nyc01, on 28 March 2013 - 10:09 AM, said:
So if the Win 7 gadget is accurate (which it's well known that even GPU-Z doesn't give a good representation of GPU utilization) what exactly is keeping the GPU busy besides maybe very high resolution at high AA settings?
Are there some advanced lighting and shadows calculations being done on the GPU? Obviously it can't use GPU compute at this time so what would be so demanding on the video card in OpenRails?
Per the data available, the GPU isn't being over-burdened, the CPU is.
IF the gadget is accurate ( a speculative assumption) the data in my test indicates my GPU is
not being maxed out when the fps is under 50. And the lower the fps,
the less work the GPU is doing. My conclusion is the route being tested makes the whole PC CPU bound (that's what the Render % is suggesting, supported by the high primitive count). As the primitive count went up the fps went down.
And if the route indeed makes the PC CPU bound than there should be some relationship between an increase in primitives and a decrease in both fps and GPU loading... and that is what I observed.
At any rate, don't overlook the fact that when the fps hit 60 my monitor becomes the bottleneck: Everything else may be flying along at 160fps... but I only get to see 60 of them no matter how much money I might have spent on the rest.
Last, if the gadget is totally bogus then about all I can do is quote Emily Litalle: Nevermind. :)