Hey there. I have the same problem as you had. Recently i had edited the game properties and run it. Surprisingly the power usage is amazingly very high and causing lags.

I already turn off all kinda apps that using much power even just a Moderate one, but still the game fly on a very high power usage.

1. My comp spec is about the same.

2. Is it about the extra load for the short term memory traffic? What is it if not.

3. I already check and recheck all the changes that I've made on the game and there are nothing wrong with them

4. Sometimes I got a Not Responding warn at the task manager, but slowly working again when I let it

 

Please kindly any advice would be very help here. Thanks guys

[eEmillerz]

On 12/14/2021 at 9:24 PM, Ocephtius said:

Hey there. I have the same problem as you had. Recently i had edited the game properties and run it. Surprisingly the power usage is amazingly very high and causing lags.

I already turn off all kinda apps that using much power even just a Moderate one, but still the game fly on a very high power usage.

1. My comp spec is about the same.

2. Is it about the extra load for the short term memory traffic? What is it if not.

3. I already check and recheck all the changes that I've made on the game and there are nothing wrong with them

4. Sometimes I got a Not Responding warn at the task manager, but slowly working again when I let it

 

Please kindly any advice would be very help here. Thanks guys

Hello. Sorry for the late reply as I haven't been on this website for a while. Turns out I didn't know what I really was talking about when I made this post, and Europa Universalis IV is actually a CPU intensive game that utilises the cores of the CPU very poorly. According the comments I've got, it seems like the power usage isn't really the problem, and I would bet it isn't the problem for you either. Hope this helps at least a little bit even though I answered this late

[Mark Kaine]

On 3/6/2021 at 4:44 PM, eEmillerz said:

it doesn't even use near max GPU & CPU,

screenshot of the game running (no pause or menus) showing all cores of your cpu.

 

use afterburner as taskmanager is *not* reliable. 

 

22 hours ago, eEmillerz said:

Turns out I didn't know what I really was talking about when I made this post,

... heh, i think everyone does that mistake at some point because "cpu usage" and also how a pc generally functions is not super clear or obvious. 

 

usually if performance isnt great, its just that and not some malfunction or defect, other than shitty code more often than not. 

 

sometimes mods can fix it (basically altering/  optimizing how the game works) ie. "potatoe mods".