Ideal GPU usage percentage?

[sho69607 29]

Hello,

Kind of a dumb question here, but is it a bad thing if GPU usage is at 100% usage? I have been playing with my settings and so far reducing tessellation to medium, water detail to medium/high, and shadow quality/distance to medium has almost completely eliminated stuttering and brought my gpu down to 70-75% usage. Everything else like draw distance, mesh resolution, LOD, and special effects are able to be set at very high or max without issues. This likely means that gpu was being overworked before I brought down the settings listed above, correct? 

[Bert Pieke 7,584]

5 minutes ago, sho69607 said:

Hello,

Kind of a dumb question here, but is it a bad thing if GPU usage is at 100% usage?....... This likely means that gpu was being overworked before I brought down the settings listed above, correct? 

I would agree... if you can run the GPU at less than 100%, you are going to get a smoother sim... and less noise from the fans 😉

Another way, is to use an external fps limiter..

Edited January 13, 2021 by Bert Pieke

[sho69607 29]

2 hours ago, Bert Pieke said:

I would agree... if you can run the GPU at less than 100%, you are going to get a smoother sim... and less noise from the fans 😉

Another way, is to use an external fps limiter..

If you have vertical sync set as adaptive (half fresh rate) is it still necessary to limit the frames as well? I tried using the internal frame limiter, but found that my FPS was decreasing below 30 with it on. It did reduce the workload on the GPU though.

[Bert Pieke 7,584]

1 minute ago, sho69607 said:

If you have vertical sync set as adaptive (half fresh rate) is it still necessary to limit the frames as well? I tried using the internal frame limiter, but found that my FPS was decreasing below 30 with it on. It did reduce the workload on the GPU though.

I use RTSS, 1/2 refresh rate... similar to what you are doing I believe.

[sho69607 29]

Alright thanks and I forgot to mention I am on v5. Any issues using RTSS in p3dv5?

[Bert Pieke 7,584]

2 hours ago, sho69607 said:

Alright thanks and I forgot to mention I am on v5. Any issues using RTSS in p3dv5?

I am on V5.1.

RTSS is working just fine..

[C2615 319]

Speking of external fps limiter, I noticed that my NV's limiter are not fucntinal proper with muti-window P3D.

Same as baicam show, it thinks my FPS is the total sum of all window I undocked, like normally I would have an ATC window, a FMC and a PFD or +ND undocked to other monitor, so when I run at 25FPS, it shows my FPS as 4 windows combined 100 FPS, so if I set a limiter to 40, it will give only 10 on each.

And as I might use different config for different aircraft... I just can't get it to work....

My 1080 runs mostly over 90%, and the fans is quite noticable, luckly not as loud as engine sound from speaker...

[MDFlier 2,031]

13 hours ago, sho69607 said:

Hello,

Kind of a dumb question here, but is it a bad thing if GPU usage is at 100% usage? I have been playing with my settings and so far reducing tessellation to medium, water detail to medium/high, and shadow quality/distance to medium has almost completely eliminated stuttering and brought my gpu down to 70-75% usage. Everything else like draw distance, mesh resolution, LOD, and special effects are able to be set at very high or max without issues. This likely means that gpu was being overworked before I brought down the settings listed above, correct? 

I'm probably going to go against the grain here, but my thoughts are that you paid for 100% of it so you should use 100% of it. All computer parts have a lifetime. There's no saving them for later. If you are not doing anything ridiculous to them, like applying outrageously high voltages or pushing the clocks too high, then by all means run them full tilt. Drive it like you stole it.

The worst thing that can happen to a GPU is that the CPU sends it more information than it can handle. The GPU handles it by just dropping the frames it can't handle. Basically, it just says "no". It won't be harmed by too much information. I've got my RTX 2080Ti running at 94% - 99% and everything is great. I'm happy.

Study the specs for your card, and make sure that any pertinent settings in the UEFI (or BIOS if you have an older machine) are within guidelines for the card. Set them to max, lower them if you have a problem. Then, check any vendor support software and drivers to make sure that all of the options and settings are within guidelines, but maxed out. 

Finally, watch the temperatures in the beginning to make sure that they stay reasonable. HWInfo by Cpuid is a great little freeware monitor to use for that if you don't have one. Temperature is the enemy, my friend. Make sure that the operating temperatures are within guidelines for the components.

If you have problems, pick the most likely setting, and try lowering it. Do not change more than one setting at a time, or you will never figure out what is going on.

Enjoy!

[GSalden 4,654]

You will get a much better franerate around 50% GPU load than at 90%.

I have a test situation at FT Schiphol + TE NL with many clouds. At 50% load I see 49 FPS with my high settings. If I change from 2x SSAA to 4x SSAA + object shadows the load goes up to 82% but the framerate goes down to 32.

 

[sho69607 29]

17 hours ago, GSalden said:

You will get a much better franerate around 50% GPU load than at 90%.

