PC High CPU, even when paused and without any zombies. (6flr apartment, Navezgane)

[John Black]

Testing was done in/around - 6flr apartment, Navezgane; I believe the issue is not tied to a ~specific POI

It was already a while back when I noticed that when you paused and minimized the game the CPU is still pretty active for the 7d2d process. I then moved the save game to a dedicated server(low load server in office) and connected to the same game. The CPU load was still very high on the client which leads me to believe there might be a client issue on my end.

Today I proceeded to load the game without zombie spawns, ran a killall and reloaded. Still, some major CPU usage even without any zombies spawning.

Client : A20, b238, no mods.

Other changes tested...

• Occlusion
  
• boot.ini tweaks on/off
  
• CPU affinity / no HT & other combos
  
• An experimental (2-3 week ago)
  
• New game, 6flr apartment, no zombies. (better but still a lot of CPU for environment only and paused)
  

Can anyone else confirm high CPU usage being the norm for a paused game without zombies in a city/town.

Screens from local single player game, with zombies. No zombies doesn't make much of a difference.

 

[BarryTGash]

What's the cpu usage unpaused?

A quick, probably very unscientific, test in a small city in a newish game was 32% unpaused, 27% paused - occlusion off. 45% unpaused, 27% paused - occlusion on. 4790K @4.4ghz all cores. 

 

[Fox]

Do you have bloatware or antivirus or firewall running in the background? This game (last I checked) can only utilize 4 core threads worth spread out to all cores (game engine limitations). In other words, it should be impossible to see more than 33.3% (+5ish percent for OS overhead / background apps) total CPU utilization with this game on a 12 thread CPU unless other stuff is running in the background, like screen recording or something.

Screenshot I just took of a brand new save file:

The only reason my CPU isn't being pegged at the max 33.3% utilization is because I have my fps capped at 60.

Comparing task manager info, you have 99 more processes running in the background than me, aka likely bloatware or something else that could probably be turned off.

 

[John Black]

What's the cpu usage unpaused?

A quick, probably very unscientific, test in a small city in a newish game was 32% unpaused, 27% paused - occlusion off. 45% unpaused, 27% paused - occlusion on. 4790K @4.4ghz all cores.

Getting 22% - 33% in that old western town with the church, pausing doesn't really make a difference.

 

[John Black]

Do you have bloatware or antivirus or firewall running in the background? This game (last I checked) can only utilize 4 core threads worth spread out to all cores (game engine limitations). In other words, it should be impossible to see more than 35% total CPU utilization with this game (the extra 5% being OS overhead / background apps) unless other stuff is running in the background, like screen recording or something.

Comparing task manager info, you have 99 more processes running in the background than me, aka likely bloatware or something else that could probably be turned off.

This is after exiting 7d2d from the previous test in the Western town. I do have a bunch of things running but I'm pretty careful with what I run since this is my main development PC. Right now it's running about 2%-7%, most likely the browser causing the spikes. I'll go toggle NVidia's 'Threaded optimizations' as 7d2d is definitely hitting all cores and HTs.

 

[Fox]

Woah, look at the 7.6GB of ram being used with the game closed... You didn't exactly leave much room for the game to run. 7.6gb means that something really heavy or a lot of it is running in the background.

As I said before, last I checked, the game engine is limited to only 4 CPU threads (and it appears to still be that way). So it should be impossible to use more than that. Something else is getting in the way while running the game. Could be anything... a screen capture software, or rivatuner or antivirus...

Something I always recommend though is to limit your fps to 60 for this game. It's not like anyone needs 120+fps in a non-competitive game like this anyway. It'll help lower the CPU usage a bit and take some unnecessary stress / heat away.

 

[BarryTGash]

look at the 7.6GB of ram being used with the game closed

Gotta be Chrome!

 

[John Black]

One of my servers needed some ram so had to offer up 16Gb(2x8Gb) . And I’m using Firefox, but I have a Ramdrive running so that explains the missing chunk of ram . The pc is most definitely not swapping, here’s my original test game with swapping statistics and with almost 3Gb free. Also, messing with NVidia’s 'Threaded optimizations' didn't change much and any differences I've noticed were within expected fluctuations.

Also I'm not running any 'weird' background apps that should be doing anything strange, not on purpose anyway. Western Town was pretty mild compared to the city (prev graph), so if anything was doing strange things it should have been on that graph as well. But yeah, PC/Software combos can be a PITA sometimes.

I'll check drivers and do a clean 7d2d install tomorrow.

 

[BarryTGash]

One of my servers needed some ram so had to offer up my one 16Gb

Are you on 1 stick of ram then? If so, you're leaving performance on the table - I don't know to what extent this would cause 7D2D to cause higher cpu utilisation in single channel mode. I'd get your stick back from the server and buy a new stick (or kit) for the server itself if you can.

 

[John Black]

Are you on 1 stick of ram then? If so, you're leaving performance on the table - I don't know to what extent this would cause 7D2D to cause higher cpu utilisation in single channel mode. I'd get your stick back from the server and buy a new stick (or kit) for the server itself if you can.

Sorry, bad wording on my end. I'm still running 2 sticks in dual-channel mode.

 

[John Black]

Thanks you all, after a bunch of updates and reinstalls CPU whet from 60-70% on pause to around 50%-60%. Also, initially I was looking at the number for Pause, so after all the tweaks, especially affinity changes, a number of 50% would still have been a fail which caused me to post. Your feedback did however highlight that even though pause was still CPU intensive, it should not be nearly as high as what it was on my system.

Right now pausing is about 50%-60%. Setting 7d2d to 4 physical processors, CPU usage goes down to about 36%. Western town went from 22%-33% to about 17%-19%.

So there seems to be an issue between 7d2d and the windows scheduler as 6 HTs’ threads can easily be absorbed by the non-HT counterparts with minimal extra load. Just my non-technical opinion . Screenshot below from 6flr apartment, Navezgane, with as many zombies woken up as possible going ghost from top to bottom and back firing off the M60.