High CPU Usage

ph1Lt0r · Feb 7, 2017

Hi all,

I was wondering if anyone has noticed higher than normal CPU usage since the last patch? I've been having all sorts of issues in combat zones, busy haz res, and when passing through the station mail slot. It will use between 50-70% of my CPU, previously it would be around 30-40%

Note: this is ONLY elite dangerous causing the CPU spikes, not overall CPU usage. I am only talking about elite dangerous cpu usage.

System Specs:
Core i5 4430
16 gigs of Corsair Vengeance
evga NVidia 980ti kingpin

Any help or suggestions would be much appreciated!

shadragon · Feb 7, 2017

Your overall CPU % is that high or you specifically mean Elite alone is running at that level?

ph1Lt0r · Feb 7, 2017

shadragon said:
Your overall CPU % is that high or you specifically mean Elite alone is running at that level?

Elite is running at that level. Sorry. It's normally not a problem, unless I am streaming. It will then cause OBS hard locks.

SpeakerToAliens · Feb 7, 2017

My PC had started running hot (fans started howling), so I turned down the frame rate from 60fps to 45fps. That fixed it.

IndigoWyrd · Feb 7, 2017

Core i7 4.0 Ghz, 32 GB RAM, Geforce 1080, never misses a beat.

BUT... as of late I have noticed a few things:

1. Black Screen in CZ when in Wing - You drop in, pick your faction, start fighting, and suddenly there is blackness. You can still hear, but no buttons perform any functions. Killing the client is the only way out.
2. The Great Blur - Only had this twice so far, but when entering a station to dock the innards of the station become a vast blur, rotation correction seems to fail, and you are pulled to the left until you smash into something. Landing on your designated pad is impossible even if you manage to locate it. Exiting, cancelling and re-entering the station does not fix this. Only logging out and back in fixes it.
3. Entering/Exiting Super... - forever. The Blue Tube forms, but you never actually enter or exit super cruise. Nearly lost my FGS to this due to perpetual heat build-up - was at 504%, after dropping 3 heat sinks when I killed the client. I refuse to lose a ship to a bug.
4. Heat, heat and more heat - like above, I have run into some strange instances of inexplicable heat buildup to insane levels - 300-500%, Not been in combat, not too close to anything that would generate heat like that - just scooping up salvage. Once in supercruise the heat bleeds off normally.

DragonIV · Feb 7, 2017

IndigoWyrd said:
Core i7 4.0 Ghz, 32 GB RAM, Geforce 1080, never misses a beat.

BUT... as of late I have noticed a few things:

1. Black Screen in CZ when in Wing - You drop in, pick your faction, start fighting, and suddenly there is blackness. You can still hear, but no buttons perform any functions. Killing the client is the only way out.
2. The Great Blur - Only had this twice so far, but when entering a station to dock the innards of the station become a vast blur, rotation correction seems to fail, and you are pulled to the left until you smash into something. Landing on your designated pad is impossible even if you manage to locate it. Exiting, cancelling and re-entering the station does not fix this. Only logging out and back in fixes it.
3. Entering/Exiting Super... - forever. The Blue Tube forms, but you never actually enter or exit super cruise. Nearly lost my FGS to this due to perpetual heat build-up - was at 504%, after dropping 3 heat sinks when I killed the client. I refuse to lose a ship to a bug.
4. Heat, heat and more heat - like above, I have run into some strange instances of inexplicable heat buildup to insane levels - 300-500%, Not been in combat, not too close to anything that would generate heat like that - just scooping up salvage. Once in supercruise the heat bleeds off normally.

Sounds like network issues. I've been having tons of weird stuff too, from guns not firing (I've been playing for 2+ years, I know how to get my guns to fire folks), station service quicklinks fail to initialize, changing state (going into/out of SC / jump stalls), jump tunnels occasionally last a loooong time, etc. Even quitting the game gets interesting, and all this stuff just began in the past week.

Seeing issues with many other network games--Diablo 3 is also having all sorts of issues. Best I can tell looking at downdetector, my ISP is getting hammered by attacks. What's better, my work ISP is *also* getting hammered with attacks every few hours for the past few weeks. This new era of super cheap mega DDOS attacks really stinks.

