Thanks
! That scenario had my processors running at 15-35% (i7 4770, Haswell I think, 3.4 GHz). The load seems to be pretty well distributed amongst the 8 threads.
I love buzzing the anacondas, but my gpu doesn't! The frame rate gets down to ~6 FPS at 1920x1080 on high settings
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Ah thanks for checking that.
So you are very much GPU bound then, the powerful CPU is sat waiting to deliver data to your card.
The other poster said, "A PM from Cosmos (who is on a Q6600 like me) seems to back Wookie up! - "the last scenario slows right down, with all those ships, and it would appear its bottle necked by the CPU.. but there is a ridiculous amount of stuff going on. GPU was at 40% load and was getting <20fps."
So, as expected, we go from one poster being CPU bound in the same scenario with a Q6600 to your case where the CPU is twiddling its thumbs because the GPU cannot cope: the only reason a GPU would run at only 40% is a CPU bottleneck, either the hardware or the app itself written poorly (not multithreaded for example, but you have proven this is not the case).
I observed that, "remember a top-spec Haswell is way ahead of a 6600, maybe up to 3 times as potent for CPU intensive stuff."
This is the evidence of that, your CPU is far more capable than your GPU - a GTX660? - and more capable (as expected) than the 6600 CPUs.
Throwing multiplayer into the equation seems to increase load on CPUs judging by experience with BF3, so come March 2014 the 6600 people are going to be CPU shopping and you are going to be GPU shopping!
I am a hi-fi and performance car man and the way I view it is that I'd always rather the core of a system is the most competent aspect. I'd rather my speakers were slightly less capable than my amp, then I know I am getting the best I can from them, but the best speakers in the world cannot make a 200 quid Sony amp sound good. The same with a car, I'd rather my car was over-powered for the suspension, I can always reign in my driving if I lose traction, but the best suspension\tyres in the world are not going to greatly improve the experience of driving a 1.6 Ford Focus!
Same with a PC, I think a video card sat doing nothing is a far worse scenario than a the CPU waiting on the video card. You can always turn off graphical bells and whistles if the GPU is overloaded, but if the CPU cannot generate enough geometric data to send to the GPU in the first place, then even going down to 800x600 isn't going to help you. A lot of people just fall for marketing speak and buy the best GPU they can, forgetting something has to actually do the grunt work of sending data to it. Plus, a powerful CPU benefits everything, a powerful GPU only benefits games.
Anyway, the code is bound to go through a ton of optimisating before release, so what we see now is in no way representative of production and the multiplayer angle will change the behaviour of a system again.
