What does cpu usage mean in games?

[737382828299338]

I was watching a video where a guy was talking about how ingame fortnite with his pc his cpu usage is only 30%. Does this mean in order for the game to run above average it only requires the cpu to use 30% of its full potential? I was just confused on what having a low or high cpu usage meant and how it affected in game.

[Revelene]

You do not want the cpu to ever get maxed out. If it does, the the gpu has to wait on the cpu.

This is not an indication of how a game will perform frame wise. Merely how the gpu and cpu correspond with each other. Many refer to this kind of occurrence as "bottlenecking".

[Arya]

Running Fortnite is only using 30% of that CPU's total processing power. It's still got 70% free for other things. Which implies it's an 8700K or something along those lines, something very efficient and very powerful.

[🦜Cloud Boy🦜]

What does cpu usage mean in games?

it means exactly what it sounds. Fortnite needa only 30% of that CPU to Run.
if you play Battlefield 1, it will Show 90% Cpu usage with GTX 1080Ti.
Depends on CPU and the GPU. Simple.

[[☥] - CJ -]

CPU usage depends on a few aspects

The CPUs performance itself, what GPU is being used, what graphic settings the game is being played on, how optimized the game is, how many cores the CPU has, how many threads it has

how a game may or may not properly utilize it

etc so on

HIGH CPU Usage is not something you want
High or Maxed CPU usage can indicate a bottleneck, in which case your CPU may be having issues keeping up with your GPUs needs.

Graphic settings can have an effect on this

[Omega]

It's kind of complicated since we also need to take cores in account. A CPU running at 30% might already be utilized to the maximum a certain game is able to.

[Aliquis Freedom & Ethnopluralism]

If it's average load you shouldn't draw too much conclusion from it.

A ryzen 7 1700 at 30% total load may still limit the frame-rate because one core may have 100% load and not all of the 8 cores 16 threads may be used.

To really find out whatever you are cpu limited that's what you should be looking for. The max load on any core. That you have lots of cores free with low load still mean you've got processor capacity left but it could be used for other programs or better utilized by a game better utilizing multiple cores.

Some old games will only use one thread because they were made when there only existed processors with one core.

[vadim]

TH3ETAWN eredeti hozzászólása:

What does cpu usage mean in games?

In general, nothing. Unlike GPU. You can have 15% CPU load and CPU bottleneck at the same time, but on other hand CPU load could be as high as 100%, but no CPU bottleneck.

[Aliquis Freedom & Ethnopluralism]

vadim eredeti hozzászólása:

TH3ETAWN eredeti hozzászólása:

What does cpu usage mean in games?

In general, nothing. Unlike GPU. You can have 15% CPU load and CPU bottleneck at the same time, but on other hand CPU load could be as high as 100%, but no CPU bottleneck.

At 100% CPU load it's likely bottlenecking =P

And at 15% CPU load you can just see the load per core and if one is at 100% then it's likely still bottlenecking.

[737382828299338]

In pubg my 8700k gets like 40% and my gpu gets like 55%, is this normal?

[Aliquis Freedom & Ethnopluralism]

TH3ETAWN eredeti hozzászólása:

In pubg my 8700k gets like 40% and my gpu gets like 55%, is this normal?

If the graphics settings are low and the game use few cores maybe.

[[☥] - CJ -]

TH3ETAWN eredeti hozzászólása:

In pubg my 8700k gets like 40% and my gpu gets like 55%, is this normal?

no that isnt normal, but thats an optimization problem

[vadim]

Aliquis Freedom & Ethnopluralism eredeti hozzászólása:

At 100% CPU load it's likely bottlenecking =P

And at 15% CPU load you can just see the load per core and if one is at 100% then it's likely still bottlenecking.

Unfortunately, things are not as simple as you described. First, there are a lot of reasons when CPU can be fully loaded without bottleneck. For example, run any MS-DOS program to check.
Second, OS scheduler constantly switches cores, so, it can be impossible to understand whether this thread fully uses core resources (a particular core at each specific moment of time, but different cores at different times) or not.

[737382828299338]

☥ - CJ - eredeti hozzászólása:

TH3ETAWN eredeti hozzászólása:

In pubg my 8700k gets like 40% and my gpu gets like 55%, is this normal?

no that isnt normal, but thats an optimization problem

So I shouldn’t worry about soemthing being wrong with my system?

[[☥] - CJ -]

depends on what your specs are

[x_wing]

Cloud Boy eredeti hozzászólása:

What does cpu usage mean in games?

it means exactly what it sounds. Fortnite needa only 30% of that CPU to Run.
if you play Battlefield 1, it will Show 90% Cpu usage with GTX 1080Ti.
Depends on CPU and the GPU. Simple.

On a high level what you say may be correct but to be technically correct, the "CPU usage" is just a measure of the OS that shows how much percentage of it is not idling. Depending of the software you're running, it may or may not be bottlenecked by the CPU due that it may be able to only use one core (if you have a 4 core cpu, a CPU usage of 30% could mean that you're using at a 100% one of your cores). So, in some scenarios it may be necessary to go in more detail to how a resource is being used.