Multi Core Question...

[BigR]

Im running a phenom 8750, along side a radeon 5770...as a general question:

What would cause me to only pull 50 fps while my gpu load is only 59% and my cpu load is at 60%?? Are my cores not being fully utilized? Or is it a memory issue? I have 4 gigs of ram and 1 gig of video memory. Self shadowing is off, but everything else is turned on, running windows 7 64bit. I can provide dxdiag if needed. This is at 1650x1080

[BigR]

oh one thing i forgot to mention..core 3 seems to run much higher percentages than the other 2 cores on average. Core 2 is next highest, and core 1 seems to run at half the percentage most of the time.

[guncrasher]

ah and most games only uses to cores, i believe.  so if your only using 60% of your cpu and get 50 fps then that's good. ur eyesight cant tell the difference on fps higher than 40.

semp

[Skuzzy]

The frame rate should ne no higher than the monitor refresh rate.  50 seems odd.

The core usage is determined by the operating system.  Generally speaking, Aces High will need no more than two cores, but with a quad core CPU the operating system determines how they will be allocated.

[BigR]

It stays at 59-60 (my refresh rate) but then sometimes it drops...ive seen it go all the way to 30. When it drops my CPU and GPU usage percentages are never near maxed. In fact the highest ive ever seen one core go during AH is 80%, and my video card rarely gets above 80 as well. I just wonder if my cpu and gpu are not being taxed, why are the frame rates dropping? This is a tripple core processor btw.

As an example when I play other games, when the frame rates start to stutter, i can see a direct correlation between my dropping frame rates, and how hard my CPU/GPU are working. In AH, there is no rhyme or reason to it.

[cattb]

out of curiousity what do you run your CPU at, I have the same one. I run 2.8
Thanks Cattb/Tim O

[BigR]

i run it at the stock 12x multiplier, so 2400.

[cattb]

I had a problem and was running a 2.8 windsor, I had to buy a new CPU, I found at stock speeds I did not get the performance that I had before with the 2.8 and ran the multipler up on the 8750 and back to normal.
I try to eliminate all background processes that I don't need,  also anything like auto updates that I don't need running in the background.
Somtimes I get a drop in framerate but I do keep my firewall on and antivirus and it has a auto updater.I have attributed the lost of framerate to either the connection getting slow or my updater for antivirus.
I am not a expert at all this stuff.
I am not implying for you to raise your multiplier, just telling you of my experience.
Cattb/TimO

[Skuzzy]

Other games are not natively multi-core.  You cannot take one core and its load to mean anything with an application that is natively multi-threaded.  Now, here is where some game companies will turn to marketing.  By the very nature of DirectX, any game can call itself multi-threaded.  There are but a handful of games in the marketplace which are natively multi-threaded.  Aces High is one of them.

Games that show a direct coorelation to performance and core load, are not natively multi-threaded.  The game code all runs on one CPU, while the DirectX layer does its multi-threaded thing.

Now, in your particular case, the low speed of the CPU's are holding up the game's ability to keep the video card busy, which causes the frame rate drop when a lot of objects are in the area.  When a lot of objects are in the area, there is more for the CPU(s) to do.  Due to the video card being so fast, it is waiting for data.

This is something many people do not understand.  Multiple cores do not make a computer faster.  It simply makes the computer handle more loads.  A 3Ghz dual-core CPU would run circles around a triple core 2.4Ghz CPU, as it pertains to Aces High.  This is due to the flight modeling, which is very, very CPU/floating point intensive.  This does not mean Aces High is CPU bound.  It just means we happen to need more CPUpower than a typical first person shooter game will.

Overall, higher clock rates make a computer faster than more slower clocked cores will.