PC Is 7 Days to Die supposed to be more CPU or GPU intensive?

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MacTX

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My experience with 7 Days to Die so far,

Computer:

HP Z420

Xeon E5-1650 v2 3.5 Ghz 6 core/12 threads

GTX 1060 6GB

64 GB RAM

256GB SATA SSD (70 GB free space)

Windows 10

3440x1440 100hz (game played here)

1920x1200 60hz

Alpha 16.4 Stable

A16.4.jpg

80-90 FPS (out in the open)

99-100% GPU utilization

25-35% CPU utilization

Alpha 17 Experimental

A17.jpg

30-40 FPS (out in the open)

99-100% GPU utilization

20-30% CPU utilization

7 Days to Die seems to max out my GPU but doesn't seem to do that much with the CPU. At most it's using 1/3 of the CPU. It's not maxing out any individual thread or core, it just seems to spread it across them all. Pretty significant frame drops still happen when zombies spawn or inside buildings. The interesting part is the FPS variance between Alpha 16 and Alpha 17, 17 seems to be half what 16 was. The visuals of 17 is far better than 16 though. TFP said they redid the visuals for 17 and it shows. I'm just hoping the FPS difference is just due to optimization.

What I don't understand is why more of the CPU isn't being used. If both the GPU and CPU was maxed out, the frame drops caused by zombies and buildings would make more sense.

 
Your CPU is probably maxing out, but it's just doing it in a more deceptive way.

This post is taken from another topic of similar issue (I'm too lazy to re-write it):

Seeing 8 cores being used at like 40%+ like that and primary core at 70%+, I can only assume the per core performance is being used at the maximum. The reason I think that is because I think this game really only focuses on 2 cores + hyper-threaded cores and fakes it by spreading that usage onto other cores which levels it all out making you think it's using all cores while gaming. A lot of games are like that and it's very deceptive (though I'm sure they do it for stability reasons). So if you do the math at any point in the video and add up all the core percentages, and your hyper-threaded cores clearly works well, so in your case, it would never reach past 400% (though streaming and playing at the same time might affect the results a bit). So at 400%, that could be 2/2 cores at 100%. At 200%, it'd be 2/0 cores at 100%. In my case, cuz I have Ryzen and hyper-threading wasn't working for me with A16, I'd have a maximum of 200%. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1063603328
I could very well be completely wrong on this, but this has been my experience through a bunch of testing and seeing other ppl's core usage as well. Hopefully, once A17 officially releases, I'll try some more testing to see what the core usages are again. For now, I'm just patiently waiting.
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Source: https://7daystodie.com/forums/showthread.php?98942-GPU-utilization-drop&p=898485#post898485

 
I think the whole multicore thing is kinda meh at best, most games don't use more than 2 on average if they even do that these days. AAA games are prob setup to use all cores properly but most other games aren't. Depends what your using the pc for though. for gaming i'd prefer a 4 core with a high base frequency.

 
Your CPU is probably maxing out, but it's just doing it in a more deceptive way.
This post is taken from another topic of similar issue (I'm too lazy to re-write it):

Source: https://7daystodie.com/forums/showthread.php?98942-GPU-utilization-drop&p=898485#post898485
Click to expand...
I checked out that other post but I don't see the same issue with mine. My GPU usage stays at near 99%, doesn't drop like it does in that youtube video. What confuses me is that I have tried putting the graphics card into another system with an i5 2500K, 16 GB RAM and an SSD. When running the game, it's the opposite, the CPU is maxed at 99/100% while the GPU barely reaches 50%. The i5 system doesn't get as high of an FPS as the E5 system and visual quality is also not as good since shadows and some of the visual stuff have to be turned down for a playable FPS. The game on the i5 makes it feel like it's CPU constrained and the game on the E5 system makes it feel like it's GPU constrained. Those two processors are close as far as single thread performance that they should give similar performance with the E5 just edging it out. I'm just not sure why the E5 system lets the full use of the GPU happen while the i5 system doesn't. It acts like the CPU is bottle necking.

 
I think the whole multicore thing is kinda meh at best, most games don't use more than 2 on average if they even do that these days. AAA games are prob setup to use all cores properly but most other games aren't. Depends what your using the pc for though. for gaming i'd prefer a 4 core with a high base frequency.
Click to expand...
Actually, even AAA titles don't use more than 2 cores properly either, but static world games usually don't need more than 2 cores which is why it's not really that big of a deal. But it's definitely the reason why Intel had so much upper hand in gaming all these years (that per core performance you hear about all the time).

 
I've noticed a drop in performance as well, and had to bump a couple settings down. The game still looks great though, and I noticed dropping the shadows and render distance a level isn't too noticeable with the improvements to distant terrain (especially compared to previous version, IMO).

It definitely seems to be more taxing on the GPU in this version. I haven't checked CPU usage, but I feel that is mostly moot as my GPU is the main bottleneck I'm facing.

 
Oh I think this thread is waaaay too early.

Not that it shouldn't be discussed, but perhaps after Stable had been released.

TFP outright stated that the game needs tweaking.

If we're still seeing 30-40 FPS after stable then it's time to chat.

I've heard some developers are rolling back to Unity 2017 because 2018 is nothing but trouble.

If that's the case then... well whatever.

Let's just see how Stable goes.

 
What I don't understand is why more of the CPU isn't being used. If both the GPU and CPU was maxed out, the frame drops caused by zombies and buildings would make more sense.
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Not necessarily, it depends on what work needs to be done. Things like pathing and networking are CPU heavy, but the graphical content itself is going to largely rely on the GPU.

So if the CPU isn't maxed out but the GPU is and there are big framerate drops, to me that says there's an optimization problem (which could be in the engine) for the graphics and not the other systems of the game. If the framerate was cratering and the CPU was maxed, then that might point to something else, such as the new pathing system being the culprit, but it seems that's efficiently implemented.

Regardless, I hope they get a handle on this soon. These kinds of performance numbers relative to the types of machines that are running the game are very poor.

 
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