Benchmark under-utilizing GPU and CPU?

[Kasper_MC]

I've been tooling a bit with DX12 vs. DX 11, and got to Ashes of the Singularity: Better in DX12, if anyone is curious. But I'm new to the whole benchmarking and tech-enthusiasm-thing. 

While benchmarking at three different pre-loaded settings; Low, High and Crazy, I found something I couldn't figure out why:

 

At low: I'm getting an average of 93,5 fps, clearly limited by my CPU. In Windows taskmanager, it's running between 80 and 100%, while my GPU is running at 65% max. Also, the "Percent GPU Bound" is 100% in the benchmark. Ram usage is around 8gb. 

At high: I'm getting an average of 77,9 fps, again clearly limited by my CPU, but this time taskmanager is showing 90% CPU usage tops, while GPU is around 70%. In the benchmark, the "Percent GPU Bound" is between 93- and 99% percent. Ram usage is still sitting around 8gb. 

At crazy: I'm getting an average of 43,0 fps, but this time it gets strange to me: the CPU in taskmanager is running between 40- and 70% percent and the GPU is around 30- 50%. While in the benchmark, the "Percent GPU Bound" is in all cases 100%. Ram usage is now at 9gb. 

Is it just taskmanager being strange, not measuring all cores, or not something else. Because the scaling of the fps seems about right, right? Because, I can't for the life of me can't figure out, why it wouldn't utilize both the GPU and CPU more, at least until one of them bottleneck?
I've run the test 3 times at each setting. And also: Why is it, specifically at high settings, that "Percent GPU Bound" is not 100%?

Sorry this is a lot of questions, if you only have a suggestion or answer for part of it, I'd still be interested. Again, new to the thing :) 

I'm running at 1440p, with 16gb of 3200 DDR4 ram, Ryzen 2600X (stock), and an Asus OC 1070 (stock). 

[Crunchy Dragon]

Task manager can be pretty strange. I'd recommend using something else.

[Shimejii]

Use Afterburner or Other programs. Task manager is not the best for it

[Kasper_MC]

Makes sense! Used GPU-Z and Afterburner that showed the same at Crazy pre-set: about 60% CPU and 100% GPU Thanks! 

Is the taskmanager good for anything then, when benchmarking? 

[Mira Yurizaki]

4 hours ago, Kasper_MC said:

Makes sense! Used GPU-Z and Afterburner that showed the same at Crazy pre-set: about 60% CPU and 100% GPU Thanks! 

Is the taskmanager good for anything then, when benchmarking? 

It's good for a quick and dirty look at what your system is doing.

 

It's helpful to also understand how your tools are measuring the data it's reporting. For instance, the CPU utilization in Task Manager is only measuring the time the application was scheduled to run on the CPU. It does not actually measure how those applications are using the CPU. Which makes sense to me because profiling that deep would be intrusive and could impact the performance of the application, throwing off the accuracy of the data gathered.

 

So I'm wondering what Task Manager is doing vs. these other applications. Microsoft says that Task Manager on the GPU side pings the kernel's GPU scheduler for information, but that's all I could gather. The other applications could be reading directly off GPU sensors which can probably probe at how much of the GPU is being utilized (especially in NVIDIA's case because its GPUs since Kepler use static scheduling so it's easy to figure out that data).

 

Either way, Task Manager is likely reporting accurate data, but data that we don't actually care about in most contexts.