Gonna do another router/modem reset tonight and see if I get any relief before calling my ISP again.

- - - Updated - - -

In regards to CPU, Elite is simply a CPU hog. It's funny, I used to play this game on an old Quad Core Q6600, later on a Q6800, and on both ED would eat about 60-65% of CPU overall.

Replaced the rig with a core-i5 6600 skylake system and was curious to see how much Elite would use on the new, much beefier box. 60-65% again.

ph1Lt0r · Feb 7, 2017

dragoniv said:
Sounds like network issues. I've been having tons of weird stuff too, from guns not firing (I've been playing for 2+ years, I know how to get my guns to fire folks), station service quicklinks fail to initialize, changing state (going into/out of SC / jump stalls), jump tunnels occasionally last a loooong time, etc. Even quitting the game gets interesting, and all this stuff just began in the past week.

Seeing issues with many other network games--Diablo 3 is also having all sorts of issues. Best I can tell looking at downdetector, my ISP is getting hammered by attacks. What's better, my work ISP is *also* getting hammered with attacks every few hours for the past few weeks. This new era of super cheap mega DDOS attacks really stinks.

Gonna do another router/modem reset tonight and see if I get any relief before calling my ISP again.

- - - Updated - - -

In regards to CPU, Elite is simply a CPU hog. It's funny, I used to play this game on an old Quad Core Q6600, later on a Q6800, and on both ED would eat about 60-65% of CPU overall.

Replaced the rig with a core-i5 6600 skylake system and was curious to see how much Elite would use on the new, much beefier box. 60-65% again.

I agree, but it's really strange that this has just happened (for me) since the combat patch.

AtrociKitty · Feb 7, 2017

dragoniv said:
In regards to CPU, Elite is simply a CPU hog. It's funny, I used to play this game on an old Quad Core Q6600, later on a Q6800, and on both ED would eat about 60-65% of CPU overall.

Replaced the rig with a core-i5 6600 skylake system and was curious to see how much Elite would use on the new, much beefier box. 60-65% again.

I've never found Elite to be very taxing on my hardware, but I still have all of the same network limitations you mentioned. A lot of times it feels like the biggest limiting factor for performance is the p2p networking.

60-65% is surprisingly high though, I think the worst I've seen is 35% total usage. Hardware is a bit beefier though, 5820k and 980 SLI.

Jpotter · Feb 7, 2017

That seems awfully high - my ancient/crappy AMD A8-3800 APU, will run the game 70% - 80% tops (the higher end is on planets) - and that is my entire CPU load, not just the game. And I run at Ultra settings (R9 290X GPU - I'm not running video on the APU).

I do agree that something since 2.2.03 seems to have bumped CPU use up a bit - as I can no longer watch HD videos on my 2nd monitor without the video hiccuping due to maxed out CPU. But my APU is 6 years old and was never meant to last this long and I think I get better performance than expected....

LameoveR · Feb 7, 2017

Roll back 2.2.03!

xondk · Feb 7, 2017

ph1Lt0r said:
Hi all,

I was wondering if anyone has noticed higher than normal CPU usage since the last patch? I've been having all sorts of issues in combat zones, busy haz res, and when passing through the station mail slot. It will use between 50-70% of my CPU, previously it would be around 30-40%

System Specs:
Core i5 4430
16 gigs of Corsair Vengeance
evga NVidia 980ti kingpin

Any help or suggestions would be much appreciated!

You may want to check if something else on your computer can be doing this, my experience is that it isn't Elite but other stuff, that does it.

SpeakerToAliens said:
My PC had started running hot (fans started howling), so I turned down the frame rate from 60fps to 45fps. That fixed it.

That is not a fix, it means your cooling likely is not good enough, you should ...fix that, rather then patch it by forcing frame rate lower.

Tom2 · Feb 7, 2017

Elite was running fine on my Computer about 2-3weeks ago , now it can't even get to the main menu because of the high CPU usage (100%).

AMD Athlon II X2 270 Processor

Jon flint · Feb 7, 2017

I know this doesn't help, but just checked while parked in station cpu is hovering 35-40% which seems pretty normal (i7 4790).

