Low GPU Usage

swimsphinx · August 8, 2015

Hey guys

So i have a 980ti and a 4770k as you can see by my specs below. im playing on a 1080p 144hz (its overkill in pretty much everything and im moving to 1440p soon) but I noticed when I play something like CSGO which is a walk in the park for a 980ti at 1080p I will get around 260-280 fps with about ~35% gpu usage ...

now I usually cap my FPS at around 200 or something (but CSGO comes standard capped at 300) and I found it interesting that my card wouldnt put out 300 fps to fully reach the cap... I tried raising the cap to 400 and fps stayed around ~270 still with GPU usage being the same. I mean in this case im not complaining about it because i dont need 270fps and have since capped it at 200 like normal.

However I started playing H1Z1 today and I was getting consistent dips below 60fps even at 1080p with again ~40% ish GPU usage.. i couldnt find any caps (and in non intensive images [looking at a wall] it would spin up to 200 fps or so) I really doubt my 4770k at 4.5ghz is bottlenecking a 980ti to this level (or even at all) is this just like a driver bug or something? Quite confused honestly. And unlike the CSGO example above i do care about this one because it actually does affect my experience.

Any thoughts, similar experiences, suggestion? thanks guys

Valkyrie Lenneth · August 8, 2015

its pretty common on poor optimized games(mmos for example) or non heavy gpu games that the cpu does bottleneck it , csgo is so low demanding on the gpu its pure cpu performance but on crysis 3 having a weaker cpu wouldnt matter a difference at all almost, due to it beeing a pure gpu game

on stock ive got a bottleneck on quite a few cpu games aswell on my 970gtx @ a 4670k/4690k but with oc thats gone ( only a few parts where it still drops to 90% ) but with a 980ti that would be a different story, since singlethread performance is the same on 4770k u would have around the same results as me

its basicly just the game on how its optimized, aswell as how heavy it runs on the gpu , the less demanding on the gpu, the more the cpu plays in ;x dont worry its normal to have a low gpu usage in games like csgo