For the first time ever I noticed my 4090 near steady at 99% usage with MSI Afterburner. This was in Xplane 12 and I was at FL180 looking at mostly sun, clouds, haze and no mountains.

Surprised at this, I opened up Task Manager and GPU usage there was around 73%.

What gives?

The more I looked the harder it was to get a true read on how hard the GPU was actually working.

I've always trusted Afterburner but searching shows many people are having similar issues not knowing which app reliably reports GPU usage.

Is wattage, temperatures and fan speed the better the way to go for GPU usage feedback?

Edited August 1, 2025Aug 1 by VeryBumpy
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Power draw is probably a pretty good...in fact very likely better indicator of actual GPU load...but then again, that's only if the sensors reporting *that* statistic are accurate.

Usage can be a tricky number, as it relates to the percentage of time that the cores are actively tasked, not how demanding those tasks are.  A simple task like moving data from system RAM to VRAM isn't the same kind of load as doing complex extended instruction set floating-point math.