So its not affecting everyone, but i have seen some odd stuff lately, forgot to request docking permission the other day, flew right into the station, got no trespass warnings/fines or anything! It was like the station hadn't spawned in properly and didn't know I was there.

Ca$hback · Feb 7, 2017

Quad Core i7 2670QM laptop 2.2 Ghz
8 Gigs RAM
Nvidia card is 1.3 Gigs (I think...this information was strangely easier to find 5 years ago) according to GeForce

I could have sworn my graphics card was better than that but I can't seem to find the "this is what it is" page anywhere anymore, like they're trying to hide specifics because they want people to be idiots.
At any rate I usually get about 45FPS alone in space and about 25FPS on a planet. I have periods where it drops to 6FPS temporarily.

DragonIV · Feb 7, 2017

AtrociKitty said:
I've never found Elite to be very taxing on my hardware, but I still have all of the same network limitations you mentioned. A lot of times it feels like the biggest limiting factor for performance is the p2p networking.

60-65% is surprisingly high though, I think the worst I've seen is 35% total usage. Hardware is a bit beefier though, 5820k and 980 SLI.

60-65% isn't taxing on the hardware. My current rig gets 240fps in space and 60 on the planets and in stations. It's just weird--like it's busy mining bitcoins in the background.

No other game I run showed this same profile on the old and new hardware, which was also weird.

Brett C · Feb 7, 2017

Just to be sure....

1. Latest gpu drivers?
2. Lastest os updates?
3. What's your full pc specs (dxdiag)
4. What's your game graphics settings?
5. Any other info? Where does it spike up the cpu at? Main menu, ingame, map?

Windscreen Smudge · Feb 7, 2017

Even though it's a Haswell chip, the 4430 is not all that hot.

3.2ghz and 4 threads can create bottlenecks in the areas that you're talking about when you're using a decent GPU like the 980ti and have the graphics cranked up. Cobra engine actually does multithreading very well, so the devs have capitalized on that and put a lot of overhead on the CPU for graphics processes.

So when you have an imbalanced machine like a so-so 4430 processor and a meaty 980ti, the 980ti pushes the CPU hard.

I used to have a 2500k, which is roughly equivalent to the 4430 give or take a couple percentage points here and there. Even overclocked to 4.7ghz ED would push it hard in asteroid fields because I always push my GPU until it's ready to tap out.

No problems since I upgraded to a 5930k though.

Morbad · Feb 7, 2017

The game has been gradually taking better advantage of multiple threads, and becoming more demanding, as time goes on.

AtrociKitty said:
I've never found Elite to be very taxing on my hardware, but I still have all of the same network limitations you mentioned. A lot of times it feels like the biggest limiting factor for performance is the p2p networking.

60-65% is surprisingly high though, I think the worst I've seen is 35% total usage. Hardware is a bit beefier though, 5820k and 980 SLI.

Overall CPU utilization is calculated by total cycles utilized, divided by the number of logical cores.

If you are seeing 35% utilization on a 5820k, you'd almost certainly see upwards of 70% with an i5.

Zambrick · Feb 7, 2017

ph1Lt0r said:
Hi all,

I was wondering if anyone has noticed higher than normal CPU usage since the last patch? I've been having all sorts of issues in combat zones, busy haz res, and when passing through the station mail slot. It will use between 50-70% of my CPU, previously it would be around 30-40%

System Specs:
Core i5 4430
16 gigs of Corsair Vengeance
evga NVidia 980ti kingpin

Any help or suggestions would be much appreciated!

Check and see if the Nvidia experience is running and recording the background. It kills everything and is not efficient in any way when it comes to CPU utilization.

Windscreen Smudge · Feb 7, 2017

Morbad said:
The game has been gradually taking better advantage of multiple threads, and becoming more demanding, as time goes on.

Overall CPU utilization is calculated by total cycles utilized, divided by the number of logical cores.

If you are seeing 35% utilization on a 5820k, you'd almost certainly see upwards of 70% with an i5.

I used to get 70% on an overclocked i5 of same quality.

OP's level of performance is standard. Time to start saving up for a new processor and Mobo.