Random 100% CPU spikes

[Terry Duke]

Hi Everyone!

So despite having my PC for over a year now, I still feel like i don't know much about how all that stuff works, but i am motivated to get the best performance out of my PC.

And so enter my nemesis: Rise of the tomb raider. Although i have other fairly demanding games, Rise is a particularly taxing game when it comes to graphics and I've seen people argue that the game is not optimized for pc at all, but is it?

And so every now and then, when i have the time, i run a benchmark, play a few minutes here and there, with the ultimate goal of playing at 1440p, ultra settings, 50-70 fps with no screen tearing, no stuttering and no frame drops. And I've never actually got all of those at once.

And yet, my hardware seems capable:

- GTX 1080
- Intel i7 7700k 4.20gh
- 32GB DDR4 ram
- 250gb SSD
- using a 27" 1440p g-sync monitor

So i read a lot about pc gaming, did some research. I installed msi afterburner to set a fan curve for the GPU and monitor usage and temp for both CPU and GPU.

And so the problems vary quite a bit. At one point, the GPU would only run at 70% of it's capactiy even though the CPU only worked at 40%, so the frame rate was low and i didn't know what was wrong with it. Then i tried a few things in the settings and the GPU now runs at 99-100% most of the time.

The new problem, which barely date from a week or two as far as i can recall, are the random CPU spikes. Like seriously, i see the CPU running at 100% on the loading screen. Then i bottleneck, with CPU running at 100% and GPU running at 90% (Which, you know my specs, can that even happen with this combined hardware???). But it's not consistent. Sometimes it'll go back to its usual 40% usage. At 100%, temps can go up to 65 degrees.

I've been trying to solve my screen tearing problems recently by messing around with vysnc and gsync settings both in-game settings and nvidia control panel, but nothing else. Tried running the game with DirectX 12 off, not only is the fps worst, cpu still has random spikes.

I read about it online and the common conclusion seems to be that some malware is messing up the cpu. So i ran a scan with my malwarebytes premium, nothing. Tried the offline scan with windows defender, nothing.

Also ran userbenchmark and geekbench, nothing to report.

So obviously i'm more than a little baffled by the sudden change in performance.

So, any general advice,? Any program that spots things that malwarebytes wouldn't? Do you know if the game is optimized on PC?

Thanks!

[Omega]

A CPU does not have to run at 100% to be bottlenecking the GPU. Look at the per core usage, if one or more cores are maxed it's bottlenecking.

Don't worry about random 100% spikes unless it hurts performance. A 100% spike is caused by something, either by the game you are playing on another application.

If you have Gsync, enable it. Gsync isn't exactly cheap, so if you have it I would expect you want to use it.

Don't mess with GPU settings etc.. unless you know what you are doing. This is how you can cause issues like this in the first place. Leave everything to default.


It might simply be time to do a reinstall of Windows.

[Wichtelman]

there are a ton of videos on youtube with your spec and rise of the tomb raider with cpu and gpu usage displayed by msi afterburner + rivatuner...

nothing to report with benchmarks = your score is average for your hardware?
do you have the same problem with other games or just with rise of the tomb raider?

[Sapph]

Your 7700K is running at stock speed. At stock it can very well bottleneck even a 1080.
You need to overclock that cpu to get full performance out of it.

[Sapph]

vadim původně napsal:

Sapph původně napsal:

Your 7700K is running at stock speed. At stock it can very well bottleneck even a 1080.
You need to overclock that cpu to get full performance out of it.

BS.

Not at all. It may have really strong single core performance and has HyperThreading, but it is still just a 4 core cpu. Rise of Tomb Raider is REALLY multi-core heavy game.

With the cpu running only at stock speeds, the game struggles.

[Talby]

I don't have that one yet, however there are great resources for you to get the most out of it at the game forum sticky, over at Nvidia[www.geforce.com], and PCG.

[Terry Duke]

Omega původně napsal:

A CPU does not have to run at 100% to be bottlenecking the GPU. Look at the per core usage, if one or more cores are maxed it's bottlenecking.

Don't worry about random 100% spikes unless it hurts performance. A 100% spike is caused by something, either by the game you are playing on another application.

If you have Gsync, enable it. Gsync isn't exactly cheap, so if you have it I would expect you want to use it.

Don't mess with GPU settings etc.. unless you know what you are doing. This is how you can cause issues like this in the first place. Leave everything to default.


It might simply be time to do a reinstall of Windows.

If by hurting performance, you mean frame drops and stuttering, then yes, it hurts performance.

G-sync is so confusing. If i enable it, it solves CPU usage (not completely but definitely an improvement), i can get up to 70 fps in geothermal valley. But then screen tearing becomes horrible, it's everywhere.

So i've read a bit on it and it turns out i'm supposed to turn vsync on along with gsync in the nvidia control panel, but turn it off in the game's display settings. So i've done that. No more stuterring or screen tearing, game caps at 60 fps but it's fine. No stuterring even if the game drops at 50 fps thanks to gsync i suspect, but, CPU spikes are back... I'm probably missing something here.

Also other than a custom fan cruve in afterburner, i haven't messed with the GPU. Basically thanks to the curve, the GPU never exceeds 80 degrees at 70% fan speed.

Not quite ready to reinstall windows. I gotta everything else first.

[Terry Duke]

Wichtelman0815 původně napsal:

there are a ton of videos on youtube with your spec and rise of the tomb raider with cpu and gpu usage displayed by msi afterburner + rivatuner...

nothing to report with benchmarks = your score is average for your hardware?
do you have the same problem with other games or just with rise of the tomb raider?

Yes, score is average.

Tomb raider is currently my most taxing game, i'm mainly looking to see if people with similar hardware have similar issues, which would mean my hardware really is okay, or not.

Other games seem to work fine, although i don't know if i'm missing out on even better performance. I'd need to compare with other equally strong PCs.

[Terry Duke]

UPDATE:

So i restored all the 3D settings for the game in nvidia control settings. Then i set monitor technology to gsync, refresh rate to highest available and turned on vsync.

I played the game. 60 fps, some little drops to 55 here and there. No tearing, no CPU spikes, no stuttering, everything works awesome!

Then the game freezes for 3 seconds, shuts down, i get a brief message saying my hardware ran out of ressources or something, but before i have time to read it fully, the screen goes blue with windows saying it's run into a problem and needs to restart with the message BAD_POOL_CALLER

So that's a new a problem i need to figure out.

[Omega]

Don't worry about this crash unless it happens again, it might have bugged out because you tweaked some settings.

[DVendy]

Happened to me, gpu can't get to 100% at some places (one in the first time we meet local guy)
Then I switched to dx12 and boom, it's steady 60fps.
But then at someplace when the game needs to load resource or assets, the game would freeze up to 3 seconds with 100% cpu usage. But that's a trade I'd take for steady 60fps.
I think it must be the game engine that tried to do something that's only available on dx12.,or not i don't know lol

Rig: i7-6700, RTX 2060