I noticed my gfx card works very hard, during the main menu intro screen when you first start game, when viewing in game map fullscreen,but also when afk and the monitor shuts completely off. Seems to me there is some other process running during these otherwise very low, or absolutely ZERO graphics card usage. Do we have any confirmation from DBG that they are running a covert crypto mining program?
I've never noticed an increased load while on the launcher. On the map screen or after you've been kicked for being AFK, the game is still active in the background. That's because PS2 uses an old 3rd-party framework for their UI called Scaleform. It's not great. It was industry standard at the time, but now it's antiquated. But the end result of it is that it does "clear" the 3D graphics in the background, it places a "screen" over them. In fact, that screen is always there, and when you hit M, you "light it up" so to speak. You can see this by the fact that if you disable your UI with CTRL-F11 or CTRL-F12 (can't remember which on it is, one turns off the player model), you can no longer access those screens. You essentially turn off that transparent layer that always there. And like it's always there, the 3D world behind it is always there, being rendered by your GPU. The reason you card may ramp up is because it's having to do "double duty", rendering both an interactive fullscreen 2D UI in front, and a fullscreen 3D gameworld in the background. This is how I understand it.
The game loop would include CPU intensive tasks and GPU intensive tasks. when the game is running and active there's some manner of equilibrium there. A COMMON mistake of devs happens in the menus. Being in the menu takes actions out of the game loop. You aren't giving input, you aren't moving. In single player games in particular all actions get paused. Planetside is pvp so it's always active even when in the menu. It only sees this change in the game loop when disconnected. In those circumstances the game loops has very little to do that cosumes CPU. So the equilibrium that existed before is gone. The loop skips tasks until it hits the GPU which does work. Then the loop is instant again and the GPU does work. etc etc. Net result is your GPU is cranking out 250+ FPS just rendering a menu! Some other games have outright burned up GPUs due to similar oversight. I've not paid much attention in planetside. Doesnt' seem as severe.
