Poor FPS while CPU and GPU usage remain low

[Fluvous]

I've been watching my GPU and CPU usage while running some games, and I've noticed that my CPU will often not even be running at 50%, while my graphics card can be anywhere from 5% to 30%. I've read a lot of threads with a similar situation, but none have seemed to help me. Here are my specs.

 

CPU - Athlon x4 860k (Overclocked to 4.5GHz) w/ stock cooler

GPU - Radeon RX 470 4gb

HDD - 3TB Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM (ST3000DM008-2DM166 ATA)

RAM - 2x4 8gb DDR3 1600

PSU - Either 450W or 550W

Mobo - Unknown Gigabyte, FM2+, DDR3 (From a prebuilt system and I can't find information on this)

OS - Windows 10

 

Here is some data while running some popular titles

Task manager & temperatrue

https://imgur.com/a/iapk4Ag

Counter-strike: Global Offensive

Low settings @ 1366 x 768

25-40FPS average

 

Arma III

Low settings @ 1366 x 768

15-25 FPS average

 

Dota 2

Low settings @ 1366 x 768

40-50 FPS average

 

 

What do you guys think? I just noticed that in Core Temp for CS:GO it shows my cores at nearly 100%, while the task manage shows it at almost 50%. Is it possible that for whatever reason task manager thinks I have twice the cpu power, and that's why I haven't seen CPU usage above 50%? The CPU temp is getting somewhat hot, so it is also possible that there is some throttling going on every now and then. Any thoughts are helpful. If I need to upgrade my CPU (And with it mobo, ram, etc) I'd be happy to. Athlon x4 is getting pretty old.

Thanks for the help!

[Tabs]

It's a bit weird that Windows seems to think the chip only has 2 physical cores. The X4 doesn't use SMT, so it should show as 1 socket, 4 cores, 4 logical processors.

 

Edit: Ignore me, my bad. I completely forgot they used the Athlon X4 branding for low end versions of bulldozer/piledriver. Unfortunately, games are one of the types of software that relies heavily on integer (rather than floating point) performance. Effectively, for most gaming workloads, you might as well be running a dual core. Almost no games will fully utilise a 2-int/4-fp bulldozer module. You're heavily bottlenecking your gpu with that CPU.

 

The reason coretemp shows a different value for utilisation is because it is calculating it differently. If the integer units - of which your chip has two - are at 100% load, then the extra 2 "fpu cores" are basically worthless - in effect, the chip is bottlenecked internally by only having two integer cores (which means that one FPU per core of the module is wasted). The bulldozer architecture was designed for AMD's "heterogeneous compute" future which never arrived. They abandoned this chip design with Zen, and are much better off for it.

 

Edited May 3, 2018 by Tabs
More info

[SpaceGhostC2C]

13 minutes ago, Fluvous said:

I've been watching my GPU and CPU usage while running some games, and I've noticed that my CPU will often not even be running at 50%

50% can mean full CPU utilization if the game only uses two cores.

 

13 minutes ago, Fluvous said:

Here is some data while running some popular titles

Task manager & temperatrue

https://imgur.com/a/iapk4Ag

Coretemp clearly shows your CPU maxed out, with all cores at full load in one case, and largely above 50% in ARMA (which may just ARMA running on two threads, and the scheduler distributing the load between cores, but still no CPU power to spare).

13 minutes ago, Fluvous said:

What do you guys think? I just noticed that in Core Temp for CS:GO it shows my cores at nearly 100%, while the task manage shows it at almost 50%. Is it possible that for whatever reason task manager thinks I have twice the cpu power, and that's why I haven't seen CPU usage above 50%?

It is possible that you are better off ignoring task manager in Windows 10  

 

Also, with that GPU you can probably play at higher resolutions or settings without decreasing your FPS.

[Fluvous]

1 hour ago, Tabs said:

It's a bit weird that Windows seems to think the chip only has 2 physical cores. The X4 doesn't use SMT, so it should show as 1 socket, 4 cores, 4 logical processors.

 

Edit: Ignore me, my bad. I completely forgot they used the Athlon X4 branding for low end versions of bulldozer/piledriver. Unfortunately, games are one of the types of software that relies heavily on integer (rather than floating point) performance. Effectively, for most gaming workloads, you might as well be running a dual core. Almost no games will fully utilise a 2-int/4-fp bulldozer module. You're heavily bottlenecking your gpu with that CPU.

 

The reason coretemp shows a different value for utilisation is because it is calculating it differently. If the integer units - of which your chip has two - are at 100% load, then the extra 2 "fpu cores" are basically worthless - in effect, the chip is bottlenecked internally by only having two integer cores (which means that one FPU per core of the module is wasted). The bulldozer architecture was designed for AMD's "heterogeneous compute" future which never arrived. They abandoned this chip design with Zen, and are much better off for it.

 

 

1 hour ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

50% can mean full CPU utilization if the game only uses two cores.

 

Coretemp clearly shows your CPU maxed out, with all cores at full load in one case, and largely above 50% in ARMA (which may just ARMA running on two threads, and the scheduler distributing the load between cores, but still no CPU power to spare).

It is possible that you are better off ignoring task manager in Windows 10  

 

Also, with that GPU you can probably play at higher resolutions or settings without decreasing your FPS.

Thanks a ton guys. I always suspected my cpu was holding back my system, but the low task manager usage always confused me. Thanks for explaining that. I think I'll be upgrading to a Ryzen 5 2600 +b350 Tomahawk. Thanks again for clearing things up!