I have a test situation at FT Schiphol + TE NL with many clouds. At 50% load I see 49 FPS with my high settings. If I change from 2x SSAA to 4x SSAA + object shadows the load goes up to 82% but the framerate goes down to 32.

 

Thats what I suspected. Every time my GPU is at 100% I see stuttering. If I start turning down settings that affect the GPU, these usually go away. I don't know if it works the same way, but a GPU doesn't have multiple "cores" to share the work load like a powerful CPU. I have a 1070, which I think is a decent card, but from what I can tell there are situations where it is falling behind in terms of performance compared to my cpu setup. In older versions of p3d the gpu didn't seem to get taxed as hard as in v5. At least I think that is the case.

[Afterburner 374]

First thing you need to know is that it is impossible to maintain a constant GPU load (whatever % it may be) during a flight because of different scenarios and their different stresses on CPU and GPU. If you are taxiing (before and after landing) at a complex airport with a complex airplane (plus having AI traffic), you are often CPU limited, so the GPU will naturally experience a lower load, since it needs to process fewer frames than it is capable of (unless you turn on lots of GPU intensive features). During cruise, the GPU may be more stressed if you are flying over dense overcast cloud conditions, and less if you have clear skies. It also depends on whether you limit the frame rate or not and whether the frame limit is lower than the fps with unlimited setting in the current situation.

For example, let's say that if you don't limit the fps during cruise, you get 70 fps, and your GPU load is 100%. Now if you limit the frame rate (internally or externally) to 30 fps, your GPU load will be lower (to something like 45%). Is that a bad thing?  No, because why should the GPU work harder than it needs to to maintain the 30 fps?  Having a lower GPU load in this case is actually a good thing - you keep the temperature and the power consumption down, which prolongs the lifespan of the GPU. However, as soon as you encounter dense clouds during a sunset, the GPU load may spike to close to 100%, depending on the situation.

The purpose of having a powerful GPU is not necessarily to increase the frame rate in all situations (especially if you limit your fps with the goal of achieving smoothness). Rather, you want to increase the overhead in critical, GPU intensive scenarios to maintain a desired target frame. Not only that, but you will be able to turn on or increase the quality of features that are GPU dependent, such as dynamic lights, shadows, cloud resolution, anti-aliasing, etc.

[Afterburner 374]

18 hours ago, GSalden said:

You will get a much better franerate around 50% GPU load than at 90%.

I have a test situation at FT Schiphol + TE NL with many clouds. At 50% load I see 49 FPS with my high settings. If I change from 2x SSAA to 4x SSAA + object shadows the load goes up to 82% but the framerate goes down to 32.

 

This doesn't make much sense, something must be wrong. If you increase GPU intensive settings, either the framerate must stay constant while the GPU load goes up (in which case you are CPU limited), or the framerate must drop while the GPU load is 100% (now the scenario is GPU limited). Maybe the settings have an impact on the CPU load?

[GSalden 4,654]

46 minutes ago, Afterburner said:

This doesn't make much sense, something must be wrong. If you increase GPU intensive settings, either the framerate must stay constant while the GPU load goes up (in which case you are CPU limited), or the framerate must drop while the GPU load is 100% (now the scenario is GPU limited). Maybe the settings have an impact on the CPU load?

Nothing wrong with both systems. Test it yourself. Enable Simobjects shadows or set cloud range / shadows to max and see what is happening.

[Ray Proudfoot 8,919]

On 1/13/2021 at 3:26 AM, Bert Pieke said:

I use RTSS, 1/2 refresh rate... similar to what you are doing I believe.

If your monitor is capable of 30Hz use NCP to set it to that and the results are a very smooth sim. If not then the 1/2 refresh rate is the alternative.

@sho69607, is your monitor capable of 30Hz?

[MDFlier 2,031]

22 hours ago, GSalden said:

You will get a much better franerate around 50% GPU load than at 90%.

I have a test situation at FT Schiphol + TE NL with many clouds. At 50% load I see 49 FPS with my high settings. If I change from 2x SSAA to 4x SSAA + object shadows the load goes up to 82% but the framerate goes down to 32.

 

Changing the AA setting is primarily a GPU change. However, I think the shadows part also increases the CPU load as well so it may skew the results.

3 hours ago, Afterburner said:

Maybe the settings have an impact on the CPU load?

This is what I think.

If you increase the load on the GPU other components like the PCIe bus controllers also need to step up and handle the increased load. It's possible that as the load on the GPU is going up, something else is getting overwhelmed. I'm just speculating, but given that every one of us has a different configuration, there truly is no one correct answer. My experience is that I see increasing performance as the load goes up right up to the 100% mark until it, or something supporting it hits a limit. There shouldn't be any reason that a GPU can't produce smooth output at 95-100% load if everything else in the system can feed it data at a sufficient rate.

 

Edited January 14, 2021 by MDFlier